ORHAN PAMUK : A REFRESHING WRITER FROM TURKEY.

I never knew any one by the name of ORHAN PAMUK until I heard the news that this Turkish writer had been selected for 2006 Nobel Prize for literature. That created an interest in the writer and his work . Many Books of Pamuk , hitherto an unknown entity in India were sold with this news . I saw his books on display in stores in New Delhi.. I also saw the pirated editions  on  Foot Path markets of Janpath and karol Bagh..But then who is this Pamuk.

                                                                                

FERIT ORHAN PAMUK is a Turkish writer born in June 1952 who  teaches comparative literature in Columbia  .. He  studied architecture from Istambul , a city to which he is deeply attached . Married in 1982,his wife Aylin is  a historian .They were divorced in 2001. While reading some of his novels , I found visible influences of Albert camus ,Kafka , Marcel Proust , Sartre , Dostoevsky and valdmir Nabakov . His books also present a confusion or a loss of identity brought by conflict between Western and eastern values so inherent to Turkey . He raised his voice against the killings of Armenians and Kurds in his country and faced prosecution for insulting TURKISHNESS. Pamuk, whom Turkey should be proud of, was received with  much  hostility at home. No writer  in recent times  has been so much misunderstood by his countrymen as  Orhan Pamuk. His faith in   secular  and democratic values and his attempts to bridge the gap between the orient  and occident  truthfully  have been  misconstrued as Anti-Turkish. A Turkishness that is partly Asian and partly European in nature . That is Turkey’s dilemma .I recommend this writer to all serious readers of literature. His three books namely white castle , My name is  red and the Museum of innocence ( Masumiyet Muzesi in Turkish )are masterpieces . I rate them as finest books in modern Literature . In fact one can call them even postmodern as well. The Museum of Innocence published in 2008 is a real masterpiece. Apart from its detailed reflection on the period of the story , the people , their values and their approach to life is superbly analysed and brought out by Pamuk . Pamuk uses Kemal and Fusan as two lead characters in this novel to convey a superb story of human relationship.To seek more read the book. Pamuk remains a Turk at heart as reflected in his works .

“ My hero wants to belong , but he does not want to give up all the things he came to value in the west.”
Orhan Pamuk

“What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin ... Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations outside the Western world–and I can identify with them easily–succumbing to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West–a world with which I can identify with the same ease–nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.”

Orhan Pamuk , Nobel Lecture

The Swedish Academy praised him :

“In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city , he has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures. ”

I end this post with lines from a poem of Agha shahid Ali that he dedicated to his Kashmiri Pandit  friend Suvir Kaul  wishing  an early   reunion:

"We shall meet again, in Srinagar,
By the gates of the Villa of Peace,
Our hands blossoming into fists
Until the soldiers return the keys
and disappear.
Again we'll enter our last world,
the first that vanished
In our absence from the broken city."


CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.
Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.