Other Areas of Expertise
- Arts and Culture
- Global Issues
- Literature and Fiction
- University Favorites
More Information
Orhan Pamuk
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Base: Istanbul, Turkey
- Photo: Elena Seibert
Orhan Pamuk is the Nobel Prize–winning author of the bestselling novels My Name is Red and Snow.
Pamuk was born June 7, 1952 in Istanbul into a prosperous, secular middle–class family. His father was an engineer as were his paternal uncle and grandfather. It was this grandfather who founded the family's fortune. Growing up, Pamuk was set on becoming a painter. He graduated from Robert College then studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University and journalism at Istanbul University. He spent the years 1985 to 1988 in the United States, where he was a visiting researcher at Columbia University in New York and for a short period was attached to the University of Iowa. He lives in New York.
Pamuk has said that growing up he experienced a shift from a traditional Ottoman family environment to a more Western–oriented lifestyle. He wrote about this in his first published novel, a family chronicle entitled Cevdet Bey and His Sons, which in the spirit of Thomas Mann follows the development of a family over three generations.
His second novel, The House of Silence, uses five different narrative perspectives to describe a situation in which several family members visit their aging grandmother at a popular seaside resort with Turkey teetering on the brink of civil war. The time is 1980. The grandchildren's political discussions and their friendships reflect a social chaos in which various extremist organizations vie for power.
Pamuk's international breakthrough came with his third novel, The White Castle. It is structured as an historical novel set in seventeenth–century Istanbul, but it is primarily a story about how the ego builds on stories and fictions of different sorts. Pamuk shows personality to be a variable construction. The novel's main character, a Venetian sold as a slave to the young scholar Hoja, finds his own reflection in Hoja. As the two men recount their life stories to each other, there occurs an exchange of identities. On a symbolic level, it may represent the European novel captured and then allied with an alien culture.
Pamuk's writing has become known for its play with identities and doubles. The issue appears again in The Black Book, in which the protagonist searches the hubbub of Istanbul for his vanished wife and her half brother, with whom he later exchanges identities. Frequent references to the mystic tradition of the East make it natural to see this in a Sufi perspective. The Black Book represented a definite break with the governing social realism in Turkish literature. It provoked debate in Turkey, not the least through its Sufism references. Pamuk based his screenplay for the film The Secret Face on this novel.
The New Life is a novel about a secret book with the capacity to irrevocably change the life of any person who reads it. The search for the book provides the structure of a physical journey but is bordered by literary references, thought experiments in the spirit of mysticism, and reminiscences of older Turkish popular culture, turning the plot into an allegory related to the Romantic myth of an original, lost wisdom.
According to the author, the major theme of My Name is Red is the relationship between East and West, and the two cultures' different views on the artist's relation to his work. It is a story about classical miniature painting but also a murder mystery in a period environment, a bittersweet love story, and a subtle dialectic discussion of the role of individuality in art.
Pamuk has also published a city portrait, Istanbul : Memories and the City. It interweaves recollections of the writer's upbringing with a portrayal of Istanbul's literary and cultural history. At its core is hüzün, a multifaceted concept Pamuk uses to characterize the melancholy he sees as distinctive to Istanbul and its inhabitants.
Pamuk's latest novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize, is The Museum of Innocence. The story is set in Istanbul in the 1970s. While a romance, the story also portrays a city on the brink of modernity while looking back at Istanbul's rich cultural history.
In his home country, Pamuk has a reputation as a social commentator even though he sees himself principally as a fiction writer with no political agenda. He was the first author in the Muslim world to publicly condemn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. He took a stand for his Turkish colleague YaÅŸar Kemal when Kemal was put on trial in 1995. In 2005 Pamuk himself faced criminal charges after having mentioned, in an interview with a Swiss newspaper, that thirty thousand Kurds and one million Armenians had been killed in Turkey in 1915. The charges aroused widespread international protest and were subsequently dropped.
Pamuk has received a number of prestigious international awards for his work, including: Milliyet Roman Yarişmasi Ödülü (1979), Orhan Kemal Roman Ödülü (1983), Madarali Roman Ödülü (1984), the Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction (1990), Prix de la Découverte Européenne (1991), Prix France Culture (1995), Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (2002), Premio Grinzane Cavour (2002), the IMPAC Dublin Award (2003), Ricarda–Huch–Preis (2005), Dr Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (2005), Prix Médicis étranger (2005), Prix Méditerranée étranger (2006), and the Nobel Prize in Literature (2006).
Works by this Speaker
The Museum of Innocence
“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.” So begins the new novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize, from the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name Is Red.It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal, scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie—a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, restaurant rituals, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay—until finally he breaks off his engagement to Sibel. But his resolve comes too late.For eight years Kemal will find excuses to visit another Istanbul, that of the impoverished backstreets where Füsun, her heart now hardened, lives with her parents, and where Kemal discovers the consolations of middle-class life at a dinner table in front of the television. His obsessive love will also take him to the demimonde of Istanbul film circles (where he promises to make Füsun a star), a scene of seedy bars, run-down cheap hotels, and small men with big dreams doomed to bitter failure.In his feckless pursuit, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress and his afflicted heart’s reactions: anger and impatience, remorse and humiliation, deluded hopes of recovery, and daydreams that transform Istanbul into a cityscape of signs and specters of his beloved, from whom now he can extract only meaningful glances and stolen kisses in cars, movie houses, and shadowy corners of parks. A last change to realize his dream will come to an awful end before Kemal discovers that all he finally can possess, certainly and eternally, is the museum he has created of his collection, this map of a society’s manners and mores, and of one man’s broken heart.
A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and of the mysterious allure of collecting, The Museum of Innocence also plumbs the depths of an Istanbul half Western and half traditional—its emergent modernity, its vast cultural history. This is Orhan Pamuk’s greatest achievement.
Snow
Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism—these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their head-scarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced.
Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipek’s ex-husband to a charismatic terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude to losing everything else. Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense, Snow is of immense relevance to our present moment.
Other Colors
To be published by Knopf in September 2007, Orhan Pamuk's first book since winning the Nobel Prize, Other Colors is a dazzling collection of essays on his life, his city, his work, and the example of other writers.
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 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; and 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.
By turns witty, moving, playful, and provocative, Other Colors gives us the world through Orhan Pamuk’s eyes, assigning every radiant theme and shifting mood its precise shade in the spectrum of significance.
The Black Book
Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel–loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband, Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl’s identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.
With its cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul, The Black Book is a brilliantly unconventional mystery, and a provocative meditation on identity. For Turkish literary readers it is the cherished cult novel in which Orhan Pamuk found his original voice, but it has largely been neglected by English-language readers. Now, in Maureen Freely’s beautiful new translation, they, too, may encounter all its riches.
My Name Is Red
At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.
The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book celebrating the glories of his realm. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed. The ruling elite therefore mustn’t know the full scope or nature of the project, and panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears. The only clue to the mystery—or crime? —lies in the half-finished illuminations themselves. Part fantasy and part philosophical puzzle, My Name is Red is a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of art, religion, love, sex and power.
Translated from the Turkish by Erda M Göknar
The New Life
The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk’s fiendishly engaging novel is launched into a world of hypnotic texts and (literally) Byzantine conspiracies that whirl across the steppes and forlorn frontier towns of Turkey. And with The New Life, Pamuk himself vaults from the forefront of his country’s writers into the arena of world literature. Through the single act of reading a book, a young student is uprooted from his old life and identity. Within days he has fallen in love with the luminous and elusive Janan; witnessed the attempted assassination of a rival suitor; and forsaken his family to travel aimlessly through a nocturnal landscape of traveler’s cafes and apocalyptic bus wrecks. As imagined by Pamuk, the result is a wondrous marriage of the intellectual thriller and high romance. Translated from the Turkish by Guneli Gun.
The White Castle
From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Borges, Nabokov, and DeLillo comes a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating work of historical fiction and a sinuous treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West. In the 17th century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja—"master"—a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities. Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a colorful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination. Translated from the Turkish by Victoria Holbrook.
