Pamuk, Orhan; Maureen Freely (tr.);
Other Colours (Turkish: Oteki Renkler, 1999)
Iletsim, Istanbul / (English) faber & faber 2007
ISBN 0307266753
topics: | essays | lit
Most pieces in the book seem like diary jottings that were never quite intended to be finished - Barbers or wristwatches, Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma, the street food of Istanbul. These unpolished meditations rub shoulders with others that are more formal, achieving a closure that is often lyrical, as in the Seagull in the rain, or in Father's suitcase. Nonetheless, all the essays are informed by Pamuk's incisive gaze, bringing its essentially Turkish, yet widely-read cosmopolitan connections to such quotidian matters as the covers of books or the sadness of his daughter to deep ruminations on the passions of Dostoevsky.
Concerning the seagull on the roof opposite my desk
The seagull is standing on the roof, in the rain, as if nothing has happened. It is as if it's not raining at all; the seagull is just standing there, as still as ever. Or else the seagull is a great philosopher, too great to take offense. There it stands. On the roof. It's raining. It's as if that seagull standing there is thinking, I know, I know, it's raining; but there's not much I can do about that. Or: Yes, it's raining, but what importance does that have? Or maybe something like this: By now I've accustomed myself to rain: it doesn't make much of a difference.
They exist, nothing more. Seagulls, like most humans and most other creatures, spend most of their time doing nothing, just standing there. You could call this a form of waiting. To stand in this world waiting :for the next meal, for death, for sleep. ... Together we wait. In the sky are leaden clouds.
... Sometimes, the seagulls take flight all together to rise slowly into the air. When they do, their fluttering wings sound like rainfall. p.30-31
(his acceptance speech for the Nobel) the starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his book. [My father's suitcase, Nobel acceptance speech, p.409] So this was what was driving me when I first opened my father's suitcase. Did my father have a secret, an unhappiness in his life about which I knew nothing, something he could only endure by pouring it into his writing? ... Most of the notebooks I now took into my hands he had filled when he had left us and gone to Paris as a young man. Whereas I, like so many writers I admired - writers whose biographies I had read - wished to know what my father had written, and what he had thought, when he was the age I was now. It did not take me long to realise that I would find nothing like that here. What caused me most disquiet was when, here and there in my father's notebooks, I came upon a writerly voice. This was not my father's voice, I told myself; it wasn't authentic, or at least it did not belong to the man I'd known as my father. Underneath my fear that my father might not have been my father when he wrote, was a deeper fear: the fear that deep inside I was not authentic, that I would find nothing good in my father's writing... 411 What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: for me the centre of the world is Istanbul. 414 [Q. Why do you write?] I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but - just as in a dream - I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy. 415 A week after he came to my office and left me his suitcase, my father came to pay me another visit; as always, he brought me a bar of chocolate (he had forgotten I was 48 years old). As always, we chatted and laughed about life, politics and family gossip. A moment arrived when my father's eyes went to the corner where he had left his suitcase and saw that I had moved it. We looked each other in the eye. There followed a pressing silence. I did not tell him that I had opened the suitcase and tried to read its contents; instead I looked away. But he understood.
Preface ix LIVING AND WORRYING The Implied Author 3 My Father 11 Notes on April 29, 1994 16 Spring Afternoons 20 Dead Tired in the Evening 22 Out of Bed, in the Silence of Night 24 When the Furniture Is Talking, How Can You 26 Sleep? Giving Up Smoking 28 Seagull in the Rain 30 A Seagull Lies Dying on the Shore 32 To Be Happy 34 My Wristwatches 36 I'm Not Going to School 38 Ruya and Us 41 When Ruya Is Sad 43 The View 46 What I Know About Dogs 48 A Note on Poetic Justice 50 After the Storm 52 In This Place Long Ago 55 The House of the Man Who Has No One 58 Barbers 61 Fires and Ruins 66 Frankfurter 70 Bosphorus Ferries 75 The Princes' Islands 79 Earthquake 84 Earthquake Angst in Istanbul 94 BOOKS AND READING How I Got Rid of Some of My Books 107 On Reading: Words or Images 110 The Pleasures of Reading 113 Nine Notes on Book Covers 117 To Read or Not to Read: The Thousand and 119 One Nights Foreword to Tristram Shandy: Everyone 123 Should Have an Uncle Like This [A brilliant defense of idiosyncratic prose writing; one of the longest pieces] Victor Hugo's Passion for Greatness 134 Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground: The 136 Joys of Degradation Dostoyevsky's Fearsome Demons 143 The Brothers Karamazov 147 Cruelty, Beauty, and Time: On Nabokov's Ada 153 and Lolita Albert Camus 159 Reading Thomas Bernhard in a Time of 162 Unhappiness The World of Thomas Bernhard's Novels 164 Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World 168 Literature The Satanic Verses and the Freedom of the 174 Writer Salman Rushdie POLITICS, EUROPE, AND OTHER PROBLEMS OF BEING ONESELF PEN Arthur Miller Speech 179 No Entry 184 Where Is Europe? 189 Pamuk enters a new shop that sells used books, but sadly, there are no dusty piles of books but well-organized shelves filled with handsome antiquarian books. There he comes upon Sorel's 8-volume French text - L'Europe et la revolution francaise. The book was translated in the late 19th c., and has been widely read by Turkish intellectuals, but "not as a French reader might, seeking connection with their memories and their own pasts, but rather searching within the pages for some sense of their future, of their European dreams." The essay then ruminates on what it means to live on the borders of Europe, with European dreams. Turkey shifted to the Latin script, "so as to be more European" [in 1928]; consequently all the older Turkish texts can no longer be read by the present population. [The desire to be included in Europe still animates much of Turkey, it would seem, and is matched by the European tendency, like in children's games, to exclude Turkey. ] 192 A Guide to Being Mediterranean 193 My First Passport and Other European 197 Journeys Andre Gide 204 Family Meals and Politics on Religious 214 Holidays The Anger of the Damned 218 Traffic and Religion 222 In Kars and Frankfurt 226 On Trial 237 Who Do You Write For? 241 MY BOOKS ARE MY LIFE The White Castle Afterword 247 The Black Book: Ten Years On 253 A Selection from Interviews on The New Life 258 A Selection from Interviews on My Name Is 262 Red On My Name Is Red 271 From the Snow in Kars Notebooks 273 PICTURES AND TEXTS Sirin's Surprise 283 In the Forest and as Old as the World 290 Murders by Unknown Assailants and Detective 292 Novels Entr'acte; or, Ah, Cleopatra! 300 Why Didn't I Become an Architect? 303 Selimiye Mosque 311 Bellini and the East 313 Black Pen 321 Meaning 327 OTHER CITIES, OTHER CIVILIZATIONS My First Encounters with Americans 331 Views from the Capital of the World 334 THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW 353 TO LOOK OUT THE WINDOW 379 MY FATHER'S SUITCASE 403 Publication History 419 Index 425
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071116/asp/opinion/story_8551974.asp It is impossible not to recall Kafka, the "implacable graphomaniac" from Prague, while reading Orhan Pamuk's Other Colours. ... [Pamuk] is "a creature who can never write enough, who is forever setting life in words", he hates interruptions ("life is full of things that conspire to keep a person from literature"), and prefers a hermitic existence ("the starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his book"). Pamuk's position within his family is as unenviable as Kafka's dealings with his own parents: "Istanbul destroyed my relationship with my mother - we don't see each other anymore. And of course I hardly ever see my brother." The Turkish nationalist press considers him politically suspect for his allegedly controversial remarks on the 1915 genocide of Armenians in the country. Hounded by the state, Pamuk has lived, like Ka, the hero of Snow, in a Kafkaesque nightmare. The brevity of the opening pieces, their intimate tone and lyrical allure, recall Bacon and Montaigne. Even the titles are delightfully quirky, personal, whimsical: "When the Furniture is Talking, How Can You Sleep?", "Seagull in the Rain", "A Seagull Lies Dying on the Shore", "My Wristwatches", "What I Know About Dogs". Some of these compositions come with beautiful pen-and-ink illustrations by Pamuk, dedicated to his beloved daughter, Rüya. There are richly nostalgic pieces on the barbers in Istanbul, [AM: barbershop intricacies are also a colourful detail in My name is Red -- the devastating fires, Bosphorus ferries and the recurring, calamitous earthquakes... Pamuk explores the dichotomy of being Turkish - of being geographically close to but culturally distant from Europe - in "My Passport and Other European Journeys". The account of his brief stay in Switzerland as a child, and the recollection of the experience of meeting American neighbours in Ankara, reveal the essentially truncated character of internationalism: "Our passports, which are all alike, should never blind us to the fact that each individual has his own troubles with identity, his own desires, and his own sorrows." The burden of identity, for Pamuk, is thus related as much to citizenry as to the evolution of individual self-consciousness, how the life of the mind, not just the life of the republic, shapes one's destiny. For a self-aware "Westernizer" like Pamuk, "being oneself" also means not being allowed to be the Other. This limitation becomes, for the hero of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, a deeply shameful and frustrating experience. Writing on Mario Vargas Llosa, Pamuk compares his own exclusion from the West with the intellectual displacement of Third World writers: "If there is anything that distinguishes Third World literature, it is...the writer's awareness that his work is somehow remote from the centers where the history of his art - the art of the novel - is described, and he reflects this distance in his work." ---blurb Over the last three decades, Pamuk has written, in addition to his seven novels, scores of pieces — personal, critical, and meditative — the finest of which he has brilliantly woven together here. He opens a window on his private life, from his boyhood dislike of school to his daughter's precocious melancholy, from his successful struggle to quit smoking to his anxiety at the prospect of testifying against some clumsy muggers who fell upon him during a visit to New York City. From ordinary obligations such as applying for a passport or sharing a holiday meal with relatives, he takes extraordinary flights of imagination; in extreme moments, such as the terrifying days following a cataclysmic earthquake in Istanbul, he lays bare our most basic hopes and fears. Again and again Pamuk declares his faith in fiction, engaging the work of such predecessors as Laurence Sterne and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, sharing fragments from his notebooks, and commenting on his own novels. He contemplates his mysterious compulsion to sit alone at a desk and dream, always returning to the rich deliverance that is reading and writing.