To solve Turkey's culture clash, old elite must yield to free speech

In front of the TV, cultural and class distinctions disappear. Kemal came from an upper-class family and Fusun from a lower-class family, but they all watched the one channel available in Turkey in the 1970s. They all watched the same national lottery drawing, Grace Kelly movies from Hollywood and the patriotic closing of the broadcast each evening.

There was indeed a kind of naivete to the premodernity of those days, an innocence now lost in the transition to modernity and postmodernity.

Finally, there is also a certain innocence in the relationship between art and the world. One definition of innocence is "artlessness." But these are all my peculiarities of perception. Let the reader decide.

Gardels: In lieu of being able to capture and hold onto fleeting happiness, despite obsessive pursuit, your protagonist, Kemal, collects objects associated with Fusun. As time put into matter, these objects become art. Their talismanic power resuscitates "the happiest moment of my life, but I didn't know it," as the splendid first line of your novel reads.

Pamuk: The book starts with a sentence that contains the words "life" and "happiest" and end with the words "life" and "happiness."

Gardels: Kemal says at one point that love is "deep compassion," "close and devoted attention," "respect and reverence" for the beloved, for the stories embedded in everyday objects, places and activities.

This strikes me as very similar to the Buddhist idea of "mindfulness," but through pious attachment instead of detachment.

The poet Czeslaw Milosz used to talk about the "eternal moment" as "a gleam on the current of a black river" captured by mindfulness. "Mindfulness occurs in the moment when time stops," he said. "And what is time? Time is suffering. Time is our regrets, our shame. But also our happiness. Time contains all things toward which we strive and from which we escape."

Is there a correspondence here?

Pamuk: I identify with Kemal's attention as a lover to his beloved because it is like a novelist's attention to words. In the end, being a novelist, in a way, is loving the world, caressing the world with words. It is paying attention to all the details that you have lived and experienced. This book is my most personal, intimate book. It is all the things I have lived and seen in Istanbul in my entire life. It is a panorama written with loving detail.

I was so happy writing this book. It gave me so much happiness that I would say it saved me during very troubled political times. After writing every morning from 7 to 11, I was able to face the tensions of the rest of day during those long months. [Pamuk was tried in 2005-2006 for "insulting Turkishness" by addressing the issue of Armenian massacres in an interview with a Swiss paper. The charges were later dropped. ]

At the age of 57, I am less experimental and more mature. I want most of all to convey my understanding of life. And writing novels for 35 years has taught me great humility. It has taught me to be respectful of how marvelously detailed the world is. Again, this is very close to a lover's attention to his beloved's every movement, her gestures, angers, and silences. To notice everything is to care for it.

There is indeed a kind of Sufi or pantheistic quality to this love for the world, as is also suggested by Buddhist mindfulness.

Gardels: Your novel is a quasi-biographical chronicle of the Istanbul bourgeoisie – the modernizing class of the past few decades. The youth of that Western-oriented class in the mid-1970s were "a la Franc," disdaining the "a la Turc" culture from the Anatolian provinces, though still in many ways bound by conservative convention. You write about this class with a mocking tone, suggesting, as Haruki Murakami does with reference to Japan's Westernization, that it is a culture of "borrowed surfaces."

Previous

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Next