A Turkish Delight

Orhan Pamuk was born 7 June 1952 in Istanbul into a prosperous,secular middle-class family. His father was an engineer as were his paternaluncle and grandfather. It was this grandfather who founded the family’sfortune. Growing up, Pamuk was set on becoming a painter. He graduated fromRobert College then studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University andjournalism at Istanbul University. He spent the years 1985-1988 in the UnitedStates where he was a visiting researcher at Columbia University in New York andfor a short period attached to the University of Iowa. He lives in Istanbul.

Pamuk has said that growing up, he experienced a shift from a traditionalOttoman family environment to a more Western-oriented lifestyle. He wrote aboutthis in his first published novel, a family chronicle entitled Cevdet Bey VeOðullarý (1982), which in the spirit of Thomas Mann follows thedevelopment of a family over three generations.

His second novel, Sessiz Ev (1983; The House of Silence, 1998),uses five different narrator perspectives to describe a situation in whichseveral family members visit their ageing grandmother at a popular seasideresort with Turkey teetering on the brink of civil war. The period is 1980. Thegrandchildren’s political discussions and their friendships reflect a socialchaos where various extremist organisations vie for power.

Pamuk’s international breakthrough came with his third novel, Beyaz Kale(1985; The White Castle, 1992). It is structured as an historicalnovel set in 17th-century Istanbul, but its content is primarily a story abouthow our ego builds on stories and fictions of different sorts. Personality isshown to be a variable construction. The story’s main character, a Venetiansold as a slave to the young scholar Hodja, finds in Hodja his own reflection.As the two men recount their life stories to each other, there occurs anexchange of identities. It is perhaps, on a symbolic level, the European novelcaptured then allied with an alien culture.

Pamuk’s writing has become known for its play with identities and doubles.The issue appears in his novel Kara Kitap (1990; The Black Book,1995) in which the protagonist searches the hubbub of Istanbul for his vanishedwife and her half-brother, with whom he later exchanges identities. Frequentreferences to the mystic tradition of the East make it natural to see this in aSufi perspective. Kara Kitap represented a definite break with thegoverning social realism in Turkish literature. It provoked debate in Turkey notleast through its Sufism references. Pamuk based his screenplay for the film GizliYüz (1992) on the novel.

Yeni Hayat (1994; The New Life, 1996) is a novel about a secretbook with the capacity to irrevocably change the life of any person who readsit. The search for the book provides the structure of a physical journey butbordered by literary references, thought experiments in the spirit of mysticism,and reminiscences of older Turkish popular culture, turning the plot into anallegoric course of events correlated with the Romantic myth of an original,lost wisdom.

According to the author, the major theme of Benim Adim Kýrmýzý (2000;My Name is Red, 2002) is the relationship between East and West,describing the different views on the artist’s relation to his work in bothcultures. It is a story about classical miniature painting and simultaneously amurder mystery in a period environment, a bitter-sweet love story, and a subtledialectic discussion of the role of individuality in art.

Pamuk has published a collection of essays, Öteki Renkler : SeçmeYazýlar Ve Bir Hikâye (1999), and a city portrait, Ýstanbul : HatýralarVe ªehir (2003; Istanbul : Memories and the City, 2006). Thelatter interweaves recollections of the writer’s upbringing with a portrayalof Istanbul’s literary and cultural history. A key word is hüzün, amulti-faceted concept Pamuk uses to characterise the melancholy he sees asdistinctive for Istanbul and its inhabitants.

Pamuk’s latest novel is Kar (2002; Snow, 2005). The story isset in the 1990s near Turkey’s eastern border in the town of Kars, once aborder city between the Ottoman and Russian empires. The protagonist, a writerwho has been living in exile in Frankfurt, travels to Kars to discover himselfand his country. The novel becomes a tale of love and poetic creativity just asit knowledgeably describes the political and religious conflicts thatcharacterise Turkish society of our day.

In his home country, Pamuk has a reputation as a social commentator eventhough he sees himself as principally a fiction writer with no political agenda.He was the first author in the Muslim world to publicly condemn the fatwaagainst Salman Rushdie. He took a stand for his Turkish colleague YaşarKemal when Kemal was put on trial in 1995. Pamuk himself was charged afterhaving mentioned, in a Swiss newspaper, that 30.000 Kurds and one millionArmenians were killed in Turkey. The charge aroused widespread internationalprotest. It has subsequently been dropped.

Literary Prizes and Awards: Milliyet Roman Yarýşmasý Ödülü(1979, shared with Mehmet Eroglu), Orhan Kemal Roman Ödülü (1983), Madaralýroman Ödülü (1984), the Independent Award for Foreign Fiction (1990), Prix dela Découverte Européenne (1991), Prix France Culture (1995), Prix du MeilleurLivre Étranger (2002), Premio Grinzane Cavour (2002), the IMPAC Dublin Award(2003), Ricarda-Huch-Preis (2005), Der Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels(2005), Prix Médicis étranger (2005), Prix Méditerranée Étranger (2006).