More Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk has been in so many news articles ever since the Nobel Prize for Literature was announed. But naturally.
The article that still appeals to me the most appeared several months ago, in Granta spring 2006 issue, where Orhan Pamuk walks with Maureen Freely (one of the translators of his books) through the streets of Istanbul, tracing the route that Galip takes in The Black Book.
As we continued through the market, he pointed out a bookshop that was once run by a famous sheikh. This was where an old and peaceable Sufi society would once hold its discreet gatherings. 'I mentioned this in The Black Book,' Pamuk said. 'His name is still on the door, I think. He was a great bookseller, but when I was a teenager, I'd go in and ask, do you have such and such a book? And they would not have the book I was looking for.'
We went into one last bookshop, where most of the books were foreign translations. He almost bought one. But his rule was only to buy a book if he went home and couldn't stop thinking about it.
...
In 1982 I published my second novel. At that time there was horror going on in Turkish prisons. And no freedom of speech at all, except that if you wrote a historical novel or a novel which didn't say much about politics, it was permissible. Around that time, in 1985, I met Harold Pinter. He came on a human rights mission to Istanbul with Arthur Miller and other foreign observers. I was their guide. The military proposed a constitution, the whole nation was going to vote for it. Ninety per cent was in favour... But that was not a free referendum by Western standards. One of my cousins was working for an advertising agency at the time, and he called me and told me that some Swiss newspaper people were here and that they were looking for a person who could criticize the proposed constitution on TV. We are still being run by that constitution, by the way, but in those days no one dared to publicly criticize it, and here were these Swiss TV people, looking for a Turk living in Turkey to criticize it, and my cousin didn't know any left-wing intellectuals, so he asked me if I did. He said they didn't necessarily need to see his face. (I used this in the ending of The Black Book, when, instead of giving the desired political message, the narrator tells a long story. This may be a good solution for my problems, too!)
