(7 June 1952 – )
Yan Overield Shaw
Bilkent UniversityBOOKS: Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (Istanbul: Karacan, 1982);
Sessiz Ev (Istanbul: Can, 1983); translated by Robert P. Finn as Silent House (New York: Knopf, 2012); Beyaz Kale (Istanbul: Can, 1985); translated by Victo-ria Rowe Holbrook as The White Castle (Man-chester: Carcanet Press, 1990; New York: George Braziller, 1991);
Kara Kitap (Istanbul: Can, 1990); translated by Güneli Gün as The Black Book (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1994);
Gizli Yüz, Senaryo (Istanbul: Can, 1992);
Yeni Hayat (Istanbul: İletişim, 1994); translated by Gün as The New Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1997);
Benim Adım Kırmızı (Istanbul: İletişim, 1998); trans-lated by Erdağ M. Göknar as My Name Is Red (New York: Knopf, 2001; republished, with an introduction by Pamuk, 2010);
Öteki Renkler: Seçme Yazılar ve Bir Hikâye (Istanbul: İletişim, 1999);
Kar (Istanbul: İletişim, 2002); translated by Maureen Freely as Snow (New York: Knopf, 2004; repub-lished, with a postscript by Pamuk, 2011); İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir (Istanbul: İletişim, 2003);
translated by Freely as Istanbul: Memories and the City (New York: Knopf, 2005);
Babamın Bavulu (Istanbul: İletişim, 2007); translated by Freely as My Father’s Suitcase, the Nobel Lecture (London: Faber & Faber, 2006);
Masumiyet Müzesi (Istanbul: İletişim, 2008); trans-lated by Freely as The Museum of Innocence (New York: Knopf, 2009);
Manzaradan Parçalar: Hayat, Sokaklar, Edebiyat (Istan-bul: İletişim, 2010);
Saf ve Düşünceli Romancı (Istanbul: İletişim, 2011); translated by Nazım Hikmet Dikbaş as The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010);
Şeylerin Masumiyeti (Istanbul: İletişim, 2012); trans-lated by Ekin Oklap as The Innocence of Objects (New York: Abrams, 2012);
Ben Bir Ağacım (Istanbul: YKY, 2013).
Editions in English: The Black Book, translated by Mau-reen Freely (London: Faber & Faber, 2006); Other Colors: Essays and a Story (New York: Knopf, 2007);
Orhan Pamuk in New York, 12 October 2006, after learning he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in
Ara Güler’s Istanbul, by Pamuk and Ara Güler (Lon-don: Thames & Hudson, 2009).
PRODUCED SCRIPT: Gizli Yüz, motion picture, Alfa Film, 1991.
OTHER: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Cinler, translated by Ergin Altay, edited, with a foreword, by Pamuk (Istanbul: İletişim, 2000);
Dostoevsky, Ezilmiş ve Aşağılanmışlar, translated by Altay, foreword by Pamuk (Istanbul: İletişim, 2000);
Dostoevsky, İnsancıklar, translated by Altay, foreword by Pamuk (Istanbul: İletişim, 2000);
Orhan Kemal, The Idle Years, translated by Cengiz Lugal, foreword by Pamuk (London: Peter Owen, 2008);
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Yaşlı Gemici, translated by Şavkar Altnel, foreword by Pamuk (Istanbul: İletişim, 2008).
SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATION — UNCOLLECTED:
fiction
“The White Sea is Azure,” Mediterraneans, 10 (Winter 1997–1998): 487–491;
“The Boy Who Watched the Ships Go By,” translated by Güneli Gün, in Granta 61: The Sea, Voyages, Mysteries, Discoveries, Disasters. How Much Do We Know? (New York: Granta USA, 1998): 69–82; “Famous People,” translated by Erdağ M. Göknar, in
Granta 68: Love Stories (New York: Granta USA, 1999): 69–72.
nonfiction
“A Taste for Death—Patricia Highsmith’s Crime Time,” Village Voice, 17 November 1992, pp. 107–108; “Forgive our Misery,” TLS: The Times Literary
Supple-ment, 4773 (21 October 1994): 32;
“Salaam Bombay! The Mellowing of Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Family Saga,” TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, 4823 (8 September 1995): 3;
“Landscape of violence,” TLS: The Times Literary Sup-plement, 4864 (21 June 1996): 22;
“Orhan Pamuk—Biographical,” translated by Mau-reen Freely, Nobelprize.org, 2006 [Web., accessed 23 July 2013];
“My Turkish Library,” New York Review of Books, 18 December 2008;
“The Fading Dream of Europe,” New York Review of Books, 10 February 2011 [Web., accessed 15 August 2013];
“Memories of a Public Square,” ww.newyorker.com, 5 June 2013 [Web., accessed 15 August 2013].
Orhan Pamuk is a world-renowned Turkish writer who has dedicated his life and career almost exclusively to the novel. His complex and highly crafted texts address Turkey’s diverse literary and artistic heritages, often through an exploration of the cultural eddies of his home city, Istanbul. His work inherits the dilemmas and contradictions of the Republican modernist novel, and his declared liter-ary inspirations range from modern and “Western” permutations of his chosen form—from Russian real-ism to German symbolreal-ism to French existentialreal-ism to British and American modernism—to the sacred and “Eastern” themes of Ottoman, Arabic, and Persian literatures. Accordingly, his translated novels and essays have become much read in Europe and Amer-ica as an antidote to the idea of a destructive “clash” between the Muslim East and secular or Christian West. Turkish and other international audiences, however, value his work chiely for its intellectual sat-ire of personal and political responses to the sense of disheritance and marginalization felt in the face of cultural Westernization and globalization.
In Turkey’s fraught cultural politics, Pamuk and his work are often associated with the liberal, cosmopolitan, and postmodern reassessments of the Republican and socialist heritage after 1980. His best-selling novels and outspoken criticism of the ideo-logical taboos of the Republic have often made him a high-proile target for Turkey’s authoritarian and popular nationalist elements. Internationally, he has received many awards and honors for his contribu-tions to world literature and his defense of freedom of expression; most famously and controversially, he is the irst Turkish author ever to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Ferit Orhan Pamuk was born on 7 June 1952, the youngest son of Gündüz Pamuk and Şeküre Ferit. His brother Şevket Pamuk, two years older, became an eminent professor of economic history. His was a wealthy, high bourgeois class Istanbul fam-ily with roots in both the faded Ottoman past and the early Republican boom years. His maternal grandfa-ther, Cevdet Ferit Basman, had been a law profes-sor and textile merchant who claimed descent from Chief Admiral İbrahim Pasha. His paternal grand-father, Mustafa Şevket, was a civil engineer from a prominent provincial family who had made a fortune building railroads in the 1920s before investing the proits in a rope factory in Istanbul. Though both patriarchs had passed away by Pamuk’s irst birthday, his immediate family still lived comfortably on Mus-tafa Şevket’s legacy.
had constructed on land adjoining the family’s grand old Ottoman mansion, by then rented out as an ele-mentary school. In his memoir İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir (2003; translated as Istanbul: Memories of the City, 2005) he describes the early happiness and security he felt among his large family, its branches spread across the diferent loors. He regularly visited his educated grandmother in her bed on the top loor, and she taught him to read and write the Latin alpha-bet before he started school. He was also placed in the care of relatives or the family servants, particu-larly during the occasional storms in his parents’ marriage.
By birth and inclination, the Pamuk family was close to the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP (Republi-can People’s Party), Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s organ of social reform. Pamuk’s father was a childhood friend of Erdal İnönü and knew his father, President İsmet İnönü. Pamuk’s grandmother and male relatives were typical of their class in the aggressively positivist
attitude they took toward religion, ridiculing the faith, rituals and superstitions of the lower classes. Yet, the servants of the family remained devout Mus-lims. His mother also preserved more respect for reli-gious sentiment and public propriety, which Pamuk has likened to a residual Sui asceticism.
Despite the family’s tradition of engineering, there was plenty of space for art in his home, espe-cially poetry. When the national atmosphere of reli-gious populism aggravated his grandmother, she recited verses from Tevik Fikret, the late-Ottoman radical atheist poet. His father also recited Turkish poetry, especially the recent poetry of the Turkish “Birinci Yeni” (First New). Though necessity made his father a man of business, Gündüz Pamuk had also translated Paul Valéry into Turkish and dabbled as a writer throughout his life. A Francophile, the shelves of his library also boasted the entire catalog of Galli-mard editions. Pamuk credits his father’s passion for art, literature, and music with teaching him to see Covers for Pamuk’s 1983 novel and its French translation, his irst translated edition
culture as important and worthy of respect from an early age.
In 1958 Pamuk began attending the Işık High School in Nişantaşı. Though a reluctant pupil and not academically precocious, he became an avid child and adolescent painter. He illed his school-books with drawings and tried to copy reproductions of French impressionist paintings as well as Ottoman and Persian miniatures. He credits the exaggerated praise these eforts received from his father in par-ticular with encouraging his appetite for producing for the appreciation of others.
After the sale of the rope factory and dii-culty with the family’s property investments in 1959, Pamuk’s father suddenly left for Paris, living a bohe-mian life for a few months until his grandmother cut of his allowance. He then took up a managerial position at IBM Paris, later transferring to Geneva, where Pamuk’s mother joined him. Eventually, he was appointed head of the company’s Turkish oper-ations, and the family relocated to Ankara, where Pamuk remembers living through the 1960 military coup. The family returned to Istanbul in 1962, and he continued his secondary education at the less exclu-sive (and less expenexclu-sive) Şişli Terakki Lisesi (Şişli Progress School). In 1963 his father declared bank-ruptcy, sold the family compound and buildings, and moved his family to an old apartment owned by Pamuk’s maternal grandmother in the downscale Cihangir neighborhood. Nevertheless, later that year he was able to invest in a summerhouse in the luxury coastal resort of Bayramoğlu near Gebze. The fam-ily’s inances improved again after 1964, when his father started as a senior manager with the powerful Koç Holding.
In 1966 Pamuk matriculated at Istanbul’s exclu-sive Robert College for boys. He became popular in the all-male environment for his saucy jokes and cari-catures of teachers. He also had a good relationship with his basketball coach, the scholar of Ottoman literature, Walter Andrews. Robert College opened his eyes to world culture and provided him access to an extensive library of literature, some in Eastern and European languages, but mainly in English. He remembers, however, feeling some alienation from his wealthier classmates, and his elder brother’s aca-demic successes fueled his sense of their intellectual rivalry.
In 1967 the family moved to another apart-ment in Beşiktaş, and Pamuk began to photograph Istanbul’s poor neighborhoods. Having read Man of Monmartre (1958), he began to imagine himself as Maurice Utrillo, transforming the Istanbul back-streets into echoes of Paris on Utrillo’s characteristic
white backgrounds. In 1968, after his brother left to study at Yale in the United States, his mother allowed Pamuk to use the family’s old Cihangir apartment to work on his ever-larger canvasses. His family now decided to encourage him to study architecture as a compromise between art and engineering.
In his later teenage years, Pamuk turned more seriously to literature, raiding his father’s library, as well as spending his generous allowance at the old booksellers’ market in Beyazıt and the backstreet bookstores of Istanbul. In addition to Turkish lit-erature, he became interested in Western modern-ism, reading translations of Henry James and James Joyce. Drawn to Turkish literature, he began youth-ful experiments in its privileged form, poetry, but found his eforts uninspired. He also began a diary, and recalls that he gradually came to depend on the sense of achievement and satisfaction that a full page gave him.
In 1970 Pamuk enrolled at the architecture fac-ulty of the İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, İTÜ (Istanbul Technical University), obediently following the fam-ily tradition by entering this science and engineering institution. That year was, however, a high tide of both Marxist-Leninist revolutionists and their fascist antag-onists among Turkish students. Turkish campuses became notorious centers of militancy, with frequent armed clashes between rightist and leftist groups and the police. Pamuk read the requisite theory and joined a group he describes as upper-class Marxists— privileged revolutionaries who held high hopes for a future coup by a bloc of radical military oicers.
intellectual, he could not justify writing novels: a position that Pamuk increasingly came to resent as a double standard.
Then, on 12 March 1971, the Chief of the Gen-eral Staf Memduh Tağmaç issued a “coup by mem-orandum,” forestalling the “progressive” coup and purging radical oicers. The junta clamped down on leftist tendencies, and turned a blind eye to the activi-ties of the rightist paramilitaries who attacked student activists and oppositional academics, forcing left-wing ideas and culture underground. That summer Pamuk retreated to his parents’ luxury summer-house, illing a spare room with books and spending his time reading and painting, guarded from the political violence outside by high fences. In his mem-oir, he describes beginning a relationship with a younger girl from his neighborhood who modeled for him. The couple continued their liaisons back in Istanbul at his Cihangir studio. Her father, however, found him, with his bohemian lifestyle and plans, an unsuitable future son-in-law, and sent the girl away to boarding school in Switzerland in 1972.
When his parents inally separated in 1972, his father moved out, apparently to live with another woman, and Pamuk moved in with his mother. His anger at his parents mingled with his resentment at the loss of his lover, his art, and his friends’ political hopes. Uninspired by the instrumental aesthetics of his architecture teachers, he began cutting his İTÜ classes. His behavior did little to improve his relation-ship with his mother, who worried about his mental health and suggested he try out for medical school.
In 1973 Pamuk quit İTÜ and enrolled at the journalism department of Istanbul University (İÜ). He had no wish, however, to become a journalist, or even a columnist. Seeking an outlet for his frustration at his Westernized, bourgeois world, he determined early on to write novels. He believed being a novelist would also enable him to re-create the joy he had pre-viously taken in painting—that of “being another” in a world of his own creation. His enrollment in the journalism degree allowed him to dedicate himself full time to creative writing, and he obtained his diploma largely without attending classes.
Pamuk researched and wrote his irst novel from 1973 to 1978, under what he has described as diicult creative circumstances. Writing and chain-smoking all night in a tiny room in his mother’s apartment, he was subject to her constant discour-agement. His friends, though supportive, also ques-tioned his chosen career when he had so little life experience behind him on which to base his writing. Nevertheless, his father, though emotionally distant, continued to pay him his allowance. He also began
his irst serious relationship, with Aylin Türegün. His social equal, from a White Russian immigrant family, Türegün was a trained historian who could research systematically and read Ottoman.
Pamuk had high ambitions for his irst novel, in which he wanted to address the rupture and loss as well as the continuities in Turkish life throughout the twentieth century. He was initially inspired by the fate of his family’s Ottoman mansion, and he drew heavily on his family and personal life to create his irst characters. He also drew on a range of Turkish and Western literary inluences. Though he admired Yaşar Kemal’s lyrical work, he also wanted to break with the dominant trend of Anatolian realism or köy romanı (the village novel). Instead, he conceived an empire-to-republic generational odyssey reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s irst work, Buddenbrooks (1901). Bourgeois, urban life as a site of Republican crisis was also a major theme in his favorite Turkish writers, including Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Oğuz Atay. In 1974 he wrote his irst critical essay about modern style in Atay, though it was not published. Searching for a writerly voice, he also placed the English text of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury next to the Turkish translation, studying the language and char-acterization, though he did not yet use Faulkner’s irst-person narration.
Pamuk himself, however, was not yet ready for formal experimentation. Inspired by György Lukàcs’ reading of Tolstoy and the historical novel, he aimed to use a collage of everyday details to evoke his characters’ “historical consciousness.” He scoured his grandfather’s railway journals and second-hand bookshops for historical minutiae from which to build convincing slices of life. To research the East-ern chapters, he took a rail trip across Turkey in 1974, following the Sivas-Erzurum railroad all the way to Kars, on Turkey’s Eastern border, whose decaying Russian and Armenian buildings and poetic remote-ness impressed him.
Cover for Pamuk’s 1985 novel (Boğaziçi University Library)
His irst manuscript, “Karanlık ve Işık” (Dark-ness and Light), traced the fortunes of the Işıkçı (light-seller) family from late Ottoman Empire to just before the 1971 coup. The narration is omniscient but complex, focalizing key characters. The open-ing movement takes place over the course of a sopen-ingle day, 24 July 1905. The successful merchant Cevdet Bey struggles to overcome his sense of belittlement and exclusion from late-Ottoman aristocratic society, and his dying Young Turk brother charges him with the care of his son. The second and longest move-ment of the novel is set during the period of high republican reforms in 1936–1939. This section traces how the aspirations of the second generation and the republican project are defeated by plutocracy or subverted by doubt. The inal movement occurs on 12 December 1970. Young Ahmet Işıkçı is struggling to become an artist in the family apartments built on the site of Cevdet Bey’s mansion. A visit by his radical oicer uncle foreshadows the fast-approaching coup. His revolutionary friend’s harsh verdict on his bour-geois subject matter momentarily shakes his self-belief, but his historian girlfriend encourages him to return to his studio. When he arrives home, he inds his grandmother, increasingly bereft of her memo-ries of the Ottoman past, has passed away. He then turns hopefully back to his painting.
In 1979 Pamuk entered a competition for the best previously unpublished novel, held by Milliyet Publishing, the literature wing of the Milliyet news-paper group, for a 10,000 lira lump sum and pub-lication. In April the jury announced that his novel had won, though he shared the award with Mehmet Eroğlu’s Issızlığın Ortası (The Midst of Desolation), which dealt with the experience of leftists around the 1971 coup. The jury’s award to two books critical of the military took place in the context of the assassina-tion that February of Milliyet’s liberal editor-in-chief, Abdi İpekçi, shot down in Pamuk’s native Nişantaşı by ultra-nationalist gunmen aided by senior soldiers. Milliyet’s publishing director, however, equivocated over publication, citing the failing Turkish economy.
Later that year, buoyed up by his award, Pamuk immediately started working on a second and more explicitly political novel that drew on his time at İTÜ. He envisioned a satirical novel about upper-class Marxists whose desperate plot to throw a bomb at the Turkish prime minister would contrast amusingly with their privileged and leisured lifestyles. After the intense research efort of “Karanlık ve Işık,” the autobiographically-inspired material lowed more naturally, and he inished 250 pages of the manu- script in the irst twelve months. In 1980 his half
sister, Hümeyra, was born to his father and his new wife, Fatma Feyza Geç.
On 12 September 1980 the armed forces led by General Kenan Evren staged Turkey’s third coup in twenty years, banning all political parties and impos-ing military order on the parliament, the turbulent streets, and the ailing economy. As a senior member of the business community, Pamuk’s father helped found SODEP, the republican social-democrat party set up to keep the CHP lame alive, though its can-didates were quickly disallowed. As the junta forcibly depoliticized Turkish public life, the arrest and tor-ture of leftist and liberal intellectuals by state forces became a routine.
Under such circumstances Pamuk understood there was little hope of Milliyet publishing his irst novel, let alone his new one about Marxist terrorists, and he abandoned his uninished new manuscript. When his master’s course ended in summer 1980, he could no longer delay his compulsory military ser-vice. He received a non-combat posting to Tuzla, a suburb of Istanbul, for only four months. When he left the army in 1981, he began rewriting elements of his political story as a new novel, dealing again with the disjunctures of Turkish history.
Pamuk’s inspiration this time was the corre-spondence between his maternal grandparents after their engagement. In Berlin to study law in the 1920s, an impressed Cevdet Ferit had written to Ayşe Nikfal of the progress of the women’s movement, which she latly replied was a sin and forbidden. These let-ters inspired Pamuk to create the antagonistic rela-tionship between the dictatorial positivist Selahettin Darvinoğlu (Son of Darwin) and his pious wife Fatma. Against this background, the writer preserves the idea of the happy crowd of youths, but, instead of rich radicals, he describes the apolitical hedonism of his own Bayramoğlu summer crowd. He began a further exploration of narrative technique, drawing on Faulkner and Woolf to create a convincing irst- person narration, though one that deliberately avoided the provincial dialects of Anatolian realism.
who praised its historical sweep and psychological nuance. On 1 March 1982 he and Türegün married.
By 1983 Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları had sold 2,000 copies, and in May the novel won its second award, the prestigious Orhan Kemal Roman Armağanı (Orhan Kemal Novel Prize). In August, Pamuk took the opportunity to make a critical statement him-self, publishing an article, “Roman Gibi Roman bu Roman” (This Novel is a Novel-like Novel) in Gösteri (August 1983), criticizing Turkish novelists’ timid devotion to Anatolian realism, though praising the modernist experiments of Tanpınar, Atay, and Yusuf Atılgan, and the augmented realism of Yaşar Kemal and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Later in 1983, Can Publishers released Pamuk’s second novel, Sessiz Ev (translated as Silent House, 2012). It is set in the economic turmoil and social vio-lence before the 1980 coup, as three grandchildren visit their aging grandmother in her decaying Otto-man Otto-mansion. The untitled chapters shuttle the narration between ive characters. The grandmoth-er’s memories reveal the violent bifurcation in the
family’s past, which ultimately leads to tragedy for the younger generation in the present. Pamuk’s Faulknerian narrators personify tendencies in Turk-ish intellectual life, and there are repeated refer-ences to Ivan Turgenev’s Ottsy i deti (1862, Fathers and Sons). The novel also anticipates the writer’s later postmodern concerns, as three generations of Darvinoğlus fail to realize three equally quixotic intellectual quests. In a kind of hidden signature, Pamuk also included anachronistic references to himself and his brother and to characters from Cev-det Bey ve Oğulları. In the last scene, Fatma seems to airm the value of literature as a secular transcen-dence of linear time and existential ennui.
Excitement around Pamuk’s two awards boosted sales of Sessiz Ev to 8,000 copies in the irst year. In April 1984 the novel won the Madaralı Novel Award. Media interest in the “thrice awarded” Pamuk pre-dictably exploded, and the evident pleasure he took in giving his irst newspaper interviews set an endur-ing pattern of media engagement. The reviews of Ses-siz Ev, however, were generally less positive, and one critic complained about the novel’s exchanges of unattributed “theatrical” dialogue. At the same time, probably in response to his success at the awards, in a generally positive review of Pamuk’s irst novel, another critic noted its sometimes clumsy reporting structures. Pamuk responded that his experiments in stream-of-consciousness in Sessiz Ev had partly been an attempt to avoid such phrases, though he did alter his treatment of dialogue in his next novel.
By 1984 Pamuk’s income from his novels, inter-views, and articles allowed his father to end his reg-ular allowance payments. After his grandmother passed away in January 1984, Pamuk remarked in Mil-liyet, 19 April 1984, that Sessiz Ev’s Fatma Hanım had been partly based on his sharp and digniied paternal grandmother. In his writing as well as his life, his fam-ily now began to lose its central position. Later that year, he received a letter from the prestigious Paris publisher Gallimard, requesting translation rights for Sessiz Ev. The translation was suggested by liter-ary elder stateswomen Thilda Kemal and Münnevver Andaç. Andaç met Pamuk in Paris several times dur-ing the next few years to work on the translation, and she helped smooth his way into this new, European literary world.
set his novel in a particularly neglected period, the seventeenth-century reign of Sultan Mehmed IV, under whom the empire began to sufer defeats at the hands of the technologically superior European powers, and he read a huge array of transliterated contemporary sources. He also decided to embrace
novelistic. His proposed title, "Gölgeler Kitabı" (The Book of Shadows), referred both to the book’s self-conscious ictionality and to the Ottoman Karagöz shadow theater, but his publishers asked him to sug-gest another title.
Beyaz Kale (translated as The White Castle, 1990) was released in late 1985. It is framed by a “preface” by Sessiz Ev’s historian, Faruk Darvinoğlu, who presents it as a found Ottoman manuscript with resonance for contemporary struggles between East and West. He dedicates the book to his loving sister Nilgün, whose life spans the dates of Turkey’s military takeovers (1960–1981). The narrative proper is apparently that of a noble Venetian youth, captured en route to Naples by the Turkish leet and enslaved. He poses as a man of science, with knowledge of medicine, and is then bound to an Ottoman scholar called simply “Hoja,” meaning “teacher,” “preacher,” or “master.” The two men are physically identical, and become involved in an almost sadomasochistic exchange of scientiic and personal knowledge, recalling Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. After local superstitions make it impossible for Hoja to continue his work in the empire, the two men’s distinct identities become blurred into a single, shadowy, and seemingly dei-ied Other, “O/Onun” (He/Him). In the last scene of the novel, an Italian traveler begins to search the manuscript for clues to the narrator’s true identity.
The novel immediately doubled Pamuk’s sales to 16,000 copies in its irst year. Some critics were enthusiastic about his new and original stylistic direc-tion. Others, however, bemoaned the lack of the rich historical and psychological detail of his irst two works. His postmodernist approach to the sources also drew accusations of plagiarism, with critics not-ing similarities between the opennot-ing passages of Beyaz Kale and the Turkish translation of a contem-porary account of the Ottoman lands by Spanish cap-tive Pedro de Urdemalas. In a later afterword, Pamuk playfully accused Miguel de Cervantes of plagiarizing a (ictional) Arab historian to create Don Quixote, and denied any culpability in “Faruk’s” cavalier attitude to the archive.
Spring 1985 provided Pamuk with political inspiration for his fourth novel. Evren’s regime had maintained pressure on critical writers and intel-lectuals and was taking an increasingly harder line on the Kurdish question. Playwrights Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller came to Istanbul as part of a joint international PEN and Helsinki Watch human-rights delegation. Pamuk took Pinter and Miller to visit journalists imprisoned and tortured by the state. The stories of such victims aroused Pamuk’s feelings of pity and solidarity but also the desire to retreat to the
safety of an ivory tower. In summer he was accepted as a fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. His wife had also been accepted to Columbia University’s history department to study for a doctorate, and the couple moved to America. In 1986 he began to teach Turkish courses at Colum-bia. Given a cubicle in the school’s Butler Library, he was blissfully situated above three million books, with access to the full richness of world culture.
At Columbia, Pamuk reevaluated his relation-ship to Turkish culture’s Islamic heritage. He reread the classical Sui literature that he had associated with religious conservatism as a young man. He stud-ied two texts in particular: the Masnavi (Turkish, Mesnevi), the Persian poem by the founder of the Mevlevi sect, Mevlânâ Celâleddin Mehmed Rumi, inspired by his search for his lost beloved, Şems of Tabriz; and Hüsn ü Aşk (Beauty and Love), by the eighteenth-century poet Sheikh Galip, an allegorical love story based on his repeated readings of Rumi. Pamuk read these works in dialogue with Jorge Luis Borges’ ideas about the “metaphysics” of literature, distinguishing and emphasizing the form of the par-able over its religious content. Nevertheless, the Sui tradition’s ability to create something new by an ele-gant development or recombination of an ancient theme suggested to Pamuk an aesthetic critique of Romantic and Modernist notions of originality. Searching for a secular setting for the Sui path, in which the seeker eventually “becomes” the beloved, he decided on the world of Istanbul’s newspaper col-umnists, all-knowing “professors of everything” who shape how their reader’s interpret the world, becom-ing “a kind of God,” accordbecom-ing to an interview with Maureen Freely in Granta 93, God’s Own Countries (Spring 2006).
[…] searching for the continuities in their country’s history, rather than its folklore.”
Pamuk returned to Istanbul in 1988 with the manuscript of his dense and ambitious fourth book, continuing to work on it intensely. He considered the title “Kayıp Esrar” (The Lost Mystery) to sug-gest the simultaneous demystiication and inscruta-bility of modern, urban life. He inally decided the title made his novel sound too much like a crime thriller.
In February 1989 the Ayatollah Ruholla Kho-meini, supreme leader in Iran, capitalized on grow-ing Muslim anger at the treatment of the Koran in British Indian writer Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and declared a fatwa against the writer’s life. Pamuk, along with writers Yaşar Kemal and Aziz Nesin, was quick to issue a solidarity statement, being among the irst from a Muslim country to do so. Just a week later, he wrote an article for the 21 Febru-ary 1989 issue of Cumhuriyet (Republic) newspaper, explaining the content of the novel and criticizing the demagogic response in the Turkish press.
In summer 1989, just as Pamuk was inishing his new manuscript, Victoria Holbrook suddenly threat-ened to withdraw her English translation of Beyaz Kale. She was unhappy with edits made to her manu-script by a Carcanet editor, and Pamuk was forced to visit the publishers and revise the manuscript. He still fretted about the title and preface, which he worried would draw comparisons to Umberto Eco. In early 1990, The White Castle was published to overwhelm-ingly favorable U.K. reviews, particularly by Şavkar Altınel in the inluential TLS: The Times Literary Sup-plement (12 October 1990), though the preface by the mysterious Faruk Darvinoğlu left some British read-ers puzzled. In May 1990 the novel won the irst-ever Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, awarded equally to Pamuk and Holbrook.
In Turkey, Can released Pamuk’s fourth novel under the enigmatic title Kara Kitap (1990; translated as The Black Book, 1994). Similar to the Sui parables and the Thousand and One Nights, it has a double structure that is inally revealed as a unity. The frame narrative is an inverted and unsolved murder mys-tery: a bland, middle-aged lawyer named Galip (after Sheikh Galip) searches for his wife, Rüya (Dream), who he believes has probably run of with his half brother, a famous newspaper columnist called Celâl (after Rumi). As he journeys through Istanbul, he meets a constellation of copies, fakes, and doubles who trouble or deny their originals. Into this frame narrative are woven, in alternating chapters, a series of newspaper columns written by (or in the style of) Celâl, which develop the theme of identity and
imitation in dialogue with Eastern sources, including Harun al-Rashid’s adventure with the “False Caliph,” set just after Atatürk’s death and Rumi’s parable of the Chinese painters set in a Beyoğlu gangster’s nightclub. The inal column, “Şehzadenin Hikâyesi” (The Story of the Crown Prince) is an original story that Galip tells three times to a BBC ilm crew in the Pera Palace hotel; through this impersonation of Celâl he inds his own writer’s voice. The epilogue relates the aftermath of the 1980 coup, when Galip, bereft of Rüya, discovers in writing under Celâl’s name his “tek teselli” (sole consolation).
When Can Publishing released Kara Kitap in 1990, the long-awaited book sold 32,000 copies in four editions in its irst year, and provoked an unprec-edented critical debate. There was some controversy over Pamuk’s appropriation of the Sui tradition, which scandalized religious traditionalists, while secularists accused him of playing into reactionary hands. There were also attacks on his experiments with prose style, some accusing him of grammatical errors and others defending his linguistic innovation.
Critics were equally divided about the novel’s ency-clopedic abundance of stories and objects, which some felt disrupted the narrative. Finally, his post-modern turn was celebrated by some (particularly in the United States), though others remained sus-picious of the replacement of social and historical representation with a tissue of literary intertextual allusions. Feminist critics objected that the most important symptom of his new approach was the dilution of Rüya to a mere shade in an allegory of male literary becoming. The novelist conceded that he had not suiciently explained Rüya, and made eforts to develop his subsequent female characters.
Later in 1990 Pamuk collaborated with Turkish director Ömer Kavur in ilming the Kara Kitap story of the nightclub photographer, itself based on Farid ud-Din Attar’s twelfth-century Sui allegory Ferîdüddîn-i Attâr Mantıku’t-Tayr (translated as The Conference of the Birds, 2011). Pamuk received valuable feedback from Kavur on the script and learned much about the art of narrative economy. The inished ilm, Gizli Yüz (The Hidden Face), won several awards at the 1991 Altın Portakal (Golden Orange) ilm awards in Antalya, including best ilm and best screenplay, and went on to win two international awards.
In 1991 Pamuk’s international reputation con-tinued to improve. In France he won the Prix de la Découverte Européenne (European Discovery Award), rather belatedly, for La Maison du Silence. In Britain, Faber and Faber purchased paperback rights to The White Castle, becoming Pamuk’s sole U.K. pub-lisher, and George Braziller brought the U.S. rights to the book soon after. In the U.S., positive reviews by Jay Parini (The New York Times, 19 May 1991), John Updike (The New Yorker, 23 September 1991) and Talât S. Halman (World & I, June 1991) drew com-parisons to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Anton Shammas, and even Marcel Proust. Aided by positive reviews by Turkish critic Jale Parla (World & I, June 1991) and Turkish-American novelist Güneli Gün (World Literature Today, Winter 1992), U.S. expecta-tions of Kara Kitap were high, and Gün began work on a translation for Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Pamuk now borrowed money from his mother to buy the penthouse of the Pamuk Apartments, which he turned into an oice. He and Aylin’s daugh-ter, Rüya, named after the evanescent heroine of
Kara Kitap, was born in 1991. He also started work on his next project: a historical novel to popularize what he regarded as the forgotten stories and artworks of the Islamic, Ottoman past. He was particularly fascinated by the igurative miniature paintings that adorned Ottoman and Persian literary and histori-cal manuscripts, with their wholly Eastern trajectory
of painting and representation. To gather details for his book, he studied many illuminated books, mined the Ottoman archives, and read widely in the revi-sionist historical and art-historical scholarship on the period.
In Spring 1992 Pamuk attended a writer’s festi-val in Adelaide. Evoking Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
Kubla Khan, he credits half a sleeping pill Oliver Sacks gave him with providing the inspiration for his ifth work. He envisioned a puzzle book, in which the reader would have to infer from the hero’s sub-sequent actions the contents of a life-transforming text. For a change, the title came easily. Pamuk’s choice of “Yeni Hayat” (The New Life) echoes Dante Aligheri’s La Vita Nuovo, in which the poet meets Beatrice, the unattainable love who releases his muse and leads it through the Christian afterlife, as well as
Yeni Hayat, a posthumous collection by the Turkist
intellectual Ziya Gökalp, who based a utopia on the principles of Turkish nationalism. Inspired by Ger-man RoGer-mantics, Pamuk wanted to write a “prose poem” that would evoke Novalis’s idea of death and Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Angelic Orders.” That summer he stopped work on his historical novel and began to plan the new book.
As Yeni Hayat (1994; translated as The New Life,
that the angel he had sought is simply a sublime and eternal indiference.
Demand for Yeni Hayat quickly outstripped sup-ply, with 100,000 sold in the irst month, twenty-two new printings in its irst year, and 200,000 sales in less than two years, with the book remaining even today Pamuk’s top-selling title in Turkey. Baled by the suc-cess of his experimental and poetic book, Pamuk the-orized that his book had tapped into national senti-ments. Some critics, however, were alienated by the book’s complexity. Hostile reviewers and columnists even confessed being unable to inish it and attrib-uted the book’s success to its publicity campaign. In response, literature academic Yıldız Ecevit began work on a book-length defense and exposition of Pamuk’s complex literary aesthetic, Orhan Pamuk'u Okumak, aligning his novels with postmodern literary theory. Others speculated about his religious sympa-thies; in the World & I (September 1997), Halman noted that the word he uses for accident—“kaza”— also means predestination and redemption in Otto-man Turkish. In response, Pamuk reiterated that his interest in Suism was purely as a literary source. In fact, critics including Jale Parla have since read the novel’s national allegory as partly a satire on the pressures of globalization and the rightist ideology of Turkish-Islamic synthesis.
In November 1994 Kara Kitap, translated by Güneli Gün, was released as The Black Book. Most American and British critics were dazzled by the noir-ish novel, hailing Pamuk’s postmodernist inno-vation, his depth of knowledge of his Eastern literary heritage, and his encyclopedic evocation of Istanbul, drawing comparisons to Joyce’s Dublin and Robert Musil’s Vienna. Yet, as more than an exotic whodun-nit, Pamuk’s postmodernist work did defy easy diges-tion in some quarters. Those predisposed to dislike international postmodernism raised notes of cau-tion about Pamuk and/or Gün’s Turkish-American voice. In the Village Voice (7 February 1995), John Brenkman suggested that Pamuk ought, like Turkish feminist author Latife Tekin, try to tell the stories of Turkey’s poor and excluded.
In Turkey, Pamuk was asked by political friends to use his new international status for the Kurdish cause. The human costs of the war between the Marx-ist Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK) and the Turkish Army in the southeast were rising, with thousands killed and hundreds of thousands internally displaced. His presence raised the proile of street protests as well as of a campaign supporting hunger strikes by Kurdish inmates. He also signed up as one of 96 “editors” of a volume of banned essays in an act of civil disobedience against
the laws in the 1982 constitution that prohibited the defamation of the state or its security services. In April 1995 Pamuk wrote an article in the German press criticizing Turkey’s culture of misinformation around the war. Nationalist commentators began to call him a “vatan haini” (traitor), complaining he had “insulted Turkey” to Europeans.
In Spring 1995 the French translation of Kara Kitap, Le Livre Noir, was awarded the Prix France Culture. That summer Pamuk returned to his his-torical novel and his research into life and art in sixteenth-century Istanbul. Searching for a new nar-rative approach, he undertook a reassessment of magical realism. In a critical review of Salman Rush-die’s The Moor’s Last Sigh for the TLS, 8 September 1995, he praised the political intentions of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Nevertheless, he argued that the magical and fantastic writing dominant in contem-porary international literature had become a way of “reducing the Other to tolerable proportions, […] cute, lovable characters moving in situations that seem merely folkloric, no matter how horriic they really are.”
In 1996 Pamuk returned to the idea of an ency-clopedic or catalog novel. Drawing inspiration from the implied narrative of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), he wanted his story to emerge from a series of ordered entries referring to objects related to love and family life. He began to collect objects from Istanbul’s antique shops and lea markets, and he searched for an afordable house in the Beyoğlu district in which to house his collection. During pro-motional tours abroad, he began to visit small, back-street museums for inspiration, in particular the Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris, the Frederic Marés Museum in Barcelona, and the Sir John Soames Museum in London. He also made visits to Istanbul’s legendary junk houses, where he felt the anxiety of cultural loss had led people to a pathological fear of throwing away anything at all.
view on freedom of expression, Pamuk confessed to Fernanda Eberstadt (The New York Times Magazine, 4 May 1997) that he often envisioned a life of exile in Paris or New York.
When The New Life was released in the United States in 1997, inluential critics invoked Borges, Calvino, Eco, and Thomas Pynchon, praising the unity of its postmodern vision of Anatolia. Halman, however, noted Pamuk’s “carefully planned odyssey towards the Nobel,” and called on him to turn away from postmodern Euro-American gimmicks, toward a “truly original” Turkish voice (World & I, Septem-ber 1997). In the U.K. Alev Adil (TLS, DecemSeptem-ber 1997) and Ronald Wright (10 October 1997) harshly criticized Gün’s Americanized, idiomatic, and exper-imental translation, forcing her to defend it as a “second artwork” (TLS, March 1999). Disturbed by the reviews, Pamuk approached Gün to ask her to tone down her style. Nevertheless, the publishers supported Gün, who later won the 1998 National Translation Prize for her work on the book. The
novelist subsequently switched his U.S. publisher, signing with Alfred A. Knopf.
an initial print run of 50,000, breaking the Turkish record at the time.
Released in December 1998, Pamuk’s ifth novel, Benim Adım Kırmızı (translated as My Name is Red, 2001), is set during the reign of the cosmopoli-tan-minded Sultan Murad III, and weaves art histori-cal debate on Islamic aesthetics into a murder mystery and love story. It is narrated in the irst person by ten characters, with the most important charac-ters “drawn larger.” One character is a cofeehouse “meddah” (storyteller), who “magically” stretches the bounds of the novel’s narrative to inanimate objects and even the afterlife. The action is set over ten days in the winter of 1591. The sultan has com-missioned an illustrated book for the Venetian Doge, depicting the Sultan and his realm in the “Frank-ish” (Renaissance) style. One of the ive miniaturists working on the project fears that the secret book is blasphemous but is killed by one of his fellow artists before he denounces it to the followers of a radical, iconoclast preacher. To investigate, the head of the atelier calls on his nephew, Kara (Black). He is in love with his cousin, Şeküre, a beautiful war widow with two sons, Orhan and Şevket. As the mystery and love story unfold, so does the history of miniature painting and its development at successive Persian, Timurid, Turkmen, Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman courts. After the murderer’s identity is eventually revealed by a stylistic glitch, Şeküre commissions her son Orhan to write their tale.
Benim Adım Kırmızı was an immediate commer-cial success. Its strong female character and joyous exploration of sexuality were especially well received. Nevertheless, some reviewers criticized the book as playing into Western stereotypes of the Ottoman Empire. Others saw it as derivative postmodernism, imitating the style of Umberto Eco. Most serious crit-ics, however, agreed that the novel employed the Islamic aesthetics of miniature painting to generate original resonances with the postmodernist suspi-cion of the “objective” viewpoint of realism.
Pamuk became involved in the search for a new English translator. He approached Walter Andrews, who suggested his graduate student, Erdağ Göknar. When friction arose among Andrews, Göknar, and Knopf editor Georges Andreou during proofread-ing, Pamuk again found himself mediating interna-tional squabbles over his work. He also had to ind a new French translator when Münevver Andaç passed away in 1998, shortly after inishing La Vie Nouvelle. Mon Nom est Rouge was eventually translated by Gilles Authier, though in Germany, Pamuk continued with long-term collaborator Ingrid Iren for Rot is mein Name.
In January 1999 a columnist in the Hürriyet newspaper printed an article claiming that Pamuk’s sales igures had been exaggerated. İletişim editor Murat Belge reacted swiftly, taking the columnist to court, and eventually forcing him to pay damages. Unbowed, the columnist reprinted sections of Yeni Hayat that mentioned an Atatürk statue with a crown of pigeon droppings and his portrait smiling down on alcoholics from the walls of a bar. Speculation now arose as to whether Pamuk was in the pay of the Republic’s religious or foreign enemies, selling out his country to secure a Nobel Prize.
By April 1999 Pamuk had decided to write an explicitly political novel. His publicly declared sym-pathies were with the Kurdish struggle for better con-ditions and representation. Yet, despite the dramatic capture of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan in Nairobi that February, “propaganda” for a separatist orga-nization remained a constitutional ofense. Pamuk decided to focus his novel on the fraught relations between secular nationalists, the army, and political Islamists. Since 1997 the Islamists had also seen their political parties dissolved by the constitutional court and their leaders imprisoned for imperiling the “sec-ular nature of the republic” and “inciting religious hatred.” Pamuk’s initial inspiration was an imagined discussion of the nature of civilization between an imprisoned Islamist and a Westernized liberal like himself.
Despite his advocacy of the Islamic cultural tradition, Pamuk knew comparatively little of the right-wing Anatolian populism that drove the for-mation of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP ( Jus- tice and Development Party) in 2001. In order to give his Islamist characters convincing voices, he subscribed to a range of conservative and Islamist newspapers. Representing themselves as the defend-ers of the rights of women, Islamist columnists had recently railed against the banning of the women’s türban, or headscarf, and other forms of Islamic dress in Turkey’s secular education system. At the same time, reports were emerging of a tripled suicide rate among Muslim women and girls in the poor province of Batman, a southeastern region already notorious for its traditional culture of honor killing.
youth, paranoia, and the art of the novel, as well as essays about Turkish literary igures, including Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Kemal Tahir, Orhan Kemal, Aziz Nesin, Oğuz Atay, Fethi Naci, Kemalettin Tuğcu, and Şavkar Altınel.
In 2000 Pamuk began editing a series of new translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works for İletişim, writing forewords for editions of Cinler (Poor Folk), Ezilmiş ve Aşağılanmışlar (Injury and Insult), and İnsancıklar (The Possessed). He explored Dosto-evsky’s ambivalence about Western European val-ues and his seemingly incongruous devotion to the novel, its most potent aesthetic form. İletişim later included these works in its ongoing “Dünya Kla-sikleri” (World Classics) series, of which Pamuk remains a series editor.
Pamuk also increased his involvement in minority-rights campaigns. In early 2000 he was warmly received at a book signing in Diyarbakır, a Kurdish city in southeast Turkey. In his speech he
described his own reaction to foreign-loan words in Turkish to support the campaign for Kurdish lan-guage rights. Even in the mainstream, liberal press, this statement was conlated with support for sepa-ratism. He also wrote a foreword for a book about the Tuzla Armenian Children’s Camp, an Armenian owned orphanage that had had its property seized for alleged links to terrorism. In November he appeared on a platform in support of more than 800 Kurdish and leftist hunger strikers protesting their transfer to new F-type prisons.
police. He nevertheless recorded several interviews with city residents, who complained about the harsh economic conditions in the town, especially after the stock market crash hit in February 2001, apparently triggered by foreign investor light due to political wrangles in the coalition government. In the library he unearthed local sources, including the local Driv-ers’ Association map, newspapers, books about the city, the memoirs of retired schoolteachers and one of a belly dancer who returned to piety after a life on stage. To record the city’s layout and architecture, he toured the town with video and stills cameras, accompanied on his last three trips by photographer Manuel Çıtak. Late in 2000 he also traveled to Frank-furt, to research one character’s life as a Turkish immigrant in similar detail.
In early 2001 Göknar’s translation My Name is Red was released in the United States. Western reviewers were impressed by the art-historical take on the murder mystery, and male reviewers such as Richard Eder (The New York Times, 2 September 2001) were particularly smitten with the “immensely beguiling” Şeküre. The readable translation was generally welcomed, though there were minor nig-gles over proofreading by Dick Davis (TLS, 7 Sep-tember 2001). More seriously, Güneli Gün accused it of orientalist impulses (World & I, January 2002). In the United Kingdom, My Name is Red became a 2001 TLS international book of the year. The posi-tive response in the West again increased Pamuk’s prestige at home, and news of John Updike’s three-page review in The New Yorker (3 September 2001) made the headlines.
Pamuk immediately condemned the 11 Sep-tember 2001 terrorist attacks on New York, telling the Turkish press that “O gün, ben Amerikalıydım” (that day, I was an American). Nevertheless, in an article published in Germany, Britain, and the U.S., where it appeared in the 15 November 2001 issue of The New York Times, he pointed out that many in his part of the world empathized with the sense of dispossession by the West that had driven the hijackers. For a bewil-dered American and European public, he became a central voice in explaining the frictions between sec-ularism and religion in the newly troubling Middle East. His books quickly appeared alongside books explaining the viewpoints of Islam, radical Islamism, and the supposed “clash of civilizations.” My Name is Red sold more copies in English than in Turkish— more than 200,000 compared to an average 10,000 for his previous books—and Western readers eagerly sought out his earlier work.
As a result of the 9/11 attacks Pamuk removed from his political novel, titled Kar (2002; translated
as Snow, 2004), a passage mentioning an al-Qaeda plot to execute Turkish sex workers, lest it be thought a response to the disaster. Worried about prosecu-tors’ reactions, he convinced İletişim to have the manuscript checked by a lawyer, who recommended several changes before publication, including ton-ing down passages too overtly critical of the mili-tary. İletişim, having already printed 100,000 copies, feared the book might be impounded. Their adver-tising campaign emphasized the novel’s love story, and Pamuk stressed in interviews that the hero of this new book was chiely interested in how to be happy in life. İletişim had also chosen to promote the book over the winter period. When snowfalls greeted the irst billboards, Istanbul wits suggested that even God was marketing the writer’s new book.
Pamuk’s novel Kar is narrated by Orhan, a nov-elist, on a quest to reconstruct a cycle of poems, Kar, written by his friend, a poet known as “Ka” (K), dur-ing his visit to Kars durdur-ing the mid 1990s. Ka suppos-edly traveled there to cover the suicide of a young female student who took her own life, apparently as a reaction to being excluded from school for wearing an Islamic headscarf. In fact, he goes to persuade his beautiful school friend to join him in his bleak Frank-furt exile. He meets her sister, who has converted to Islam and become the outspoken leader and symbol of a group of radicalized “Türbancı Kızları” (heads-carf girls). He also meets her lover, a charismatic Islamist guerrilla, Lacivert (Deep Blue, so named for his piercing eyes), in town to provide intellectual leadership in the struggle. In the religious atmo-sphere, Ka begins to receive inspiration for his irst cycle of poems in years. Yet, he also becomes increas-ingly embroiled in the town’s violent politics. The novel takes an allegorical turn when the leftist direc-tor of an itinerant republican theater group “stages” a real coup during a propaganda play. After a terri-ble betrayal, Ka returns to Frankfurt alone; he is exe-cuted four years later by unknown gunmen, who steal his poems. In the last scene, a religious high-school student voices his doubts about Orhan’s motives in turning the provincial town, its characters, and its troubles into metropolitan iction, because “kimse uzaktan bizi anlayamaz” (no one could understand us from so far away).
that the novel had been an exercise in political empathy, telling his critics Tolstoy’s dictum that bad characters need a good side to make them believable and vice versa. To his dismay, the proudly secular res-idents of Kars complained to the press that, poetic license notwithstanding, they had been blamed for another city’s suicide problem. Pamuk himself hoped that the book’s most important contribution was its self-relexive concern with the ethics of rep-resentation, especially when Kar’s provincial activists hopefully prepared their statements to the West in the Hotel Asia.
In a Zaman (Time) interview (2 March 2002), Nuriye Akman suggested that Kar dramatized Pamuk’s personal dilemma between literature and life, ofering the author the opportunity to com-ment on his marriage, which that year ended in divorce. Pamuk was, however, characteristically care-ful to shield his former wife and daughter from the press. In November a seismic shift occurred in Turk-ish politics with the electoral victory of the Islamist AKP under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Interviewed by Michael Skaidas for Global Viewpoint (11 November 2002), Pamuk declared his support for the “narrow path” that Erdoğan was opening toward European accession and “a more open, more liberal society” in Turkey, stating categorically that “I want Erdoğan to succeed, and I want the army to stay away from politics.”
Pamuk soon returned to his catalog novel proj-ect, which he had given the working title “Masumi-yet Müzesi” (The Museum of Innocence). However, he was dissatisied with the novel as an ordered set of separate entries rather than a rounded narrative. He mentioned to his agent, Andrew Wylie, that he had written several uncollected essays about Istanbul culture, and his U.S. publisher responded enthusi-astically to the idea of a book. In December 2002 Pamuk’s father died, and he stopped working on his catalog novel. He now began to develop the Istan-bul book, delving into his own family’s archive of home videos, photographs, souvenirs, and antiques. He also approached Maureen Freely to translate Kar into English.
In May 2003 Pamuk won the International IMPAC Dublin Award for My Name is Red. He had been nominated for the prize by libraries in Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. The citation described the novel’s “intense beauty,” and called it “a window” into the Ottoman past, which never-theless ofered a “breathlessly urgent perspective.” Twenty-ive percent of the prize money also went to Göknar for his translation.
Published in December 2003, Pamuk’s İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir (translated as Istanbul: Memories and the City, 2005) alternates chapters of cultural his-tory and criticism with autobiography. The essays on Istanbul culture include, most memorably, a dis-cussion of the city’s own version of romantic, post- imperial hüzün (melancholy). In the sections of memoir, Pamuk was less interested in biographical accuracy than in what he calls the “simetri” (symme-try) between his own story and that of the city, espe-cially as seen through the eyes of both visiting Western travelers and the Istanbul writers who responded to them. The bildungsroman narrative ends with a declaration of transcendent artistic intent: “Yazar olacağım ben.” (I’m going to be a writer). The book also features many black-and-white images selected from his family collection and the personal archive of the photographer Ara Güler. The book’s rev-elations of the Pamuk family’s diiculties led to an “open season” for the press, and his mother and brother were distressed by the attention. Yet, as the writer told Joy E. Stocke (Wild River Review, 2006), “I can’t care about that; I must care about the beauty of the book.”
In April 2004 the famous “Radyo Tiyatrosu” (The Radio Theater) group announced a major adaptation of Benim Adım Kırmızı and plans to adapt Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları for Turkish state radio. Freely’s translation of Kar was also released by Knopf. West-ern reviewers praised Kar’s political prescience and courage, welcoming Pamuk’s perspective on con-temporary Turkey. They compared him to new lit-erary peers, including Paul Auster, José Saramago, W. G. Sebald, Freidrich Dürrenmatt, and Heinrich Böll, and several again suggested him for the Nobel Prize. Freely’s translation was generally praised as the most readable yet, and U.K. publisher Faber commis-sioned her to re-translate The Black Book.
here. And a million Armenians. Hardly anyone dares mention it. So I do. And that’s why they hate me.”
In Turkey, Pamuk’s remarks were immediately mistranslated, exaggerated, and denounced as slurs against the honor of the state. Several nationalist pros-ecutors began proceedings against him under provi-sions of the 1981 constitution, including article 159 (for “public denigration” of “Turkishness,” redrafted in a 2005 reform as the infamous article 301), article 312 (for “incitement to religious or racial hatred”), and article 31 (for “provoking the people” in the media). His books and photographs were burned at “Respect the Flag” and right-wing trade union rallies at Bilecik and Isparta. Populist government oicials even suggested removing his books from circulation. From late February on, he began to receive hate mail, including death threats.
Pamuk moved to London for two months, receiving diplomatic support over his political trou-bles. He then left for New York, where Andreas Huyssen had arranged the use of a room for him at Columbia. Toward the end of June, the charges against him were dropped on a technicality, and he returned to Turkey in August. On 31 August, how-ever, new charges were iled at his local court in Şişli, Istanbul, though the idea of arresting him pending trial was quickly dismissed. The trial date was set for 16 December, the very day on which accession talks with the European Union were set to begin. On a visit to Istanbul in October, EU Enlargement Com-missioner Olli Rehn described the trial as a “provoca-tion,” and made a highly publicized visit to Pamuk’s oice.
On 13 October the 2005 Nobel Prize in Litera-ture was awarded to Harold Pinter, amid reports that the committee had been split over whether or not to award Pamuk. The next day, Pamuk gave an inter-view to CNN Turk in which he insisted he had never used the word “soykırım” (genocide) in relation to the Armenians, and described PKK ighters as “geril-lalar” (guerillas) whose war with the Turkish army had damaged Turkish democracy. The Turkish press immediately implied that he had made his February statements to impress the Nobel committee.
Later in October Pamuk gave the Freidenspreis speech at the Frankfurt book fair. He declared his faith in the novel as a tool of international understand-ing, and insisted that the best antidote to Turkey’s feelings of cultural disinheritance and exaggerated nationalism was commitment to European inte-gration. In November 2005 he won the Prix Médi-cis Étranger, France’s most prestigious award for a foreign novel, for Neige, Jean-François Pérouse’s French translation of Kar.
On 2 December 2005 a judge ruled that the new charges against Pamuk required the approval of the justice minister. Writing in The New York Times, 19 December 2005, Pamuk claimed to feel conident of acquittal, and insisted his trial had been “over-dramatized” in the West. He also noted how the lies and legal abuses perpetrated by the CIA during the Iraq war had damaged America’s credibility as a champion of free expression. On 13 December he received televised support from Portuguese Nobel winner José Saramago, and signed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Günter Grass, Umberto Eco, John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, and Juan Goytisolo. The statement noted Turkish ambitions to enter the EU and threatened the “grav-est consequences” if Pamuk were found guilty.
At his court appearance on 16 December, Pamuk, his supporters, and international observers were violently harassed by nationalist demonstra-tors and denounced by the prosecudemonstra-tors. The judge adjourned the case to 7 February on the grounds that the justice minister had still not approved the
case. As Pamuk left the courtroom, agitators pelted his car with eggs. On 22 January 2006 the charges were dropped on a technicality, and the government continued its delicate EU accession talks. By not pressing charges against Pamuk, the AKP avoided a showdown with nationalists as well as a constitutional argument about the validity of article 301.
In April 2006 Pamuk received the Puterbaugh Award of the University of Oklahoma (generally reserved for the winners of or contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature). Also in April, he deliv-ered the inaugural PEN Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Memorial Lecture at the PEN World Voices fes-tival in New York, addressing the place of politics in the novel, and the connection between freedom of expression and human dignity. That spring, Wash-ington University awarded him the inaugural Dis-tinguished Humanist Award, citing his “excellence and courage.” In May he was named one of the “One Hundred People Who Shape Our World” by Time magazine, for his free speech activism and “magical realist” books. In Autumn 2006 he accepted a fellow-ship at Columbia University, undertaking to teach one semester per year in the school of arts, and he moved to New York. That summer, Freely’s new Eng-lish translation of The Black Book was pubEng-lished in the U.K. and the U.S. to welcoming British reviews.
Early on the morning of 12 October 2006, Pamuk’s agent, Andrew Wiley, called to tell him he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy’s citation noted that Pamuk, “in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and inter-lacing of cultures.” Pamuk told American journalists that the award had been bestowed, before all else, “on the Turkish language, Turkish culture and Tur-key itself,” though taking some of the credit for “my labors, my years of writing iction all by myself, soli-tary, in my room, my humble devotion to the great art of the novel,” and promising that “this prize will not change my working habits.”
In Turkey the positive reaction to Pamuk’s Nobel Prize was drowned out by the reaction to a decision by the French parliament to criminalize denial of the Armenian genocide. A nationwide poll in the Milliyet claimed that only thirty-seven percent of Turks were pleased about Pamuk’s Nobel Prize. While Prime Minister Erdoğan called to congratulate him, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer did not. Halman explained Pamuk’s success by his meticulous deploy-ment of the popular eledeploy-ments of world literature. Some critics noted the injustice of a Nobel for the relatively young Pamuk, when the elder statesman of Turkish letters, Yaşar Kemal, had been denied.
Kemal himself was gracious, congratulating Pamuk on having deserved the award.
In December 2006 Pamuk traveled to Stock-holm with his daughter. He delivered his Nobel lecture on 7 December in Turkish. Titled Babamın Bavulu (2007; translated as My Father’s Suitcase, 2006), the speech was a deeply personal relection on his lit-erary relationship with his father and his own moti-vation for writing. In an interview with a German newspaper on 10 December, he announced that he would henceforth avoid making political statements, and conine himself to “looking at the world from a cultural window.”
Nevertheless, on 7 January 2007, in an issue of Radikal (Radical) he edited as a guest, Pamuk expressed solidarity with socialist writers and artists persecuted by the Turkish state, including Nâzım Hikmet, Yaşar Kemal, Sabahattin Ali, and Kurdish singer Ahmet Kaya. On 19 January Pamuk’s friend Hrant Dink, the high-proile chief editor of the Armenian language daily Agos, was shot dead by a young nationalist extremist, Ogün Samast; his arrest-ing oicers later posed for photographs with Samast in front of the Turkish lag. Pamuk spoke of the grief of Istanbul’s intellectual community when he said that Dink’s murder had “soured” his life, and that he felt “boundless shame.” When Samast’s accom-plice Yasin Hayal later warned Pamuk to “wise up” or face Dink’s fate, his publisher canceled a proposed book tour to Germany over security fears, and Pamuk left Turkey for New York. When evidence later emerged of a plot to assassinate Pamuk as part of a wider, ultra-nationalist conspiracy, nicknamed “Ergenekon” by the press, he was advised by the Turkish government to hire bodyguards.
In 2007 Pamuk received honorary doctorates from the Freie Universität Berlin, from the Universit-eit van Tilburg in the Netherlands, and from Wash-ington’s Georgetown University. In Turkey he also received an honorary doctorate from the department of western languages and literature of Boğaziçi Uni-versity, the liberal state university that had absorbed much of his old alma mater, Robert College. The award was the irst formal recognition of his achieve-ments in Turkey since 1984. In the fall Pamuk left for New York to take up a teaching position in compara-tive literature at Columbia.
