标题: 评《别样的色彩》：Inspired and informed by Orhan Pamuk [打印本页] 作者: mu 时间: 2009-6-6 21:42 标题: 评《别样的色彩》：Inspired and informed by Orhan Pamuk Inspired and informed by Orhan Pamuk
'That my library should conspire in the earthquake's wrath, that it should confirm and dignify its message - this frightened me. I decided to punish my library.' Orhan Pamuk's account of the destruction of his books following one of Istanbul's tectonic grumbles is the most comic piece in Other Colours, a collection of occasional writings, plus an interview, a speech and a short story.
The heterogeneity of Other Colours does give it the feel of a cash-in book, but if you can't cash in when you've won the Nobel Prize, when can you? And many of these pieces are weighty, colourful and elegant. Orhan Pamuk has become the man who tells the world about Turkey and this he does extremely well. Living in Istanbul, he has an important position as a gatekeeper, ushering in democratic oxygen and exporting Turkish experience. He has become, against his sensibilities, a political figure.
Pamuk explains how when he started writing at the age of 22, he wasn't interested in joining the Turkish literary establishment, which was predominantly social realist and engagé. Ironically, it was an interview with a Swiss newspaper in 2005, in which Pamuk referred to the 'taboo' subjects of the killing of the Ottoman Armenians during the First World War and the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey, that threw him into the front line and lifted his (already considerable) profile both domestically and internationally.
He was prosecuted under Turkey's article 301 for denigrating 'Turkish identity', an article that has been used to harry many Turkish writers and academics over the years, although recently it has been, in effect, the tool of nationalist nutters rather than for the execution of government policy.
After considerable international protest the case against Pamuk was dropped and he won the Nobel Prize the following year.
In his article 'On Trial' he reflects on the charge and ends: 'but these days the lies about the war in Iraq and the reports of secret CIA prisons have so damaged the West's credibility in Turkey and in other nations that it is more and more difficult for people like me to make the case for true Western democracy in my part of the world.'
Unsurprisingly, writers are often at their best when writing about other writers. Other Colours has a selection of essays on Pamuk's literary heroes. Pamuk's father (a failed poet) would bring back the latest Camus from Paris, and his early literary orientation was French. There is a Turkish analysis of the Sartre/Camus rivalry, and Sartre's infamous assertion that literature was an ill-advised 'luxury' for poor countries.
Dostoyevsky is a writer who fascinates Pamuk, not just because of his narrative talents, but because Pamuk sees a parallel between Dostoyevsky's Russia, hanging off the edge of Europe, with its anarchists and conspirators and the Turkey of his youth with its political poseurs.
Expounding on Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground Pamuk observes how (returning to the text as a middle-aged reader): 'today I can speak more comfortably about the book's true subject and wellspring: it is the jealousy, anger and pride of a man who cannot make himself into a European'.
An enthusiastic study of an author can often inspire you to read or revisit the work. Pamuk failed to convince me about Nabokov or Tristram Shandy, but he did make me want to have another look at Gide, Dostoyevsky and even Thomas Bernhard (whom I've always found excruciatingly dull).
For anyone wanting to delve into the background of Pamuk's own novels, Other Colours offers extensive insights into his thinking and methods, even for the one novel, his first, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, which has yet to appear in English.
A lifelong resident of Istanbul, Pamuk writes with great affection about the city, its past and its uncertain future. 'Earthquake', which recounts the powerful tremor that shook Istanbul in 1999, killing 30,000, is a vivid and memorable account, and 'Earthquake angst in Istanbul' examines how the inhabitants try to deal with the certainty of another, more catastrophic earthquake which is due in the next few years.
Pamuk concludes: 'I've asked myself the same question as that man pacing the streets, about why a person might not be able to leave. It's because I can't even imagine not living in Istanbul.'
Other Colours closes with 'My Father's Suitcase', the acceptance speech Pamuk gave in Stockholm when he collected his Nobel Prize, the most emotional piece in the collection. Pamuk praises his deceased father for his support and encouragement, and for his tales of seeing Sartre in the streets of Paris.
Pamuk is also grateful for his father's huge library: 'The starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his books.' Pamuk further reveals: 'the writer's secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where that comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying "to dig a well with a needle" seems to me to have been framed with writers in mind.'