The voice from Istanbul

TALYA HALKIN

Jerusalem Post, Israel

As Turkey's leading novelist, Orhan Pamuk reluctantly straddles the divide between East and West

When the five-year-old Orhan Pamuk's parents went off on a reconciliation trip to Paris, he was sent to stay with an aunt who lived in another part of Istanbul. The aunt and her husband treated him nicely, and showed him a European picture of a wide-eyed child who resembled him.

"This is you," they would say jokingly, pointing repeatedly at the picture of the little boy staring out from under a cap. It was during this period that he began entertaining the idea he would write about years later: Somewhere in the city, he came to believe, there lived another boy just like himself. When he was unhappy, he was convinced the other Orhan was undoubtedly having a better time. Walking through the streets, he would stare into unfamiliar houses, wondering whether any of them was where the other Orhan lived. Over the years, this imaginary twin became such an important part of his life he felt he could never leave the city without forsaking his double.

"Except for three years spent in New York, I've lived on the same street and in the same family apartment building for the past 50 years," the 52-year-old Pamuk told me when I visited him earlier this month at the Istanbul apartment he uses as an office.

Today, Pamuk is considered to be Turkey's leading novelist. His features, however, still reveal the timid, bookish child he once was, so that people familiar with his photographs are always surprised at how tall he is when they encounter him in person. His manner is at once boyish and imperious.

Pamuk tells the story of his childhood double in the first chapter of his latest book, Istanbul, which was published in Turkey earlier this year and combines memories and essays about the city. And although he eventually relinquished his childhood fantasy of an identical counterpart, over the past two decades Pamuk has made the relationship between self-knowledge and knowledge of the other into the leitmotif of his work. One can only truly become oneself, his narratives insist, by becoming another - and this process of becoming takes place, more than anywhere else, through the act of telling stories.

PAMUK'S SPACIOUS, book-lined office is directly above the Jihangir Mosque, situated on the hillside sloping down to the European bank of the Bosphorus. His secularly minded mother, who gave him the money for the apartment as a gift, deeply disapproved of his choice because of the minarets sticking up right in front of the building like two exclamation points after the word "religion."

Foreign journalists, however, love to describe the view the minarets frame. Seagulls flutter picturesquely over the ferries and small yachts dot the water at the confluence of the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, and the Sea of Marmara, separating the city's European coast from its Asian one. Like Pamuk himself, the view can symbolize, for those interested in such metaphors, a vision both reassuring and alluring, of the opposing East and West conjoined.

Pamuk, however, is less than happy with this image. Sitting across from me on a low couch in a button-down shirt and dark cotton pants, his body arches forward like an oversize question mark.

"What I've written about is not the clash of civilizations or the conflict between East and West," he told me. "I hate both the concept and the reality of a Muslim world clashing with the West. What I've been interested in writing about is what you would call in sociological terms 'cultural change,' or in psychological, more personal terms 'problems of identity.'

"Thirty years ago, this used to be only Turkey's problem. Now it has become the world's fashionable problem, and I don't like it when journalists turn to me because they want Islamic fundamentalism to be quickly explained to them by a mellow, civilized Turk like myself, who can understand the so-called 'primitives' and act as a go-between."

Pamuk, who defines himself as "a Western writer working in a semi-non-Western cultural climate," grew up in a secular, wealthy Istanbul home. He and his older brother, Shevket, attended the city's American school. Pamuk's father, who died last year, was the son of a successful industrialist who filled journals with existential quandaries and accounts of his Parisian love affairs, translated the modernist French poet Paul Val ry into Turkish, and - together with Pamuk's uncle - squandered the family fortune. He also cultivated a good library, in which his son acquired what he describes as "an immense passion to devote my life to books and literature."

His literary heroes include both Proust and Montaigne, both of whom he loves and identifies with for the same reason.

"They were both," he explained to me, "wealthy men who didn't need to work and were surrounded by lots of books, which they could read and then come back and write. It's a tough position to develop in Turkey, because people here are so political and don't want to accept this way of life, which I eventually made them accept."

As a result, Pamuk has accumulated a vast amount of literary knowledge.

"You can tell from reading his books that he has almost literally locked himself up in a room all his life," Nuket Esen, a professor of modern Turkish literature at Bosphorus University, told me when I met her in a caf around the corner from Pamuk's apartment.

"He read and read and read, and all of a sudden he began writing and writing and writing."

Pamuk's first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, which he wrote when he was 26, was a traditional family novel. It took some time to get published, and finally appeared in 1982.

"As soon as I finished it," Pamuk told me, flashing a smile, "I immediately felt it was old-fashioned."

Over the next two years, he published two more books in quick succession, in each of them very consciously adapting a particular literary form. In The House of Silence, which appeared in 1983 and has not been translated into English, the narrative explodes into polyphony, as each chapter is recounted through the consciousness of a different protagonist. The novel, which unfolds against the political events of the late 1970s in Turkey, takes place in a dilapidated seaside house inhabited by an old woman, the dwarf who takes care of her, and the three grandchildren who come to visit. The history of the family, which parallels the history of modern Turkey, probes the vicissitudes of Westernization on both the personal and the collective level.

Pamuk has a penchant for what literary critics call "intertextuality" - referring within his work not only to the texts of other writers, but to his own earlier novels. His third book, The White Castle, which was published in 1985, begins with a prologue written by an alcoholic historian who is one of the protagonists of The House of Silence. The bulk of the novel is a historical doppelganger story, in which East and West come face to face when an Italian student is overtaken at sea and sold as a slave to a Muslim scholar in 17th-century Istanbul (the two turn out to be spitting images of one another).

IN 1982, Pamuk married Aylin Turegen, and the two set off for the United States, where Turegen would pursue her doctoral studies at Columbia University. Living in New York, he told me, was a welcome change from the Istanbul of the 1970s and 1980s, where "everything was very political. You had to immerse yourself in one of these local problems - fundamentalism, nationalism, militarism, communism. I identified with authors like James Joyce, moving from the margins of Western culture to its center, enjoying its cultural openness and wealth while still in the back of their minds worrying about the little world they left behind."

Pamuk received a small study at the university's Butler Library, where he began writing parts of what would become The Black Book, apologizing profusely to the young lovers he stumbled upon as he made his way down the long hallway to continue writing at night. That was also the period when, having discovered Borges and Calvino, Pamuk found a way of looking back at the Islamic literary heritage from a postmodern, secular point of view, picking up literary tricks and at the same time becoming aware of the power of those texts. In doing so, he had broken completely with the realism and political themes of other Turkish novelists.

The Black Book, which remains perhaps Pamuk's most dazzling literary achievement to date, was published in Turkey in 1990. It takes place over the course of one snowy week in Istanbul, when a young lawyer by the name of Galip discovers that his wife Ruya has disappeared and sets out on a quest to find her, which takes him through the city's streets and underground passages. When he begins to suspect that Ruya's disappearance is related to the sudden absence of her half-brother, the famed columnist Djelal, Galip begins impersonating the latter and writing his daily newspaper columns. His search for the two becomes a search for his own identity and for the identity of Istanbul, which remains forever mysterious.

It was the Istanbul of The Black Book that I had wanted Pamuk to show me as we got out of a cab near Divan Yolu, once the main thoroughfare of the Byzantine and Ottoman city. We headed west into the booksellers' bazaar, then continued north through the gardens and arcade courtyard of the Suleymaniye Mosque, heading further west across Ataturk Boulevard and uphill into the narrow, winding streets of Fatih, one of the most religiously conservative neighborhoods in Istanbul, where women carefully cover themselves with head scarves or black chadors.

These streets, with their dilapidated wooden houses, are where Pamuk would wander about when he was enrolled at the nearby School of Journalism to avoid the military draft. We stopped in at an old tiled shop for drinks made of fermented wheat. The silver glass holder from which Ataturk, founder of the Turkish republic, is said to have drunk was enshrined on the wall in a specially made reliquary.

Pamuk, by his own definition, was a bookish, somewhat timid boy, who left his house only to occasionally go on long walks throughout the city.

"In the late Sixties and Seventies," Pamuk told me as we scattered nuts onto the surface of our frothy, cinnamon-flavored drinks, "I walked endlessly in Istanbul. I was moody and angry, and my walks were these furious young man's 'one day I'm going to do something big' kind of walks."

Like Galip, who is overcome at times by the strange sensation that the entire city is pervaded by a system of signs which speak to him alone, and which are embedded in the most banal of everyday objects - the titles of volumes at the booksellers' bazaar, neon street signs, bric-a-brac offered for sale at the street vendors' stalls - Pamuk would carefully comb secondhand stores and bookshops, and would return home with a host of acquired objects: Russian or old Ottoman coins, marbles, ashtrays, lighters, cigarette holders. Then he would carry them with him for a while, until they disappeared.

Large parts of The Black Book are set in Nisantas, the modern residential neighborhood in which Pamuk grew up. Today, it has evolved into an upscale shopping district, in which fashion designers have replaced the old neighborhood merchants. The store once selling fresh eggs and dairy products is now a shoe store. The mansion garden that used to abut his school courtyard is now a small public park. Pamuk and his wife have been separated now for several years. Their daughter, who was born in 1991, is called Ruya, after Galip's wife in The Black Book.

The small shop owned by Aladin - a small, bespectacled man whom Pamuk has known since they were both children - is one of the few still points in this changing neighborhood. Aladin, who has never read any of Pamuk's books, is proud of his new status as a pilgrimage site to some of the writer's foreign fans.

"Will you keep promoting me in your next book, sir?" he asked hopefully after The Black Book came out. In the center of the display window, standing back to back with a new translation of a Danielle Steel novel and just above a set of toy pistols, is a black-and-white picture of the smiling young Orhan on the cover of the only remaining copy of Istanbul.

PAMUK IS a well-known media personality in Turkey, and people ranging from a hip passerby on his own street to the owner of a run-down shop bordering an abandoned church near the Golden Horn recognize him. Notwithstanding his high degree of intellectual sophistication, he is the first Turkish writer to become a best-seller in the Western sense.

Andy Finkel, an American journalist based in Turkey who attended the same school as Pamuk, describes him as "nice and at the same time terribly controlled and disciplined, good at knowing what he wants to be and hanging on to that in a country where people do all they can to put you down."

Those who dislike Pamuk seem to be bothered not only by the fanfare that surrounds the publication of his books, but also by the fact that in Turkey, respected novelists have always spent some time in prison - a not-insignificant point in some left-wing circles.

According to Maureen Freely, the novelist and journalist who has just translated his most recent novel, Snow, into English, Pamuk's large following in Turkey is mostly made up of members of the younger generation. Nevertheless, she told me, when he appeared in London several years ago, "Everybody mentioned in Snow - the PKK, the secret police, the ambassadors, they were all there because they're obsessed with him. Looking at them, I realized what conflicting emotions he arouses in people - fascination, fear, mistrust."

The Black Book was followed by The New Life, which appeared in 1994 and continued the theme of searching out mystical shards of illumination in the everyday. In it, a young man infatuated with a book he reads abandons his life in Istanbul and embarks on a series of ghostly, disturbing bus trips between provincial towns.

"What remains unchanged in all his books beginning with The White Castle," Jale Parla, a professor of modern Turkish literature at Istanbul Bigli University, told me, "is a mood of terrible isolation. The major characters all know something is wrong, but what they think is wrong is not really what's wrong. They are going around enveloped in this isolated capsule, finding ways out of it like a caterpillar poking through the cocoon. But they poke at the wrong points all the time. It's a very ironic quest, which is comic at times and tragicomic at others. It's the only continuity in the work of an author who is constantly experimenting with new forms of representation."

While The New Life, like The Black Book, received rave reviews when it appeared in English, it was only with the publication of My Name is Red, which came out in English in 2001, that Pamuk became more widely known to American audiences.

A historical novel set in the Ottoman court, it revolves around the murders of two of the Sultan's miniaturists and deals with the battle between Eastern and Western models of representation and the opposing worldviews they stood for.

My Name is Red came out in the US in the first week of September 2001. In it, Pamuk had written about problems that he has been preoccupied with for many years, but in the wake of September 11, they suddenly seemed to take on a new relevance.

"Today," Pamuk told me, leaning against his terrace balcony the day after we first met, "I am much more optimistic about the future of Turkey than I was several years ago. It is in the process of stabilizing, and I hope this stability continues and that other countries learn from Turkey's example that Islam and democracy aren't contradictory, and that you can develop civil society in an Islamic country. I don't want my part of the world fighting with West. I have my foot in both parts, and I want them to be at peace with one another because I want to survive."

The accidental dissident
Snow, which has just appeared in England, is due out in the US this August. It is Pamuk's sixth novel, and the first one to make contemporary Turkish politics its direct subject. The year is 1992 when Ka, a Turkish poet and political exile, travels to the eastern city of Kars, on the Armenian border, to report on forthcoming municipal elections and a series of mysterious female suicides for an Istanbul newspaper. When a blizzard temporarily cuts off communication with the rest of the world, Ka finds himself caught in the midst of religious and political conspiracies that culminate in a military coup staged by a theatrical troupe.

The snowed-in city becomes, in this political thriller, a microcosm of the entire country.

Pamuk had previously refrained from writing on overtly political subjects because of what he perceives to be the destructive effect that political over-involvement has had on the previous generation of Turkish writers. After winning international recognition, however, he began signing petitions regarding the war against the Kurdish guerrillas and the Turkish state's violations of human rights and freedom of expression. He went on to write articles on these subjects for the foreign press, which were angrily discussed in Turkish newspapers, and within a decade became a political figure in spite of himself.

"I finally decided to go ahead and write one political novel so I could get it off my chest," he told me. Like Ka, the protagonist of his novel, Pamuk arrived in Kars carrying a press card from a major Turkish newspaper, and used the pretext of researching an article to travel back and forth to Kars over a period of four years.

"It snows so much there," he said, "and I love snow. But I also felt this depressing loneliness there, this kind of misery born from the horrifying absence of a future. There was a real epidemic of girls committing suicide at the time, but that happened in Batman, another Kurdish town 200 kilometers south of Kars that is a bastion of Turkish fundamentalism. It made the national and international news, and it's still a mystery to me why they committed suicide."

MAUREEN FREELY, an American journalist and novelist who grew up in Istanbul and has known Pamuk since childhood, took it upon herself to translate Snow into English.

"It's a kind of endgame, a three-day version of Turkish politics," she told me, speaking on the phone from her home in Bath, England.

"It's all there - the succession of military coups and people pulled into prison and spewed out many years of torture later. And apart from a few people who keep the records, it's just denied and denied and denied."

Freely was translating Snow when Chechen rebels took over the musical comedy theater in Moscow.

"What I saw on tape was disturbingly close to what Pamuk had written about in his novel, with people marching on stage and nobody knowing what to make of them," she said.

Although his novel pushes Turkish politics to a level of absurdity, Pamuk, according to Freely, wrote accurately about "a society held together by violence, in which the people in power have the ability to make people who have been violently treated collude with the violence and refrain from talking about it. In Pamuk's novel, that silence takes the form of the falling snow that is present throughout the book. By the time the book comes to an end, the city decides the coup has never taken place."

It is no accident, according to Freely, that Pamuk set the novel in a formerly Armenian city, whose history can still only be written about in Turkey by way of insinuation.

The day before I called her, Freely told me she had been speaking to a Turkish friend who said that Snow made her feel depressed and sad about her country.

"Strangely," Freely said, "sitting and translating the book in Bath, England, I just wanted to travel to Kars. Despite my political concerns about Turkey, it appealed to me because of the human warmth that Pamuk evokes. There's this tiny detail at the end of the novel when it turns out that the Kurdish maid at the local hotel is still giving soup to the detective. They are simultaneously turning each other in and feeding each other - like a big, warm, treacherous family."

Pamuk's international reputation has come to protect him against a government crackdown, but even so his publishers were somewhat worried when Snow was due to come out in Turkey. Pamuk is against militarism and fundamentalism of any kind. While Kemalists felt he was being too pro-Islam, Islamic groups were equally displeased with Pamuk's book.

"It took my breath away to see how many types of people he chose to insult at once," Freely told me.

"Yet although he examines how extremist groups on both poles of the political spectrum operate within a given power structure, he is most damning about his own generation of left-wing artists and radicals, who have come to very absurd nothings."

"When I read it," Prof. Jale Parla of Istanbul Bigli University told me, "I thought 'this is it, he's in trouble.' The book was simply ignored by literary critics and intellectuals - perhaps because it is directed very straightforwardly against the military regime and its interference with democracy. Other novelists would still be interrogated for making half the comments that Pamuk made."