The last nine months have obliterated my sense of time so it's hard for me to remember where this story began. Something like two years ago, I was sent a small package with My Name is Red and Snow by some Turkish author I had only briefly heard of. I didn't have much context, and knew very little about that region of the world. I grabbed the more exotic of the two titles to try first. At the surface level of plot (all we can hope on a first read), My Name is Red was an enjoyable detective story. I had trouble throughout the process, squaring shapes I had never heard of, orienting myself with a broken compass. I finished the book and moved on to different things, but never quite forgot that I had the second novel on my shelf.

As I was dismantling my library at the end of times, the convenient paperback Snow peeked out from a Banker's Box at me, and I added it to my bag. The time I spent with Ka in Kars finally accomplished what My Name is Red had tried to start, and I only continued to accumulate mass on the Katamari seed afterwards. Some of these thoughts need to be put in order.

A Collection of Shorter Thoughts

Before I dig into entire novels, I want to set some context and bin a few pieces.

Translations

Being mostly monolingual and deeply invested in Russian studies, translation quality and the ecosystem of translators is extremely important to me. Luckily, with Orhan Pamuk, this is effectively a closed problem. Orhan is fluent in Turkish and English, and reviews the translations of his novels himself.

Throughout Pamuk's early 2000s arrival as an international heavyweight, his main translator into English was a certain Joan Cleme---er, Maureen Freely, daughter of physicist-cum-flâneur John Freely and Dolores "Toots" Stanley. Her Wikipedia page contains what is easily the dumbest sentence I have read all year, and I had to read my own thesis:

Freely is a fourth-generation atheist.

Fucking fascinating.

Pamuk carefully reviews his English translations with personally selected translators, knowing full well that editions for the international audience are going to be translated from the English rather than the original Nihongo. He chooses Brave and Stunning translators, and I never found anything to be awkward. After entering into his museum phase (more on which later), Pamuk switched translators from Freely to Ekin Oklap, who did a fine job with A Strangeness in my Mind.

There's a nice 2005 interview with Pamuk in which he discusses the English language translation history of his novels, up to Maureen Freely. In the end, for the English reader, only The Black Book has two translations to choose from, and Pamuk himself has endorsed the later, Maureen Freely translation. Ergo, the question of translation is effectively a non-issue.

All in the Family

The Pamuk family was a mess. Orhan's parents were part of the first real generation to fully develop under the Atatürk agenda and his descriptions of his early family life scream of the "growing pains" of a Turkish family trying desperately to "westernize", without really knowing what that would mean.

It's hard to say for sure, but dad is possibly a spy of some sort. Possibly off on homosexual romps in Paris. At some point it becomes hard not to suspect this behavior when biographies involve broken families and long stretches of absentee literary work abroad. At any rate, Pamuk Sr. was certainly sleeping with someone who wasn't his wife. Gunduz Pamuk was the head of Aygaz, "Turkey's leading propane company" (Istanbul, (313)). He had society connections, literary propensity, and would disappear from the family home overnight and for extended periods. Just read the short "story" in Other Colors for an example of this behavior, since the story is clearly a superficially disguised memory with the names changed. On a given day, Gunduz might casually walk in and inform the family that the house is sold, or that he has a restraining order. Totally normal. This happens to me weekly.

My father would usually be stretched out on the sofa in the sitting room: It’s where he spent most of his time at home, reading newspapers, magazines, or books (not the literary novels he’d enjoyed in his youth but books about bridge) or staring distractedly at the ceiling.
Istanbul, (275)

??? How does someone with a literary shade end up reverting to books about Bridge?

The stories Pamuk shares are those of scuffles and fights in a damaged home. Pamuk père's disappearances are mentioned throughout Istanbul, and the presence of a secret girlfriend is casually dropped as common knowledge (this girlfriend would later be donated to Kemal's father in Museum).

Everyone has their baggage in this story (and if we learn exclusively from Istanbul, it is indeed a story). Mom is not blameless. She appears to have run off to her parents' house regularly, unloading her children on... um, anyone in the process. Very normal behavior! Orhan's brother, Şevket Pamuk, is an economist and historian. Orhan would like you to know that he was regularly beaten by his older brother, and that said brother eventually went to Yale. In an interview after the publication of Istanbul, Pamuk says that he "lost" his brother over the gossip present in the book. I don't know if that is still the status-quo, but I suspect they talk now.

In chapter six of Istanbul, Orhan scoffs at the nuclear family. Dozens of times he mentions wanting to be coddled by mother. He makes no mystery that he inherited his father's love for FROOD and SARTRE. These are red flags to me, as are

Postmodern Techniques

"I was more worried about being labeled an intellectual, so, hoping to convince them I was not an effete snob, I began to say I read my books---my Woolf, Freud, Sartre, Mann, Faulkner---“just for fun,” though they’d ask why I underlined passages."
Istanbul, (326)

As far as I'm concerned Pamuk's every mention of 'postmodern techniques' is a lame way of saying that he puts himself into his own novels here and there. Whatever. Snow is a typical case. By the novel's end we learn that a version of Orhan is the author of the novel we hold in our hands. Nabokovian optics turns this gambit into child's play, and considering it deeply neither adds nor detracts from the experience of the novel. I pulled an epic stunt like this on a paper for a college history class, only I wasn't a world-class weaver of a good yarn. Because of his immense talent and the polished window he gives us into his world, we can forgive Orhan for these peccadilloes. They cause small, occasional eyerolls but never cause me to send the book airborne.

Pamuk has a penchant for emphasizing relativism and unreliability in his narrators, but dwelling on this tired trope is almost completely subverted by his other habit: he will completely explain the objective reality of the situation before the novel's end (like the mystery plot in Red, or the sister swapping in Strangeness). This turns out to be a strength---pickles and games at the level of plot rarely reward the reader on a second pass, but Pamuk nearly discards them on the first go! Lean back and enjoy his novels, browse the Nişantaşı district on Google Maps, and don't stress too much about solving the low-yield puzzle. Kira will reveal himself in the end.

Pamuk's literary idols are terrible. His father's hero worship for slimy French intellectual descendants of a convicted sex offender was transferred directly to the son. Throughout the essays in Other Colors, name drops like Hegel, Kenzaburo Oe, Umberto Eco, Thomas Mann, Faulkner, and (worst of all) Freud and Sartre abound. Istanbul has entire chapters devoted to a handful of 19th century western authors simply because they wrote about Constantinople in travel narratives. I do not care about Nerval or Gautier unless they show up as background characters while reading about Huysmans. I DEFINITELY do not give a shit about what Humbert Gide had to say about the Turks, or any opinion by Auden, Sartre, Brodsky, Walter Benjamin, Woolf, or Sartre (Orhan mentions Sartre a lot). Laudable names like Dostoyevsky (with whom Pamuk is a valuable contrast) or Tolstoy almost need not be mentioned, their influence is so clear.

He also deals in concepts like "thinkers" and "literary structures", and anxiety of influence-tier models. Some of this is probably a result of teaching in America (he moonlights at Columbia University), but there's also an undeniable theme where Pamuk overemphasizes his westernization by exaggerating his progressive opinions.

All considered, this list of quirks would be fatal if Pamuk wasn't that good at telling a story. In Istanbul, the author attempts to enumerate famous western references to the city over the centuries. If one of his major concerns was that all of these portrayals were by western tourists, he can officially stop worrying. Everything I know about Istanbul I learned from Orhan Pamuk.

Bonus: Flaubert basically ended my read of Istanbul.

Pamuk grins as he announces the arrival of twenty-nine year old Flaubert, sporting a fresh case of Levant syphilis. My eyes glaze over the text and land on the photo. "What a nice two-page spread of a painting of ships on the Bosphorus. I wish this was in color! Perhaps I shouldn't skip all of the text on these pages; let me do a quick scan..."

Allow me to illustrate this with a story about Flaubert's penis–[SIC, THIS IS ACTUALLY IN ISTANBUL, SIC]

Alright JEEZ. Let these ghosts stay dead, please!

Westernization

After the end of WWII, the world was split into two, east and west. This marked the beginning of the era known as the Cold War.
- Metal Gear Solid 3

Pamuk would reaaaaally like you to think that he never left his native home. This is like Nabokov working Pushkin into the structure of an English novel at the same time he sserts his complete Americanization; he's lore-building. "I've lived in the same house for seventy years" means he jumped around many homes as a child, went on a cross-country roadtrip with a college buddy, and lived several cumulative years in New York City. As before though, it's hard to get too mad at him for his games, because they're all easy to see through.

As for religion, these two quotes say more than I could hope to:

"I consider myself a person who comes from a Muslim culture. In any case, I would not say that I'm an atheist. So I'm a Muslim who associates historical and cultural identification with this religion. I do not believe in a personal connection to God; that's where it gets transcendental. I identify with my culture, but I am happy to be living on a tolerant, intellectual island where I can deal with Dostoyevsky and Sartre, both great influences for me."
- Spiegel, 2005

"Through it all, neither my father nor my mother would speak, and because they responded naturally to my sudden and irrepressible desire to do a painting, it seemed to me as if God had briefly stopped time just for me. (In spite of my general lack of interest, I still believed that She came to my aid at important moments.)"

AAAAGHH. Incidentally, one can replace the entirety of Istanbul chapter 20 with this shitty song).

Prizeguy

In 1998, Pamuk rejected the Turkish State Artist prize on moral grounds:

"There is a moral issue here," he said. "This state does not have clean hands. If you accepted a prize from the White House during the Vietnam War, that would of course have political implications. This is a similar situation."

This happened a year before the English publication of Call Me Crimson. It's funny to note that, up until Pamuk was offered the prize, only sixty-four people had historically received it. The year the committee tried to include Pamuk, eighty-five new awards were chosen. Immediately the prize becomes valueless. Unsurprisingly, the award never seems to have been offered again.

Of course, less than a decade later he would accept a far more prestigious political prize (mostly on the grounds that it was offered by a European power). It's impossible not to mention that Pamuk's Nobel Prize (2006) followed after a year of struggling with the Turkish press over an allusion to the Armenian genocide. "Good politics" beats "bad politics", right? The Nobel was too high-profile to turn down (and I don't think he would have in any event).

Lemma: all Nobel Prizes are awarded for political reasons.

Once again, who cares, as long as we get good stories out of it?

So much for the disjointed notes. Let’s talk about some novels.

1001 Broken Hoarders:
The Museum of Innocence

At the time of writing, the earliest Pamuk novel I've read is Red, but my impression is that The Museum of Innocence is the peak of Pamuk's self-intended career trajectory. The unique idea here is that the character of the novel creates a museum dedicated to his relationship with his cousin. In tandem with writing the novel, Pamuk created the actual museum his character supposedly develops. This is exactly the sort of meta-activity someone who thinks he's a postmodern spirit can accomplish with Nobel Prize money.

Pamuk claims to have been mulling over the novel as early as the late 1980s after meeting the model for his protagonist, the dual museum curator/lodger. The idea of the physical museum certainly grew up with the story. Since each informed the other, statements in interviews like "you can enjoy the museum without reading the novel, and vice-versa" lose steam.

The problem is that the novel does not take off. It's not because the plan is too over-the-top, and and it's not inherently a style over substance issue. The problem is that the protagonist is a stupid piece of shit.

But before we get into the weeds, some biographical background. Late in Istanbul there's a surprise chapter worth reading in its entirety.

First Love

Young Orhan Pamuk repurposed a family apartment in Cihangir as his makeshift artist's loft. The apartment was a dumping ground for his mother's and his grandmother's old furniture and sentimental junk. Eventually, he began to bring a girl up to the apartment to paint her (like one of his French girls? This is the teenage dream). This is obviously a huge influence his later Museum scenario.

Eventually his mother caught on to what was happening and started dropping in unanounced. Pamuk and his muse called off their meetings and picked up new rendezvous in...

...

...

A MUSEUM.

The media literally refuses to cover this.

This is a good time to mention that I, very stereotypically, had my own memories in mind as I read this chapter. Fifteen is an excellent time for an emotional relationship that goes nowhere, and though the whole thing seems silly and inconsequential as an adult, there's no question that the thoughts and feelings at the time were real and formative. Those (shockingly brief!) memories resurface weekly in little ways, strange gestures, faces in profile, objects that trigger Proustian resonances, no matter how many years back they recede. The hazy mirror effect of reading a similar experience is a form of nostalgia. We may not feel like the same person that had those experiences half a life ago or longer, but there is a direct lineage from that person to the person you are today, and to deny it is silly. Pamuk is not stingy with his personal details, and it tends to be obvious when he's donating his own memories to his characters wholesale. He has spent his entire adult life rephrasing and flipping his young experiences into his novels. And that's how it should be.

Orhan planned a staged kidnapping to run off with his Black Rose (and forty years later, he would donate this same kidnapping plot to Mevlut of A Strangeness in My Mind). We might laugh at his idea that he could translate an "old Graham Greene novel" (The Quiet Turk?) in a fortnight just to make quick cash, but it's a sweetly sentimental overestimation.

An order from on high: this girl is not to marry a painter. She is spirited away. The episode in his life ends, but the museum begins.

Masumiyet Müzesi

The Museum of Innocence is a frustrating, top-heavy novel. The charm of Pamuk's young love-affair that inspired the novel is lost in translation from memory to fiction. Pamuk and the "Black Rose" of Istanbul are a doomed couple we can see reflections of our own experiences in. Kemal Bey, the protagonist of Museum, is an unlikeable playboy whose bad choices over the first 200 pages are never transcended by later developments. Rather than trying to improve his lot after his fall, Kemal pisses about for the better part of a decade and allows all of his human interests to shed without regrowth. He ends the novel a discarded husk of a promising life.

Kemal's paramour Füsun spends those same eight years pretending not to look at him as he destroys his life for her---and she still tries to kill him for... not noticing that she's wearing a pair of earrings she told him were lost almost a decade prior. This is an eight year pursuit, not an eight year relationship. And up to the moment the novel's time-skip activates, it is unexpected. Kemal's future involvement in the movie industry is not even suggested (though perhaps this is something about the cultural situation in Turkey at the time, when these industries may have been morphing quickly in real time). Still, a huge part of the problem is that these developments only begin halfway through the physical novel. 250 pages dedicated to a few months of debauchery and fallout, 250 pages for eight years where one year of action occurs. I don't buy it, and nothing makes these people relatable. (Incidentally, the time skip occurs nearly 80% of the way into the museum fotobook!)

Kemal sure drinks a lot. And to excess. He never has a moment of reckoning, and what begins as a character flaw that should be addressed ultimately degrades to a cute quirk. Constant guzzling, cover to cover boozing. I thought it would catch up to him through social repercussions but it only affects him on the final pages (death at 60, though he died spiritually long before). I get it, Istanbul is a decaying city, Kemal's life is empty trash (and so he fills it with literal trash). Another case of the character revealing that he did not fundamentally change, and that his entire pursuit and post-Füsun life trajectory is a cope.

How much of the novel was written with the real museum in mind? Was the pace of the novel hijacked by this more ambitious goal? Were the polishing and editing stages short-circuited by a lengthy lawsuit and Alfred Nobel? Since we know the author's original idea was to open the museum on the day of the novel's release, it's clear that at least some of his plans were derailed by life's circumstances.

I detect a few clunky transitions in the finished product. We hear of Grace Kelly and immediately know what Füsun's end will be.

When we went into the back room, Füsun said, “Do you know what, Kemal? Grace Kelly was bad at mathematics, too. And she got into acting by working as a model first. But the only thing I really envy her is that she could drive a car.” - chapter 72

In case you don't know, the operative historical detail here is that Grace Kelly died in a car accident. The comparison immediately foreshadows Füsun's death, but the span from Grace Kelly's first earnest mention (chapter 72) and the car crash after the doomed engagement (chapter 79) is too brief to feel like anything but a convenient afterthought. This is an Agatha Christie-tier foreshadowing that Pamuk is better than. There is a brief namedrop of Grace Kelly in chapter 12, but it smells of being added at a much later stage. There's something clumsy about the pieces in this one.

A similar blip occurs in the beginning of the novel during the "Feast of the Sacrifice". We're told through a flashback that the young Füsun was imprinted with fascination for Kemal and with the values she eventually brings to their relationship (no sex for eight years with your filmmaker "husband"???), but it seems hastily introduced, or maybe the subtext is too on-point.

Pamuk himself seems aware of his protagonist's shortcomings and has to ask readers to keep going until page 150.

"just don't drop this book before you reach 150 pages because at the beginning the guy looks too happy with himself… and I thought the readers would not love my protagonist Kemal at the beginning." --Interview with Richard Lea

Elsewhere:

"I also warned my friends, my readers, just don't drop this book before you reach 150 pages because at the beginning the guy looks too happy with himself, and I thought the readers would not love my protagonist Kemal at the beginning. But then he begins to suffer, then he begins to think in a different mood, then perhaps winning over the attention of the regular reader."

Kemal indeed begins to have a shift in mood, but he never fundamentally changes. If he does, it happens too little and too late.

Still, Pamuk sometimes drops gems when we least expect them. On watching people through the window from a distance:

"I felt that those distant people must be part of a complicated story that I didn't know." --The Innocence of Objects

THAT'S what elevates Orhan Pamuk and keeps me in his novels even when the rest is collapsing. Rather than a snooty solipsism, he assumes the strangers at a distance have a complicated story, lives beyond those we can project onto them.

To offset what's becoming a garrulously grumpy review, a list of novel PROS:

• Collections, acknowledging hoarding as a symptom of brokenness.
• Chapters around the military occupation of 1980.
• Fire on the Bosphorus, a general fascination with what happens at sea.
• Passionate diatribes on things we know Orhan is saying through Kemal.

Ultimately, I would rather read about Zaim the womanizer and Sibel the jilted lover. The public nuisance who slowly falls for a woman who detested him has a pathos that the eclectic garbage collector never reaches.

Musei Innocenti official strategy guide

The fotobook provides a few more glimpses into the Kemal/Fusun dynamic, but none of them make me like Kemal any more. Orhan, being epic, claims that at the museum

"Visitors who look closely inside the box might read Füsun's exam registration form and find out that Füsun's foreign language choice in high school was English. But Kemal never mentioned this side of Füsun to me."

Kemal didn't mention this side of Füsun because he didn't know this side of Füsun. He spent eight years in her living room watching TV and jacking off later to her stolen tissues and cigarettes, not talking to her.

"Every now and then Kemal openly confessed to believing that man's sentimental attachment to objects is one of life's greatest consolations." (161)

Surely this is the author's sentiments creeping through. "Consolation" is the transformative word. The attachment to objects at the level of the museum project is a cope with trauma. There's no need to console without grief.

Kemal collects objects that remind him of moments in time, but Pamuk suggests that the only object Kemal really desired was Fusun herself. Why else would Kemal never tell her about her options she had in the film industry? He deliberately kept her on the shelf. The message is clear, right up until she dies upon impact with a tree while trying to... have some autonomy. Oops. Progressive message derailed.

Finally, the fotobook delivers an epitaph for the whole project:

"Kemal spoke of himself as "a grounded ship, and ignominious heap of inadequacy and shame". (203).

This is infinitely more honest than the novel's closing lines. "I've lived a very happy life" is absolutely hollow horseshit, but I consider the above quote (found in The Innocence of Objects) as an official emendation by Pamuk. Kemal lived his life adrift, Kemal grounded his ship in the Bosphorus, Kemal died in a city far from his own, alone.

The parts of this novel worth revisiting are (as usual) Pamuk's Istanbul, described by his characters. When Füsun isn't the central object Pamuk allows his protagonist to shine---and those passages are more fun to read than any of the self-indulgent chapters of Pamuk's memoir. It's almost like Orhan Bey knew this himself, because his next book is exclusively a romp around Istanbul with his characers.

(Footnote: I do not recommend reading this novel just after moving everything you own into storage, nor while staying in a hoarder's spare bedroom.)

Some Yogurt Like I Said...

"I’d have liked to write my entire story this way—as if my life were something that happened to someone else, as if it were a dream in which I felt my voice fading and my will succumbing to enchantment." - Istanbul

Orhan Pamuk's deep love for Istanbul is real.

Throughout his memoir the author bemoans his country's artificial push for nebulous westernization, which resulted in the burning of ancient buildings and the severing of cultural roots. Istanbul's physical decay is a big theme for him. Moreover, his family seems to have had rooms of heirlooms frozen in time; this private preservation of the past as a "museum" surely contributed to The Museum of Innocence more than anything else Pamuk says (like a chance meeting with a descendant of an ex-sultan, a story I believe only slightly more than Nabokov's monkey in a cage.)

We know from the end of Snow that Pamuk was hard at work on The Museum of Innocence by 2002. Next published was his memoir. Finally, after the museum project was mostly released from his head, Pamuk was able to push forward to new works. When Nabokov entered this phase, it spelled the end of his reign as a legendary novelist who could do no wrong. Pamuk fared better; A Strangeness in my Mind is the result of perspectives he began in his memoir that could not fully materialize until he was set free from the baggage of his museum saga.

On the heels of the museum I took far too few notes on this novel, primarily because I was having fun. Since I learned from My Name is Red not to worry too much about the detective threads, I didn't let the multi-voice perspective shifting distract me and, sure enough, the solution to the mystery plot is eventually given (and it's not even that interesting). Once again, just read and have fun!

Pamuk claims not to have been very political when he was younger. That's interesting, considering that late in Istanbul he admits to hiding a classmate from the police in his Cihangir art studio. I would claim not to have been political in my youth, by which I mean of course that I never knew political dissidents, let alone harbored them on my property. We have to wonder what Orhan donated to Mevlut; the character seems stuck in between socialist Alevis friends, and Grey Wolves cousins, without having any convictions of his own. Mevlut is nearly a blank slate. At one point he participates in tagging a few mosques with the cool S with some radical pals, but that's as far as he goes. His internal compass likely aligns closer with them than his hyper-conservative family, but we can't know for sure, because "booooozaaaaa" is the only voice this character is afforded.

Which leads us to an important effect of this novel's structure---Mevlut is the only character whose chapters are not narrated in the first person. Characters defend themselves with fervor and accuse Mevlut of indecision (or worse). Mevlut is protected from our probing too deeply by the narrator, though we still get to visit lonely hills and secret meetings with him.

Perhaps related–Pamuk "became a writer" the same year that Mevlut moved to Istanbul. Think about that.

If we read Mevlut as the unawakened artist, we should also read how Pamuk fills his thoughts with poetry. The sprawling sketch on the novel's U.S. hardcover (see the image above) shows Mevlut atop a skyscraper, contemplating a city he both stands over and is one with. The dust jacket over the cover shows this to be in Mevlut's imagination as he sells boza. This is when Mevlut is happiest; Pamuk feels the exact same way.

Mevlut's visits with the "Holy Guide" / Master Calligrapher resonate with Pamuk's self-identification as a "cultural Muslim". And Mevlut knows to keep his mouth shut about these visits around his family. Yet another reason for his chapters to be conveyed by an outside narrator: we aren't allowed fully into his inner world, and maybe that's the reason he survives while everything around him seems to fall apart.

I'm repeating myself now, but the mystery subplot doesn't matter much and will be resolved without ambiguity by mid-novel. Süleyman deliberately delivered the initial letters to the wrong sister because he found the younger one attractive. The End. Their whole wing of the family (except for the aunt) is vindictive and has a deep feeling of entitlement towards Mevlut, so this shouldn't be much of a surprise. It's something Mevlut's father might have actually been justified in noticing.

Today Korkul (the eldest cousin) can't be doing well. Turkey's Islamic slide has only intensified in the past decade. The Grey Wolves have deep state ties, but Korkul wasn't a ranking member, to judge from his sidelining in the early 90s. On the other hand, Mevlut the boza seller may have had a hard life, but he still had moments of happiness. Two children grew to be healthy, he himself is still sound, and there's plenty of time for a future. Mevlut was only 55 when the novel ends, in 2012. He would be 67 today. As far as an English reader in America is concerned, Mevlut is still wandering the streets of Istanbul now, (hopefully in Çukurcuma, away from his cousins). The novel indeed could have been trimmed down, but I think the result was a net win. This is the book that Istanbul should have been.

"…having already absorbed the notion that to lie well was a form of cleverness."

Thank you to Orhan for concisely phrasing the phenomena of service animals.

A few thoughts on Snow

"Isn't having been in prison at least once a sort of badge of honor for a Turkish author?"
"Wouldn't it be an even greater honor to be the first Turkish writer who had never been there? Isn't that much better? Better for Turkey and better for the author?" - Spiegel, 2005

Snow is the indisputable masterpiece of the three novels considered here. I read it first of the three, and I spent more time thinking about it, and I learned more from it (although that learning set the basis for the follow-up novels).

At the level of plot, the first read experience unfolds expertly. Competing alternatives for Ka's fate are in constant tension and one never has obvious primacy over the others. In this case, Pamuk's attempt to consider what the reader will be thinking as he reads was utterly successful. The narrator makes us feel Ka gradually receding from us, and we're increasingly reminded of the narrator's presence. Small hints of Ka's death end chapters a third of the way through the book, and it's only halfway that the narrator confirms Ka's death (by which point it's already clear to anyone paying attention). We might assume that he dies in Kars by misadventure, and boy does that seem to be where things are heading! As the novel progresses Ka lies more brazenly, his motivations become more questionable, and his political maneuvering becomes much more involved. It's almost hard to believe he's just a writer (could a case be made that he's an agent?) Just as we become resigned to his impending death in Kars, the narrator steps out from behind the curtain and delivers a jolt. He tells us about his search for Ka's poetry in Frankfurt following the poet's death... four years after the main events of the novel! The mystery is revitalized just when we'd become co-conspirators to history.

This isn't a skeleton popping out of the closet, but something more subtle. This is dramatic structure artfully deployed. When I inevitably re-read Snow, I suspect the narrator's adroit manipulation of the data will impress me all over again. Pamuk nails the suspense structure without being contrived.

Pamuk missteps in his interviews about Snow. He insists that Ka is a poet on a mission to find a wife. Ka does an awful lot of poking his nose around, playing on every side, and he has a suspicious and highly developed ability to pass social barriers without much harm. I had my doubts throughout the novel that Ka was sincere and I believed he was playing some degree of spy up to the final pages... and Pamuk explicitly states that he wasn't. But too much about Ka is suspicious. Maybe Ka's "novelist friend Orhan" got it wrong.

The character Sunay Zaim is almost farcial in his stage role planned assassination, but the novel is so entertaining that I forgive him. I forgive him!

I do not believe Orhan Pamuk to have the poetry-writing muscle, and yet Ka is a convincing poet. A less skilled author would have failed at this gambit. But Orhan-Bey has a secret weapon: he flexes his painting muscle instead. I fully believe that, though the text of the poems was never written by Pamuk, the content of the poems was, and certain colors and emotions they were meant to evoke. Sure, the content of the poems was to some extent established within the novel, but without a deep knowledge of what the poet was supposed to have felt and channeled, the effect would not have been a success. It was. Since the poems weren't written it's natural and maybe obvious that the notebook had to be stolen by the end (a mirror of Pamuk's own father's stolen suitcase of poems and translations in Istanbul chapter 33). The gambit passes, and the novel is a success. I found myself sad that the poems weren't recovered at the end, since that meant that I wouldn't be able to read them myself. That's the greatest compliment I can pay the novelist.

"It shook me to the core, because it showed me that you believe with all your heart that this world is nothing more than a preparation for the next."

"Yes, I do believe that," said Necip with excitement. "It's not enough, though. God wants us to be happy in this world too. But that's the hardest thing."

Pamuk himself plainly states some of the things I've been trying to say above in an interview published in the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER - Have you ever written poetry?
PAMUK - I am often asked that. I did when I was eighteen and I published some poems in Turkey, but then I quit. My explanation is that I realized that a poet is someone through whom God is speaking. You have to be possessed by poetry. I tried my hand at poetry, but I realized after some time that God was not speaking to me. I was sorry about this and then I tried to imagine—if God were speaking through me, what would he be saying? I began to write very meticulously, slowly, trying to figure this out. That is prose writing, fiction writing. So I worked like a clerk. Some other writers consider this expression to be a bit of an insult. But I accept it; I work like a clerk.

In lieu of a conclusion: three images

• An elderly couple walks down the Istanbul street at twilight, pulling the night behind them, Nyx's urban chariot.
• İpek cuts a thick slice of bread, Ka involuntarily associates the action with poverty.
• A boy and his father quietly fish around Kemal and Sibel's yali.

86th Annual Atatürk Day Postscript

The novels discussed above form the bulk of Pamuk's middle career, but there is much more out there. Judging from interviews, his most recent novel about Covid in Corfu sounds like... not the next move.

"When […] is murdered, it falls upon Pakize and Nuri to employ methods reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes to identify the culprit."

Did late Pamuk turn into early Umberto Eco? That's a question for another day. For now, I think the next move is The Black Book, since its presence can be felt throughout the subsequent novels and the memoir I didn't bother finishing. My Name is Red surely deserves a re-read. Braudel's Mediterranean is another layer of landscape and texture that will surely enhance my vision of this region of the world. Pamuk's novels already did more for me than any history book could have for introducing me to the foreign world of 20th century Istanbul. Even if I stopped my journey right here, I would have to thank Orhan Pamuk profusely for what he's given me already.

2024.11.10
A Land of Onions
Revised 2026.05.25