Orhan Pamuk sees the world
The Turkish writer's work serves as a literary bridge between East and West
NEW YORK -- Who knew George W. Bush had a taste for Turkish literature? Yet there he was in Istanbul last June, quoting Turkey's most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk (pronounced OR-han PAH-mook).
Sitting in a Greek restaurant near Carnegie Hall, Pamuk recalls the Bush reference with amused consternation. "Those who prepared his speech thought it would give a bit of glamour to a writer -- suspect though the glamour may be!"
Glamour, at least the literary kind, is something Pamuk already possessed. He has been translated into 35 languages. His sixth novel, "My Name Is Red," won the world's richest book prize, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, in 2003. It's become commonplace to speak of when, not if, he will win the Nobel Prize.
Tomorrow afternoon Pamuk will read from his latest novel, "Snow," at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
What makes Pamuk unique -- it's the reason Bush cited him -- is his ability to serve as a literary bridge between East and West.
"There must be many good writers in many, many places whose work doesn't easily translate because it is so specific to the place," says Ian Jack, editor of the literary quarterly Granta. "Orhan is, for some reason or other, accessible to us."
Refusing to castigate or apologize for either side in any "clash of civilizations" (a term Pamuk scorns), he seeks to understand, explain, illuminate.
"He makes everyone angry at one time or another because he avoids taking sides when people want him to take sides," says Walter G. Andrews, research professor of Near Eastern languages and civilization at the University of Washington at Seattle. Andrews was also, in a biographical detail worthy of Pamuk's fiction, the novelist's high school basketball coach in Istanbul.
"When he does take sides," Andrews adds, "it is . . . not in the service of one ideology or program or another."
Pamuk's homeland literally straddles Europe and Asia, something he considers valuable both to him and to it. "Turkey is made in such a way that the country's culture is also made of two spirits," Pamuk says, "not essentially fighting with each other but trying to find ways of combining. . . . In that sense, I'm slightly schizophrenic -- slightly."
As the repetition of the adverb suggests, Pamuk has a taste for both fine distinctions and self-deflation. Graying hair and nerdy glasses provide ballast for what remains, at 52, an angular boyishness. There's a loose-limbed intensity to him, a winning avidity.
Pamuk has a great, horsy laugh that gallops all over his conversation. He's eager and funny and intellectually vibrant. That old putdown, "The lights are on, but nobody's home," Pamuk turns inside out. His lights are always on, and many people are home. (He populates his novels with them.)
"I talk and talk too much," Pamuk says with a frown. In his gulpy, slightly nasal voice, that sounds harsher than he perhaps intends. It's true, though, he does talk a lot -- but that's also how he writes. "Oh, I'm a hard-working, obsessive type," he says with happy matter-of-factness. "I go to my office, then I stay there 10 hours. I'm working all the time. I have no holidays. Book tours, ha, these are my holidays."
When Pamuk speaks, the words spill out in bursts, and his vocal registers do loop-the-loops (it's that vocal gulpiness). He makes faces. He gesticulates. He doesn't so much keep up his end of the discussion as perform it, with his plosive, headlong English mugging for the tape recorder.
Pamuk, who lives in Istanbul, is divorced and has a 13-year-old daughter. He and his then-wife stayed in New York for three years in the late '80s, the only time he's lived outside of Turkey.
"Orhan's a person who opens up interesting vistas of discussion and debate," says Erdag G. Goknar, who did the English translation of "My Name Is Red."
"His intelligence, sense of irony, and humor make him fun to be around. This playfulness, however, alternates with a self-consciousness and intellectual intensity that verges on obsession. His ongoing engagement with writing and reading, with narrative production, reinforces the idea that new forms of expression emerge out of the persistent, and at times violent, meeting of cultures and ideologies."
Nowhere has Pamuk so directly addressed that meeting as in his new novel, "Snow." Overtly political as none of his other novels has been, it examines the conflict between Westerners and Islamic fundamentalists in a provincial city in northeastern Turkey.
The protagonist is a somewhat effete poet who's been living in exile in Germany. A Turkish Westernizer dismisses him as "a porridge-hearted liberal." Pamuk takes great pains not to take sides in "Snow," but his own liberalism is patent. He was one of the first writers from a Muslim country to denounce the fatwa issued against the English novelist Salman Rushdie in 1989. Pamuk showed he could stand up to civil as well as religious authority when he became a high-profile critic of the Turkish government's attacks on the Kurds in the early '90s.
Pamuk says he decided to write a political novel as much for aesthetic as for ideological reasons. "I thought I'd do it, and I did it!" he says with a laugh. "But I did it in my fashion. This isn't a political novel of the '30s or '40s, or socially committed, or with a political agenda. This is not propaganda. This may be the first political novel ever written where there's almost no propaganda in it. . . . I'm not saying, look, here are bad guys, here are good guys. I'm not taking sides. In fact, it's more a crying out for happiness: Life is short, enjoy it, take your girl and run away."
Precisely because they're so alien to him, Pamuk strives to let the fundamentalists in "Snow" have their say. "I am a writer who believes in Tolstoy's dictum: If the character is too bad, make him good," Pamuk says. During the three years he worked on the novel, he subscribed to a raft of Turkish fundamentalist newspapers -- and, he somewhat ruefully adds, "adored reading them."
Pamuk makes clear, however, that his sympathy for his Islamist characters does not extend to their real-life counterparts. "Political Islam doesn't have much to do with Islam," he argues. "It's about politics and nationalism and anti-Westernism. If there's any political point this book should make, it's that."
Pamuk's own background -- highly Western and apolitical -- could not have been more different from that of an Islamic radical. His great ambition as he grew up was to be a painter. That urge, he concedes, survives in the strongly visual bent of his writing.
"I come from a family of engineers. My grandfather made a lot of money building railroads. He died young, and as sort of a way of honoring his memory I was supposed to go to engineering school. None of the other professions were considered honorable. Since they realized I was also interested in these artsy painters, someone in the family said, `Oh, this one won't be an engineer but an architect.' I agreed with that right away. So I began studying, and three years after enrolling in architecture school I decided I wouldn't be an architect or painter but a writer. I'd been reading a lot."
When Pamuk, a man who claims to have 16,000 books in his library, says "a lot," he really does mean "a lot." The authors he calls his "main guys" were Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Thomas Mann, Faulkner, Woolf, and "perhaps" Hemingway. Later on, there were Borges, Calvino, Nabokov, Proust. Among the contemporary authors he admires are Paul Auster (who's also a friend), Don DeLillo, Nicholson Baker, Philip Roth, John Updike, and V.S. Naipaul.
Pamuk says he has no desire to write another political novel, but that doesn't mean he can ignore politics -- especially not in a country that borders Iraq.
"Look, the Turkish parliament -- I'm proud of it -- somehow, magically, managed to stay out of this war. So every single Turk is congratulating himself. We finally made a wonderful decision. We're just so glad we're not involved.
"Unfortunately, my country's funny and tragic history is perhaps turning out to be, because of George Bush, the funny and tragic history of the world. That is, the arrogant, not-very-reasonable elite of my country destroyed its democracy when backwards, illiterate, conservative parts of the country resisted so-called modernization, globalization, call it whatever. They bombed and suppressed and destroyed their own country. Now that Turkey has lived this for, say, 80 years, 100 years, I don't want America to make that mistake.
"Bush, unfortunately, prepared this trap for himself -- and it's not just his failure, but the failure of the whole world -- in the sense that these angry Islamic young people would not be going to Iraq in fury to shoot Americans if this unnecessary war hadn't happened. So the world is definitely not a safer place, either for Americans or someone like me, who's torn in between. Now that there are elections, I don't want to go into domestic politics. That carries the risk of [assuming] `If the Democrats come, everything will be solved.' "
Pamuk looks uncharacteristically grim. "No," he says, shaking his head. "No."
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. 