Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul -- these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness. My imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.

Gustave Flaubert, who visited Istanbul 102 years before my birth, was struck by the variety of life in its teeming streets; in one of his letters he predicted that in a century's time it would be the capital of the world. The reverse came true: After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed. The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand-year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I've spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own.

At least once in a lifetime, self-reflection leads us to examine the circumstances of our birth. Why were we born in this particular corner of the world, on this particular date? These families into which we were born, these countries and cities to which the lottery of life has assigned us -- they expect love from us, and in the end we do love them from the bottom of our hearts; but did we perhaps deserve better?

I sometimes think myself unlucky to have been born in an aging and impoverished city buried under the ashes of a ruined empire. But a voice inside me always insists this was really a piece of luck. If it is a matter of wealth, I can certainly count myself fortunate to have been born into an affluent family at a time when the city was at its lowest ebb (though some have ably argued the contrary). Mostly, I am disinclined to complain; I've accepted the city into which I was born in the same way that I've accepted my body (much as I would have preferred to be more handsome and better built) and my gender (even though I still ask myself, naively, whether I might been better off had I been born a woman). This is my fate, and there's no sense arguing with it.

 

Nobel Prized Orhan Pamuk Explores How East Can Meet West

 

By Bob Thompson - Washington Post

The Nobel Prize for literature was awarded on October 12 to Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who the Nobel Foundation said has "devoted his life to the study of mixture and plurality."

"This is a flattering recognition of my work as a novelist for the past 32 years," Pamuk said in a telephone interview, and also "a celebration of Turkish language and culture, of which I am a part."

Pamuk's novels, the best known of which are "Snow" and "My Name Is Red," evoke modern Turkey's complex blending of westernized culture and Ottoman tradition. It is a mix, Pamuk said, that puts the lie to the simplistic notion of a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West.

"That is a fanciful, very dangerous idea," he said, "and so many people have been killed" because of it. His writing career, he added, is a testament to the fact that East and West can meet rather than clash.

Last year, Pamuk was charged by Turkish authorities with the "public denigrating of Turkish identity" after he spoke to a Swiss newspaper about official silence surrounding the massacre of more than a million Armenians by Turks in 1915 and the death of tens of thousands of southeast Turkey's Kurdish minority in more recent conflicts with Turkish forces.

Pamuk's case was greatly magnified by the fact that Turkey has been seeking to join the European Union, which looks with disfavor on this kind of restraint on free speech. The charges against him were later dropped. But numerous less well-known writers, publishers, scholars and others in Turkey have been similarly charged as part of a what some observers see as a campaign orchestrated by Turkish nationalists to keep the country out of the EU.

Ron Chernow, president of the PEN American Center -- which works to defend free expression worldwide -- said yesterday that he applauded Pamuk both "as an admiring reader" and because Pamuk has been "willing to defy those who would silence free speech."

At a news conference yesterday on the campus of Columbia University, where he is currently a visiting scholar, Pamuk deflected questions about politics. "This is a time for celebration," he said. But in the telephone interview, he said bluntly that "Turkey's future lies in the European Union," adding that its inclusion would be "a wonderful thing for Turkey, for Europe and for the world."

Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952, part of a large and well-to-do family, and he grew up dreaming that he would be a painter. But at age 23, he decided to write instead. Although it took him many years to achieve publication, he has never held another kind of job.

He is "a magnificent writer" who "really works hard -- he does tremendous research," said Walter Andrews, a professor in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department at the University of Washington. But Andrews, who has known Pamuk since coaching him in basketball in Istanbul ("he was pretty good") when Pamuk was a scrawny teenager, also points to a context for Pamuk's success he thinks most Americans don't understand.

"Turkey is a place full of really excellent writers, poets and literary critics," Andrews says. Compared with Americans, Turkish people are hugely interested in literature and culture, and Pamuk has "pushed to the top" internationally "because there's a base" for his achievements.

Maureen Freely, who has translated several of Pamuk's books, agreed. She called Pamuk "by far the most brilliant writer in that society," but noted that Istanbul is the kind of place where even non-literary professionals tend to read in several languages.

Freely said she was translating "Snow" -- which Pamuk has called "my first and last political novel" -- just as the United States was preparing its assault on Baghdad. She sees it as "prophetic" book that "takes everything that's gone wrong in Turkish politics since World War II and has it all happen in one snowbound city in three days" and in the process, "predicts a lot of the problems we're seeing in Iraq."

The snow becomes a metaphor for any kind of chaos, Freely said -- "a blizzard, a half-finalized invasion" -- under cover of which a nation's political players proceed to "get business done and scores settled."

Freely also noted that writing the book influenced Pamuk's own political behavior.

His protagonist, Ka, is a man who "shirks his duty" by choosing private happiness over political conscience, Freely said. And "when Orhan was charged with insulting Turkishness, he was very aware" that he had written about someone who'd made the wrong choice.

To think of "Snow" as wholly political, however, would be to miss the literary flair Pamuk has brought to his work.

He is "gifted with a light, absurdist touch," wrote John Updike in a 2004 New Yorker review, "spinning out farcical plot developments to the point of implying that any plot, in this indifferent and chaotic universe, is farcical." Updike then went on to do a bit of successful prophecy himself, calling Pamuk Turkey's "most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize."

"The thing about Orhan's novels," said Andrew Finkel, a London-based journalist who has worked in Istanbul for many years, "is that he wasn't afraid of being an intellectual." By moving away from the kind of social realism that had previously dominated Turkish literature, Finkel said, Pamuk "changed what people thought a Turkish novel would be."

Beyond his stylistic innovations, Finkel said, Pamuk has tried to show that "the Turkish soul is a lot more complex than people in the West think" -- or some in Turkey itself wish to believe.

In the early 20th century, Finkel explained, the Turkish drive for westernization involved a deliberate denial of the country's Ottoman past. Yet the reality was that East had met West long before: After all, "the Ottomans were in Europe and the Turks were part of Europe." It has been Pamuk's role to show that "these cultures are far more intermingled" than the leaders of his parents' generation would admit.

Younger Turks, who buy Pamuk's books in droves, "see themselves as embracing a complex modernity," Finkel said.

Or as Pamuk put it yesterday, "My work is an exploration of having two souls" -- of the evidence that "East and West do combine."

It's a viewpoint that should reach many more readers as a result of the Nobel. His U.S. publisher, Knopf, and its paperback arm, Vintage, have announced that nearly 200,000 copies of Pamuk's books will be printed in response to the prize. But as Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards noted yesterday, Pamuk is already far more popular here than most Nobel winners who don't write in English. A total of more than 550,000 copies of five Pamuk novels and a nonfiction book, "Istanbul: Memories and the City," were already in print in American editions.

As for Pamuk himself, he promised that "this prize will not change my working habits." (He's now at work on a novel about obsessive love.) And he told a story about his teenage daughter that could help him keep the honor in perspective.

Early yesterday morning, after he learned he had won, he called his daughter at school to convey the good news. "She said, 'Oh great, Daddy, but the teacher is coming,' " Pamuk said -- and he couldn't persuade her to stay on the line.