Second only to Sertab Erener’s 2005 triumph at Eurovision, (and just ahead of the “Spice Girls; Live in Istanbul” Concert), Turkey’s biggest pop cultural coup in recent years must be Orhan Pamuk’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Having heard the name, I picked up his historical/ biography book “Memories of Istanbul” for Daisuke to read on his trip. (The irony!) The book is a rich celebration of the city – a great capital since before Muslim times, which reached its zenith under the Persian-influenced Ottomans and has since declined to being just the largest city of an economically peripheral country. The book charts the city’s decline, the interwoven history of its Muslim, Jewish,Greek and Armenian populations, and the atmosphere of defeat and lingering melancholy that mark out this city, that was once the New York of the Middle Ages.
(Interestingly,the urban myth about alligators prowling the New York sewers started in Istanbul in the 15th century!)
I enjoyed the book so much, and the images conjured up – perfect reading on a cold, grey day on the ferry across Tokyo Bay – that I started on another of his novels, “My Name is Red”. It is an odd murder mystery, set in the days of the Ottoman Empire, where every character speaks to the narrator in first person, describing their view of the events. At the heart of the novel lies the still-unsolved tension in the Turkish identity, still as strong today as it was three hundred years ago.
The Ottomans knew that they would have to adapt to superior Western technology – but what of Western culture? What should they keep and what should they keep out? How Western was too Western? Should they join Europe, or fight it?
What could be timelier?
It all has strong echoes of Japan too…but whereas Japan was defeated, occupied and remade in America”s image, Turkey (like Thailand) has struggled through the process independently – painfully, and slowly, figuring out for itself what it means to be a modern society.
His themes are serious, but Pamuk is a great writer – with a vivid eye for detail and a sense of humor. His stories intrigue. But also, he is a humanist. In his novels, the lives of clerics, officials, housewives and whores, their slaves and their gay lovers, are lovingly tied together – each character fully-rounded, three-dimensional and human. In a Middle East where we hear so many people talk in cariacatures of “infidels”, and where homosexuality is still punishable by death in ten countries, it was a revelation.
Pamuk is an interesting writer, but more than that, he is what the world needs now; a Muslim humanist devoted to a Middle East that respects its own traditons, as well as the rights of the individual. For this, as well as the quality of his work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize , and also charged with treason for daring to acknowledge the truth of the Turkish genocide against the Armenians and Kurds. (He was later let off).
So, a writer with a fascinating voice, and something important to say – who despite it all, is fun to read!!
