Orhan Pamuk the Turkish Nobel Prize-winning author is, of course, familiar to most people interested in world literature. His readers keenly await his books, which are mostly woven around Istanbul’s history and social life. This winter he is promoting his latest novel The Red Haired Woman and gave several jam-packed talks in New York.
Pamuk has a wide readership across the world but has also faced some criticism and controversy for projecting a picture of his locale and history that – to some – plays into Orientalist imagery, thus making him popular among Western readers and critics.
I have deeply enjoyed two of Pamuk’s works, My Name is Red and The Museum of Innocence. They are among the novels that stay with the reader and a rapport continues to exist with their characters for a long time.
Pamuk emphasises that you should only "write in language you dream in"
It is always instructive to hear from an author. I followed two of Pamuk’s engagements in New York and was able to enjoy a little chat with him following one of his talks. Pamuk wanted to be a painter and joined architecture school but then turned to writing. My Name is Red is his ode to his original passion – painting. The miniature atelier of the Ottomans; artistic debates as a result of the development of perspective technique in Renaissance Europe; the interaction of tradition and modernity – all this with a murder mystery makes My Name is Red a tedious but a lasting and impactful read.
I told Pamuk how a small group of Pakistani miniature painters from the only miniature department in the world at the National College of Arts, Lahore, have created a global art movement that reflected some of the debates in My Name is Red. He seemed familiar with the work of some of the artists and was more than keen to learn about the contemporary miniature revival emerging from Pakistan.
Orhan Pamuk
At his Brooklyn Library talk, Pamuk emphasised that though Istanbul is the topic of his books, there is a difference among them that critics do not recognise. His earlier works were about Istanbul as a city on the edge of Europe with a million-and-a-half people and the dominant perspective of a Western secular middle class. But the recent novels are about an Istanbul that has grown to sixteen million in population. These later novels portray the same streets from the point of view of street vendors or common people – people who are very different from the secular middle class of his earlier novels.
Pamuk’s books cover generational changes and he observed that those changes are now happening very fast – giving rise to varying levels of anxieties in societies and among individuals. In a way, he says, his last novel, The Strangeness in my Mind is like the Russian classic author Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Drawing a parallel between his and Turgenev’s characters, Pamuk says that in both societies the transition to modernity was swift and impacted intergenerational relations profoundly –as compared to, say, France where these changes took places over two centuries.
Pamuk explains that his work deals with an Istanbul facing a transformation of its very spirit
In The Red-Haired Woman the father-son relation is woven by linking it to Greek drama of Oedipus who killed his father, and the Persian epic of Rostam and Sohrab in which the father kills his own son. Reading it involves, of course, the familiar Pamuk narration and twists but leaves you a step away from the author’s best works. In terms of father-son relations, Pamuk acknowledges his own father’s strong role in encouraging him to be a writer and wishing him to win the highest prize. In fact his father was one of the first persons with whom Pamuk shared his maiden manuscript. He has addressed this in his 2006 Nobel Prize winning speech “My Father’s Suitcase.”
Pamuk provides a beautiful example to illustrate the subtle differences in the character of cities. He says that in Istanbul even today one can open a window to enjoy the outside and interact with it, but in New York that is not possible. This stretches to objects in a city, how its residents eat, drink, behave, and live – leading to different characterisation from authors.
Another of his talks was held at Columbia University. There he also teaches a semester on writing. Pamuk was in conversation with literary critic Adam Kirsch, whose latest book The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century covers works from eight global writers (including Pamuk) and looks at the genre of the global novel.
Two of Pamuk’s books have the color “red” in their titles: My name is Red and The Red-Haired Woman. His fascination with red is not made clear but I was pleasantly surprised when at the talk the school-boyish looking author pulled out a small thick red diary from inside his jacket to take notes!
Pamuk says that the term “global” has had a sort of a negative connotation attached to it. All cultures enjoy the idea of being impenetrable – a myth that they are most fond of. And the use of the term “global novel” raises anxieties around that idea of impenetrability. The art of writing the novel developed in parallel with modern nation-state. Novels covered new ideas of a middle class or bourgeoisie, in the context of a surplus in production, and the rise of the nation-state in Europe. So the novel was something meant to be enjoyed only by people living in particular settings.
When he wrote Strangeness in my Mind, he says he started behaving like a global novelist. He went to Brazil and India, comparing shanty towns there with ones near Istanbul. He could not help but notice the shared experience of humans across the world in such conditions of deprivation. The Red-Haired Woman unfolds within the urban sprawl of Istanbul and shows how fringe towns have become a part of the ‘main’ city – just like in Karachi and Lahore.
Kirsch asked if there is a suspicion around the global novel also because sometimes the substance does not come out correctly in translations. Pamuk responds that when there is negative criticism of a successful book, the writer should be asked if he or she meant it how it was translated. For example when a Turkish writer mentions Eid Qurban, he has to do it in a calculated manner so as not to be branded as one who behaves like an instructor to his reader. But when a US writer mentions Thanksgiving, that writer does not have to laboriously explain to his readers what Thanksgiving stands for.
Pamuk observes that the art of novel has in the last hundred years marginalised poetry and drama because people seem to have enjoyed it more than poetry and drama. Like post-Renaissance painting, novels are now the main form of communication for humanity. As a result there is no difference between a “global novel” and those which have not been as widely translated – but what matters is the writer’s own outlook.
He emphasises that you should only “write in language you dream in.”
I am not sure if the thick small red diary – which Pamuk safely tucked into his inner pocket after the event ended – contained notes in Turkish or English, or both. But I am certain that within are contained some of the mysteries that will go into the making of his next book!
The writer can be reached at smt2104@caa.columbia.edu
