Orhan Pamuk wins Nobel Prize for Literature, first Turk to do so
And this makes me happy, in part because Pamuk is the first winner in a while whose work I’ve actually read but also because his novels and essays really are fine.
My favorite writers tends to be “bridgers,” those who connect two or more styles, traditions, or cultures in their writing. It’s cliche to say as much about Pamuk now, but bridging is what he does–traditional to modern, authoritarian to liberal, east to west. How could a writer not, when he lives in Istanbul, the physical nexus of the world’s great cultures and religions? But in his case, I suppose it’s not as much bridging and connecting as it is layering, as if experiences were transparencies lain one atop another.
My Name Is Red was the first of his books I read, doing so for a directed study on eastern European literature. How amazing it was to read Pamuk in the context of Ivo Andric (another Nobel laurreate), Ismail Kadare (likely on this year’s Nobel short list), and other lesser known greats like David Albahari.
Pamuk will likely pass them all, in popular appreciation, given his public face. Despite his efforts to the contrary, Pamuk became a cause célèbre when the Turkish government put him on trial in 2005 for speaking publicly of the Armenian Genocide. Turkey came off looking ridiculous—they wanted to prosecute someone for stating a fact, and they wanted to prosecute him under a law passed after he stated it. The charges were dropped, but it didn’t stop Pamuk, and others in his defense, from writing breathless essays over the course of several months last year about the continued persecution of artists and their right to speak their minds—and in a country, Turkey, up for E.U. membership no less.
No doubt this hubbub aided Pamuk’s Nobel candidacy, but it is his novels and, recently, a memoir that more than justify Stockholm’s decision. And given that Pamuk is only fifty four, we as readers hopefully have much more to look forward to.
