From a very young age,” begins Orhan Pamuk’s memoir of his lifelong home, Istanbul, ”I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me he could pass for my twin, even my double.”
When his parents’ frequent quarrels overwhelmed him, he would play what he called the ”disappearing game”: sitting at his mother’s dressing table, he would adjust her three-way mirror until Orhans reflected Orhans reflected Orhans, ad infinitum. He notes that it was a game he would later play in his novels, which is true enough; they are full of refracted selves and voices and bit parts for a narrator called Orhan.
This is also, however, a useful way to think about Pamuk the writer and his place in the world. He is published in more than 40 languages, and has had to slowly get used to the fact that ”my books are being read with completely different reactions in different countries”. In Turkey he is both a literary difficult author, and a teller of absorbing whodunnits; a European-influenced stylist and an assiduous miner of Turkish history.
Pamuk is the author of five novels, one of which, My Name Is Red, won the International Impac Award; another Istanbul was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize and in the history category of the British Book Awards. So he is a major writer in the United Kingdom, but this is nothing compared with how big he is in Turkey. Thanks to The New Life, which, at the time of its publication in 1994, was the fastest-selling novel in Turkish history, and the bestselling My Name Is Red, he has been a celebrated figure at home for some time; he was really catapulted to infamy, however, when he remarked to a Swiss interviewer in February last year that ”a million Armenians and 30 000 Kurds were killed in this country and I’m the only one who dares talk about it”.
Turkish newspapers launched hate campaigns against Pamuk, some columnists even suggesting he should be ”silenced”. His books and posters of him were burned at rallies and he received death threats, after which, for a while, he went into hiding abroad.
Eventually he returned to face trial and a possible three years’ imprisonment. In January this year the court decided there was no case to answer. It has been said this was only because of the international condemnation the trial provoked, yet though Pamuk now insists the case would have been dismissed regardless, it would be foolish to ignore the fault lines it exposed.
Snow, which he began writing two years before 9/11, is set in Kars in north-eastern Turkey and tackles the urgent issues of secularism and religion in a country that has been torn between the two for most of the past century. It is full of intimations of trouble. ”Can the West endure any democracy achieved by enemies who in no way resemble them?” asks one character; another comments that ”the world has lost patience with repressive regimes”.
Pamuk begins Snow with the famous Stendhal quote: ”Politics in a literary work are a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters.” The irony is that the rest of his fiction is also political, if far more obliquely so; it has set up, within its characters, opposing ideological poles, then patiently probed what Pamuk calls ”the confusion in between”.
From his penthouse window in his Istanbul home — where he grew up — he can see Hagia Sophia, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, the Topkapi palace, the suspension bridge that links Europe and Asia — ”all the essentials”, as he puts it.
He hasn’t much time for my theory about how his still living here is unusual in these days of mass migration — that is a myth, he feels, perpetrated by a highly visible, mobile minority. ”The rest of the world lives in the same street, the same building. The father builds a house, then the child lives there. So I don’t want to talk about my experience as a unique thing.” On the other hand, he concedes that still living in this place does perhaps give him ”a strong centre in my spirit. The world, for me, has obvious beginnings.”
Pamuk grew up in a rich Ottoman family that was, through profligacy and mismanagement, progressively becoming less so. The young Orhan was meant to become something useful, preferably an engineer or an architect. He chose painting initially, then writing, despite his father’s exhortations that he should enjoy himself more. When is he happiest now? ”If you leave aside sensual pleasures, sexual pleasures, good food, good sleep, and so on, then the happiest thing is that I have written two and a half to three good pages. I am almost assured that they are, but I need confirmation. My girlfriend comes, we are happy, I read to her, she says, ‘This is wonderful’ — that’s it! That’s the greatest happiness.”
Although when he was in his 20s he read the Marxist pamphlets favoured by his friends, Pamuk simply found Woolf or Faulkner more interesting. He has been criticised for being too Western a writer, though, he points out, ”A bit of experimentalism is always ‘betraying the nation’ in my part of the world.”
Pamuk’s fiction plays with voice and subject — for him, this is a way of exploring what it means to be Turkish. So The White Castle (1995), in which a 17th-century Italian scholar is captured by Ottoman pirates and sold to a Turk eager to learn about the West, ”is a sort of intense personal conflict … Of course, it was also a story of doubles. That was the first book that had some international success. Then, when I was doing interviews, thinking about the book in an international context, I realised that doubles are Turkey’s subject: 95% of Turks carry two spirits in themselves. International observers think there are the good guys — seculars, democrats, liberals — and the bad guys — nationalists, political Islamists, conservatives, pro-statists. No. In the average Turk, these two tendencies live together all the time. Every person is fighting within himself or herself, in a way. Or maybe, very naively, carrying self-contradictory ideas.”
My Name Is Red (2003), the sprawling intellectual whodunnit that made his name outside Turkey, dramatises the tussle between Islamic manuscript illuminators and artists seduced by the Western concepts of style, originality and representation.
”It’s a metaphor for a very common Middle-Eastern fantasy,” says Pamuk, ”that of taking sophisticated, attractive inventions, techniques, [or] objects from the West, without paying the spiritual price. To appropriate an invention, be it artistic or technical, you have to have at least a part of your spirit embracing it so radically that you somehow change. That is one of the things that I see in my culture that makes me very angry.”
He is not angry, he says, because of the urge to copy in itself: ”Though that is deplorable, hateful, I have great understanding for the inevitable desire to imitate. I’m angry because that kind of fantasy is based on a very simplistic world picture. In the novel I’m writing now [to be called The Museum of Innocence], there is a dialogue about poor people. A cruel but observant upper-class person says words to the effect that, ‘They are so naive that they believe being poor is a sin and their guilt will be forgotten as soon as they get some money.’
”So all these fragile feelings of imitation, of not having, of being angry with your own country, with the West, with everything — I think that the whole non-Western world is living these damning personal dilemmas. To understand nationalism and anti-Western sentiment in the rest of the world, you have to go to these shadowy places, rather than to the latest political developments, which are actually just end products.” — Â