topics: |  essays | lit

Most pieces in the book seem like diary jottings that were never quite intended to be finished - Barbers or wristwatches, Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma, the street food of Istanbul. These unpolished meditations rub shoulders with others that are more formal, achieving a closure that is often lyrical, as in the Seagull in the rain, or in Father's suitcase. Nonetheless, all the essays are informed by Pamuk's incisive gaze, bringing its essentially Turkish, yet widely-read cosmopolitan connections to such quotidian matters as the covers of books or the sadness of his daughter to deep ruminations on the passions of Dostoevsky.

Seagull in the Rain

Concerning the seagull on the roof opposite my desk

The seagull is standing on the roof, in the rain, as if nothing has happened. It is as if it's not raining at all; the seagull is just standing there, as still as ever. Or else the seagull is a great philosopher, too great to take offense. There it stands. On the roof. It's raining. It's as if that seagull standing there is thinking, I know, I know, it's raining; but there's not much I can do about that. Or: Yes, it's raining, but what importance does that have? Or maybe something like this: By now I've accustomed myself to rain: it doesn't make much of a difference.

They exist, nothing more. Seagulls, like most humans and most other creatures, spend most of their time doing nothing, just standing there. You could call this a form of waiting. To stand in this world waiting :for the next meal, for death, for sleep. ... Together we wait. In the sky are leaden clouds.

... Sometimes, the seagulls take flight all together to rise slowly into the air. When they do, their fluttering wings sound like rainfall. p.30-31

My father's suitcase

      (his acceptance speech for the Nobel)

the starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his
room with his book.  [My father's suitcase, Nobel acceptance speech, p.409]

So this was what was driving me when I first opened my father's suitcase. Did
my father have a secret, an unhappiness in his life about which I knew nothing,
something he could only endure by pouring it into his writing?  ... Most of the
notebooks I now took into my hands he had filled when he had left us and gone
to Paris as a young man. Whereas I, like so many writers I admired - writers
whose biographies I had read - wished to know what my father had written, and
what he had thought, when he was the age I was now. It did not take me long to
realise that I would find nothing like that here. What caused me most disquiet
was when, here and there in my father's notebooks, I came upon a writerly
voice. This was not my father's voice, I told myself; it wasn't authentic, or
at least it did not belong to the man I'd known as my father. Underneath my
fear that my father might not have been my father when he wrote, was a deeper
fear: the fear that deep inside I was not authentic, that I would find nothing
good in my father's writing... 411

What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man:
for me the centre of the world is Istanbul. 414

[Q. Why do you write?]
   I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do
   normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the
   ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I
   write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I
   can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others,
   all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue
   to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper,
   pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the
   novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit,
   a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I
   like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be
   alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very
   angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like
   to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I
   want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write
   because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the
   way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of
   life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to
   compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that
   there is a place I must go but - just as in a dream - I can't quite get
   there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be
   happy. 415

A week after he came to my office and left me his suitcase, my father came to
pay me another visit; as always, he brought me a bar of chocolate (he had
forgotten I was 48 years old). As always, we chatted and laughed about life,
politics and family gossip. A moment arrived when my father's eyes went to
the corner where he had left his suitcase and saw that I had moved it. We
looked each other in the eye. There followed a pressing silence. I did not
tell him that I had opened the suitcase and tried to read its contents;
instead I looked away. But he understood.

Contents

Preface                                            ix
  LIVING AND WORRYING
    The Implied Author                             3    
    My Father                                      11   
    Notes on April 29, 1994                        16
    Spring Afternoons                              20
    Dead Tired in the Evening                      22
    Out of Bed, in the Silence of Night            24
    When the Furniture Is Talking, How Can You     26
    Sleep?
    Giving Up Smoking                              28
    Seagull in the Rain                            30
    A Seagull Lies Dying on the Shore              32
    To Be Happy                                    34
    My Wristwatches                                36
    I'm Not Going to School                        38
    Ruya and Us                                    41
    When Ruya Is Sad                               43
    The View                                       46
    What I Know About Dogs                         48
    A Note on Poetic Justice                       50
    After the Storm                                52
    In This Place Long Ago                         55
    The House of the Man Who Has No One            58
    Barbers                                        61
    Fires and Ruins                                66
    Frankfurter                                    70   
    Bosphorus Ferries                              75
    The Princes' Islands                           79   
    Earthquake                                     84   
    Earthquake Angst in Istanbul                   94   
  BOOKS AND READING
    How I Got Rid of Some of My Books              107
    On Reading: Words or Images                    110
    The Pleasures of Reading                       113
    Nine Notes on Book Covers                      117
    To Read or Not to Read: The Thousand and       119
    One Nights
    Foreword to Tristram Shandy: Everyone          123  
    Should Have an Uncle Like This
	  [A brilliant defense of idiosyncratic prose writing;
one of the longest pieces]
    Victor Hugo's Passion for Greatness            134
    Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground: The      136  
    Joys of Degradation
    Dostoyevsky's Fearsome Demons                  143
    The Brothers Karamazov                         147  
    Cruelty, Beauty, and Time: On Nabokov's Ada    153  
    and Lolita
    Albert Camus                                   159
    Reading Thomas Bernhard in a Time of           162
    Unhappiness
    The World of Thomas Bernhard's Novels          164
    Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World             168  
    Literature
    The Satanic Verses and the Freedom of the      174  
    Writer
          Salman Rushdie
  POLITICS, EUROPE, AND OTHER PROBLEMS OF BEING ONESELF
    PEN Arthur Miller Speech                       179  
    No Entry                                       184  
    Where Is Europe?                               189
	Pamuk enters a new shop that sells used books, but sadly, there are no
	dusty piles of books but well-organized shelves filled with handsome
	antiquarian books.  There he comes upon Sorel's 8-volume French text -
	L'Europe et la revolution francaise.  The book was translated in the
	late 19th c., and has been widely read by Turkish intellectuals, but
	"not as a French reader might, seeking connection with their
	memories and their own pasts, but rather searching within the pages for
	some sense of their future, of their European dreams."  The essay then
	ruminates on what it means to live on the borders of Europe, with
	European dreams.
	   Turkey shifted to the Latin script, "so as to be more European" [in
        1928]; consequently all the older Turkish texts can no longer be read
        by the present population.  [The desire to be included in Europe still
	animates much of Turkey, it would seem, and is matched by the European
	tendency, like in children's games, to exclude Turkey. ] 192

    A Guide to Being Mediterranean                 193
    My First Passport and Other European           197   
    Journeys
    Andre Gide                                     204  
    Family Meals and Politics on Religious         214
    Holidays
    The Anger of the Damned                        218
    Traffic and Religion                           222
    In Kars and Frankfurt                          226  
    On Trial                                       237
    Who Do You Write For?                          241  
  MY BOOKS ARE MY LIFE
    The White Castle Afterword                     247  
    The Black Book: Ten Years On                   253  
    A Selection from Interviews on The New Life    258
    A Selection from Interviews on My Name Is      262  
    Red
    On My Name Is Red                              271  
    From the Snow in Kars Notebooks                273  
  PICTURES AND TEXTS
    Sirin's Surprise                               283  
    In the Forest and as Old as the World          290
    Murders by Unknown Assailants and Detective    292  
    Novels
    Entr'acte; or, Ah, Cleopatra!                  300
    Why Didn't I Become an Architect?              303  
    Selimiye Mosque                                311
    Bellini and the East                           313  
    Black Pen                                      321  
    Meaning                                        327
  OTHER CITIES, OTHER CIVILIZATIONS
    My First Encounters with Americans             331
    Views from the Capital of the World            334  
  THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW                       353  
  TO LOOK OUT THE WINDOW                           379  
  MY FATHER'S SUITCASE                             403  
Publication History                                419  
Index                                              425

review : Somak Ghoshal : On the margin - Elegy for a vanished past

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071116/asp/opinion/story_8551974.asp

It is impossible not to recall Kafka, the "implacable graphomaniac" from
Prague, while reading Orhan Pamuk's Other Colours.  ... [Pamuk] is "a
creature who can never write enough, who is forever setting life in words",
he hates interruptions ("life is full of things that conspire to keep a
person from literature"), and prefers a hermitic existence ("the starting
point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his
book").

Pamuk's position within his family is as unenviable as Kafka's dealings with
his own parents: "Istanbul destroyed my relationship with my mother - we
don't see each other anymore. And of course I hardly ever see my brother."
The Turkish nationalist press considers him politically suspect for his
allegedly controversial remarks on the 1915 genocide of Armenians in the
country. Hounded by the state, Pamuk has lived, like Ka, the hero of Snow, in
a Kafkaesque nightmare.

The brevity of the opening pieces, their intimate tone and lyrical allure,
recall Bacon and Montaigne. Even the titles are delightfully quirky,
personal, whimsical: "When the Furniture is Talking, How Can You Sleep?",
"Seagull in the Rain", "A Seagull Lies Dying on the Shore", "My
Wristwatches", "What I Know About Dogs". Some of these compositions come with
beautiful pen-and-ink illustrations by Pamuk, dedicated to his beloved
daughter, Rüya.

There are richly nostalgic pieces on the barbers in Istanbul,
[AM: barbershop intricacies are also a colourful detail in My name is Red --
the devastating fires, Bosphorus ferries and the recurring, calamitous
earthquakes...

Pamuk explores the dichotomy of being Turkish - of being geographically close
to but culturally distant from Europe - in "My Passport and Other European
Journeys". The account of his brief stay in Switzerland as a child, and the
recollection of the experience of meeting American neighbours in Ankara,
reveal the essentially truncated character of internationalism: "Our
passports, which are all alike, should never blind us to the fact that each
individual has his own troubles with identity, his own desires, and his own
sorrows."

The burden of identity, for Pamuk, is thus related as much to citizenry as to
the evolution of individual self-consciousness, how the life of the mind, not
just the life of the republic, shapes one's destiny. For a self-aware
"Westernizer" like Pamuk, "being oneself" also means not being allowed to be
the Other. This limitation becomes, for the hero of Dostoyevsky's Notes from
Underground, a deeply shameful and frustrating experience. Writing on Mario
Vargas Llosa, Pamuk compares his own exclusion from the West with the
intellectual displacement of Third World writers: "If there is anything that
distinguishes Third World literature, it is...the writer's awareness that his
work is somehow remote from the centers where the history of his art - the
art of the novel - is described, and he reflects this distance in his work."

---blurb
Over the last three decades, Pamuk has written, in addition to his seven
novels, scores of pieces — personal, critical, and meditative — the finest of
which he has brilliantly woven together here. He opens a window on his
private life, from his boyhood dislike of school to his daughter's precocious
melancholy, from his successful struggle to quit smoking to his anxiety at
the prospect of testifying against some clumsy muggers who fell upon him
during a visit to New York City. From ordinary obligations such as applying
for a passport or sharing a holiday meal with relatives, he takes
extraordinary flights of imagination; in extreme moments, such as the
terrifying days following a cataclysmic earthquake in Istanbul, he lays bare
our most basic hopes and fears. Again and again Pamuk declares his faith in
fiction, engaging the work of such predecessors as Laurence Sterne and Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, sharing fragments from his notebooks, and commenting on his own
novels. He contemplates his mysterious compulsion to sit alone at a desk and
dream, always returning to the rich deliverance that is reading and writing.