Someone Who Likes Writing: Orhan Pamuk

Art Culture

16.11.2020

858

Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey’s most prominent novelists, his work has sold over thirteen million books in sixty-three languages, making him the country’s best-selling writer.

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in a large family similar to those which he describes in his novels Cevdet Bey and His Sons and The Black Book, in the wealthy westernized district of Nisantasi. As he writes in his autobiographical book Istanbul, from his childhood until the age of 22, he devoted himself mainly to painting and dreamed of becoming an artist. After graduating from the American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years. Still, he abandoned the course when he aspired to become an architect and artist. He went on to graduate in journalism from Istanbul University but never worked as a journalist. At the age of 23, Pamuk decided to become a novelist, and giving up everything else, retreated into his flat and began to write.

Orhan Pamuk pays more attention to detail than the story. The depictions of space together are quite right; the reason for this must be that he studied architecture. It adds richness to fiction with its fragmentary narrative technique in novel storytelling; this is due to the narrator changing in each episode. He also conveys the event with leaps in time and space, so the reader gets rid of the novel’s fiction’s passive situation. I can say that the fact that he is a contemporary novelist is due to this style. We can also see this technique that he uses to see in many films, for example, Pulp Fiction.

10 Notable Novels by Orhan Pamuk

THE BLACK BOOK

In a snowy winter day in Istanbul, Galip starts looking for Rüya who is his childhood love, friend, daughter of his uncle, his sweetheart, and lost wife. As the reader follows Galip’s investigations and people he meets in Istanbul that’s full of signs of a mysterious world, meanwhile he/she is introduced to some lines of columnist Celal who combines those investigations with interesting signs and strange stories. This investigation carries Galip to Rüya as well as to the mysterious enigma our lives are sunk into.

CEVDET BEY AND HIS SONS

The story of a small shop owner in Abdulhamid’s last years and one of the first Muslim merchants Cevdet Bey and his sons covers three generations from the beginning of the century to the present day, and it’s also the story of Turkish Republic’s private life. Through the adventures of a family which lives in Nisantasi, it looks into the indoor lifestyles, the new life in apartments, big families that are becoming westernized, going shopping in Beyoglu, listening to radio on Sunday afternoons…

THE HOUSE OF SILENCE

One historian, one revolutionist and another one eager to be rich… These three visit their grandmother and stay for a week in the house which is built by their grandfather when he was sent to exile 70 years ago. While the grandmother’s memories are being slowly opened partway, they remember the grandfather writing an encyclopedia hoping that it would close the gap between the East and the West. As bridges are built between the generations, there are others behind the walls. Orhan Pamuk’s second novel.

THE WHITE CASTLE

A Venetian serf captured by Turkish pirates who believes he is good at astronomy, physics and art… A Turkish master who shares the same interests and wants to learn the Western science… The stories and adventures of these two sharing strange similarities, brings them to Istanbul’s streets where plague is epidemic, to the fictional world of the Child Sultan, to the formation of an incredible weapon and to the question of ‘why am I me?’.

THE NEW LIFE

‘‘One day I had read a book and all my life has changed.’’ This is a novel about books and their magical effects which change our lives. The character who devotes his whole life to the light spurted from the book he reads, runs after the new life the book promises, enters into another life passing through doors which open out on the one hand into the Life’s, the Unique Moments’, the Death’s,

the Writing’s, the Accident’s secrets and on the other into the childhood, comic books, the appearance and disappearance of an angel, to Dante and to Rilke.

MY NAME IS RED

My Name Is Red about which Orhan Pamuk says “it’s my most colorful and optimistic novel”, covers nine snowy days of Istanbul in 1591. When Şeküre, a beautiful lady with ceaselessly fighting two sons, decides to look for a new husband, a new lover in place of her husband who didn’t come back from the war since four years, she watches secretly from where she hides the palace muralists her father invites by one by. The proficient muralists coming to their house are painting dangerous figures which convey European influences under the supervision of her father for a secret book, with the order of Ottoman Sultan. When one of them gets killed…The novel in which everyone speaks with their own voice, even dead people and furniture start to talk, is about death, art, love, marriage and happiness as well as a requiem for the forgotten beauties of pictorial art.

SNOW

On the fourth day after his return to Turkey, Ka, a Turkish poet who has been an exile in Germany since twelve years, finds himself in the city of Kars for an interview. Walking under the slow and ceaseless snow, street by street, store by store, he tries to get to know this melancholic and beautiful city and its people. In Kars there are teahouses full of unemployed people, a snowbound traveling theatrical company, girls who protest and commit suicide for the headscarf banning, various political groups, gossips, rumors, Karpalas Hotel and its owner Turgut Bey, his daughters İpek and Kadife and a promise of love and happiness for Ka.

MEMORIES AND THE CITY

Orhan Pamuk presents the reader the interesting story of the city of Istanbul he knows in a novel form, combining it with his own life story until the age of 22. This story, heads from Pamuk’s first feelings related to ‘his own’ to his mother, his father and his family, and as a source of happiness and sadness, opens out to the streets of Istanbul. As we discover Istanbul’s streets in 1950s, the roads with cobblestones, ruined blasted wooden mansions, the difficulties of the disappearance of an old culture while a new culture rises out of the ashes and shambles of it, we can follow swiftly the evolution of Pamuk’s spiritual world as if we’re reading a detective novel. In this unique piece that searches Istanbul’s black-white melancholy, we find the unity of soul and emotions special to some books which we read time after time.

MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE

“It was the happiest moment of my life, I didn’t know. Orhan Pamuk’s recent novel the Museum of Innocence on which he has been working for six years begins with these words… This colorful and fabulous novel will not only challenge the reader’s thoughts about love, but also those about marriage, sex, passion, family, friendship, and happiness. The book tells the story of Kemal, son of a wealthy Istanbulite family, and his poor and distant relative Füsun, starting in 1975 and continuing up to the present. Beyond a fascinating and unforgettable love story told with an abundance of characters and incidents revealing the human soul’s depths, the reader will also enjoy details about Turkey’s social and cultural history in the past decades as well as the beauties of the author’s native city Istanbul on the background…

A STRANGENESS IN MY MIND

“A STRANGENESS IN MY MIND”, Orhan Pamuk’s ninth novel, is both an unforgettable love story and a modern epic.

Mevlut Karataş, the novel’s hero, is a street vendor who sells boza, a traditional Turkish beverage. The novel follows the love story between Mevlut and his girlfriend whom he wrote letters for three years, as well as Mevlut’s life in the streets of Istanbul throughout a period that spans over four decades, from 1969 to 2012, during which Mevlut works in a range of different jobs by day and sells boza during winter nights. Throughout these decades, Mevlut witnesses the various transformations the city, the people and Turkey in general undergo. All the while, Mevlut often wonders what the source of this “strangeness” in his mind is – a strangeness that makes him different from all the others.

“A Strangeness in My Mind”, a story told from the perspectives of various characters, is destined to be one of the most widely read novels of Pamuk, as well as one of his greatest achievements.

Awards

1979 Milliyet Press Novel Contest Award (Turkey) for his novel Karanlık ve Işık (co-winner)
1983 Orhan Kemal Novel Prize (Turkey) for his novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons
1984 Madarali Novel Prize (Turkey) for his novel The House of Silence
1990 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (United Kingdom) for his novel The White Castle
1991 Prix de la Découverte Européenne (France) for the French edition of Sessiz Ev : La Maison de Silence
1991 Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival (Turkey) Best Original Screenplay Secret Face
1995 Prix France Culture (France) for his novel Kara Kitap : Le Livre Noir
2002 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (France) for his novel My Name Is Red : Mon Nom est Rouge
2002 Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy) for his novel My Name Is Red
2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (Ireland) for his novel My Name Is Red
2005 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Germany)
2005 Prix Médicis Etranger (France) for his novel Snow : La Neige
2005 Ricarda-Huch Prize
2006 Nobel Prize in Literature (Sweden)
2006 Washington University’s Distinguished Humanist Award (United States)
2006 Puterbaugh Award (United States)
2008 Ovid Award (Romania)
2010 Norman Mailer Prize, Lifetime Achievement (USA)
2012 Sonning Prize (Denmark)
2012 Legion D’honneur (France)
2014 The Mary Lynn Kotz Award (USA) for The Innocence of Objects
2014 Tabernakul Prize (FYR Macedonia)
2014 The European Museum of the Year Award (Estonia)
2014 Helena Vaz da Silva European Award for Raising Public Awareness on Cultural Heritage
2015 Aydın Doğan Foundation Award (Turkey), for his novel A Strangeness In My Mind
2015 Erdal Öz Literary Prize (Turkey), for his novel A Strangeness In My Mind
2016 The Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award (“Foreign Literature” category, Russia) for his novel A Strangeness In My Mind
2016 Milovan Vidaković Prize in Novi Sad (Serbia)
2017 Budapest Grand Prize (Hungary)
2017 Lampedusa Prize (Italy)
2017 Literary Flame Prize (Montenegro)