this is a rare example of a reread for me. I don't reread books very often, not because I don't want to, blahblahblah.... My experience of reading this one was a good example of a certain kind of reader's disease. The kind where even though you are trying to focus your attention on the story, the language, etc your eyes start to water and you kind of glaze over in your mind, turning pages and sort of dimly registering the story. It's not "reading",per se, but it's not skimming either. It's not bullshitting your way through the book- it's more that when you read a lot your brain (or at least mine) kind of gets blurry when the story or the language doesn't exactly burst out at you. I think it also makes a difference when the writer's particular style doesn't mesh well with your own individual brain chemistry. His way of seeing is somewhat at odds with yours. It's not a philosophical difference so much as its about...instincts of perception, if you will. The pacing of the story, the level of and type of detail, the way he describes a room or how much of it, the length and construction of sentences....all that kind of stuff. I don't think it's pretentious or posuer-ish to continue reading even if the writer's style means you're going to miss most of what's happening. Sometimes you can uncover a jewel even in the midst of confusion or mistakes. And besides, some people just *have* to finish a book once they start it. I'm one of them. Also, consider the fact that many of the places where the modern reader reads are not particularly conducive to the intimate, erotic, spiritual practice of reading a book. Consider, just for starters, the din of airports, buses, commuter rails, subways, bars, restaurants, living rooms with the tv on, so on and so forth. There is usually a trickle of white noise coming in from at least one direction- there has got to be some of the magic drained out of the experience. I would venture that long, prolonged investments in concentration could be harder to come by now than ever. More comprehension gets shaved off while, ironically, the abundance and availability of material is richer than ever. And then there's the next hundred and seventy nine pages to go... So...I kind of shortchanged the book a little bit. I think it's excusable to sort of pass something like this off, as long as you did make a decent effort. Hell, not everything can be easy to understand, right? This is leisure reading, after all. I was not told there would be any math on this exam. I will not put my pencil down. Anyway, apropos of nothing, I picked this up again recently and it's a whole new experience. The scales have fallen from my eyes. There are still some stumbling blocks here and there- Pamuk is a writer for whom I have great respect, and I absolutely loved "The New Life"- but all in all the tale is beginning to fill in for me and I'm really participating in it in a way I hadn't before. It's funny, since so much of this very provocative, philosophically savvy, eerily clean novel has to do with preoccupations of identity. I deliberately phrased it like this because there's very strong self-reflexive aspect to the proceedings. The main character is trying to relocate his vanished wife through the medium of the collected newspaper columns of his cousin, her former husband, who has also vanished, who has written a great deal about the identity of Turkey in the (post) modern world, not to mention his own consciousness and psychic disorientation, and so obviously there's a deeply meta-narrative project in place. You can imagine how sticky and obfuscating this kind of thing gets when, for whatever reason, the co-ordinates of your consciousness aren't really aligned with the text. it's a delicate balancing act anyway, moreso when the author is stepping into some very seductive, Borgesian metaphysical landscapes. Now I that, about three years later, I can dip back into it with pleasure and profit I am pleased to say that The Black Book, at maybe about 65% done at least, is a very, very worthwhile tome. It has the narrative of a noir: meditative, crisp, somewhat chilly and slightly spare. It has the political significance of Pamuk's status as a player on the Turkish literary scene (if you're actually reading this you should really acquaint yourself with his works and days) and especially when you consider the story's being set in 1980, the significance of this is explained rather neatly in Maureen Freeley's translator's afterward- a little too neatly, if you ask me. And, philosophically, it is very beautifully investigated, well prosed, and that's difficult to do well. Philosophy is an incredible thing. Sometimes its relationship to literature can be a bit awkward and bumbling. Sometimes it adds a moral and existential resonance to a story which is intriguing and enticing on its own merits. Pamuk handles this beautifully-There's quite a few quotable gems here. Many of them go on at length, necessarily. Here are a few of the shorter ones:"He felt happy, on the verge of a revelation- the secret of life, the meaning of the world, shimmering just beyond his grasp- but when he tried to put this secret into words, all he could see was the face of the woman who was sitting in the corner watching him.""He surveyed the dome, the columns, the great stone structures above his head, longing to be moved but feeling stuck. There was the vaguest of premonitions...but this great edifice was as impenetrable as stone itself. It did not welcome a man in, nor did it transport him to a better place. But if nothing signified nothing, than anything could signify anything. For a moment he thought he saw the flash of blue light, and then he heard the flutter of what sounded like the wings of a pigeon, but then he returned to his old stagnant silence, waiting for the illumination that never came.""For what is reading but the animating of a writer's words on the silent film strip in our minds?"There's some phenomenal set pieces, too. Paumk's Istanbul is there in its 'there-ness' but it still has a universal quality, albeit a somewhat dour, crystalline, noir-ish ambience...It got three stars for a muddled, uncomprehending first read which was decidedly my fault and now it's getting four stars for coming off the bench and working nicely...
BEWARE OF SPOILERS!!!Orhan Pamuk is Turkey's most well-known author, internationally, and The Black Book is proclaimed by The Times Literary Supplement as his masterpiece. It was first published in 1991 and translated into English shortly after that. In an Afterword to this volume the current translator explains the vagaries of translating Turkish into English, and that she did this updated translation because the earlier version failed to reflect the flow of the Turkish language. Also, by being a personal friend of the author, she and he were able to go over the translation together to keep it true to what he was saying and how. The book begins as a mystery. Galip, a young Turkish lawyer, returns home one evening to pick up his wife, Ruya, for a family dinner, and finds in her place a note from her saying that she has left him and will be in touch. The mystery is discovering why she left and where she is now. That mystery, however, turns out to be fairly easily solved by him; she is with his uncle and her step-brother, Celal, all of whom grew up together in the same apartment building, The City of Hearts Apartments, in Istanbul. As soon as Galip discovers this, but before he has found them, Celal is shot to death in front of the police station by a jealous husband, not Galip, and Galip's wife Ruya is accidentally shot by the police in the crossfire. That mystery and its solution, however, remains a backdrop for the primary story. Early in the book, the author gives us the clue that the “black book” refers to a detective story, specifically one of his wife's books that Galip finds hidden in her closet. But much later in the book, when he is describing the facing murals in the entrance to an entertainment palace, he notes that the “black book” in the mural which mirrors the other mural is “a book of two parts, two meanings and two stories.” So what is the second story and the second meaning? The real detective story for Galip, and the real mystery story of the book, is that of finding out who he himself is. He does this in the process of searching for Ruya and Celal, as he wanders through two different labyrinths: the streets of Istanbul, the physical labyrinth, and the stories of Celal, the labyrinth of words. Galip's searches through the streets of Istanbul lead him to places he has never been before, and lead him to discoveries about his city and the Turks who lived in it that he had not really known before. His search through the streets keeps circling the City of Hearts Apartments, where he and Celal and Ruya grew up together, and which formed the center of Celal's writings. Celal, for the past thirty years has been a newspaper columnist with a daily column in which he tells the stories about his family, his neighbors, and Istanbul. Galip has been a faithful reader of those daily columns, and he returns to Celal's apartment to read all of those columns for clues as to where his wife Ruya and Celal might be. What happens instead is, that in the reading, he discovers himself. Specifically, he discovers that he is a writer, and has enough to say himself, that he becomes the writer of Celal's columns before he is found and continuing after he is dead. The more intriguing question is why Galip faces the challenge of finding out who he really is. One answer is given to him by Mehmet, an obsessed fan of Celal's who has read and memorized every word he has ever written. He keeps calling Galip on Celal's telephone thinking that he is talking with Celal. Mehmet asserts that the real mystery Celal has been driving his readers toward for all of the years of his writing is that: “No one in this country can ever be himself. To live in an oppressed, defeated country is to be someone else.” Galip's problem is that of every citizen of Turkey, and that is one audience Pamuk is addressing. Above all else, this is a book about stories, and their roles in our lives. Celal is the writer of stories and Ruya is the reader of stories. Apparently she does nothing else with her days but read detective stories. Celal's stories, the newspaper columns that he as been writing for 30 years, the writing of which are eventually taken over by Galip himself, constitute the bulk of the stories in this book. These stories about Celal's family and neighbors and friends and enemies for the first half of the book appear as alternating chapters with those of Galip's search. Then there are the stories Galip discovers in his search for Celal and Ruya: stories of lovers reading about lost lovers in a sequence of stories within stories, “The lovers in the third story would have fallen in love while reading a fourth, and the lovers in the fourth story while reading a fifth;” the story of the Grand Pasha, intentionally and specifically patterned after Dostoyevsky's “The Grand Inquisitor” story from The Brothers Karamazov; and the story of the prince who spent a decade preparing to become a ruler of his people by telling his stories to a scribe so that he might know himself. All of these stories, and in fact everything that has ever been written, are called dreams by the author, “everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words,” and the stories are told by individuals to become themselves. But the stories do not define the person, rather Pamuk asserts on one of the final pages of the book that “Only when a man has run out of things to say, only when he has lost all memory of his past, his books, and memory itself, only when he has plunged into that deep silence will he hear---rising from the depths of his soul, from the infinitely dark labyrinths of his being---the true voice that will allow him to become himself.” That is an incredible statement for a novelist to make.
What do You think about The Black Book (2006)?
Who you really are? On the surface, this seems like a question already posed elsewhere with such banality and tedium that some would be happy to declare that they don’t care about the question, let alone a possible answer. However, you can’t help but to think about your identity while riding the roller-coaster that Pamuk manages to pull-off in The Black Book. Like all great minds, Pamuk knows very well that attempting to answer such a question is quite complicated, though he is committed to taking it seriously. He gives glimpses of different possible routes to tackle the question, including the compassionate view (for someone as lonely as himself) that it is impossible to live - as an individual or as a nation - in a meaningful way without trying to become somebody else. My grandparents and their families hail from Diyarbakir in present day Turkey. In 1915, they fled their homes and found themselves in Syria due to massive deportation and massacres known collectively as The Armenian Genocide. I was born in Aleppo and hence had a sort of double connection to this book. First, my Armenian background with its extensive affinities and similarities to Turkish culture that goes both ways despite what the two archenemies will want you think. And second, through my childhood that was spent in Aleppo, a city that is to a great extent similar to Istanbul, in that though it has mainly an Islamic heritage, was and is home to people from different faiths and world-views. With its mosques, churches, narrow streets and bustling daily life, I was really thinking the book was talking a great deal about myself and where I come from. Though Aleppo is not torn between east and west like Istanbul, as an Armenian-Syrian reading this book, I couldn’t but see myself in it. To return to the original question, the novel is constructed loosely as a detective fiction in which Galip, a middle aged lawyer, sets out in a journey to the streets and veins of Istanbul to find his detective-novel-loving wife, Ruya, who is also his cousin (an arrangement with a long history in Turkish and Islamic societies.) One night, Ruya leaves unexpectedly with a small note that doesn't mention where or why she is leaving. This quest for meaning guised as a search for his wife becomes a journey of self-discovery that echoes Pamuk’s question about Turkish identity. The tragic ending of the book is beautifully linked with the collective Turkish question, yet Pamuk doesn’t overstate the link. His is a personal journey as well that explores himself as an author by asking himself why, at all, he is writing? why is it that some choose to tell stories? is it the only thing that keeps them moving in their imaginary journeys?The book is written in a charming format that alternates between the story of Galib’s search for his wife and columns written by his cousin Celal that he comes across. In each of these columns, Celal talks engagingly about his own life as a columnist, topics of historical, political and religious interest in addition to his complains about his supposed gradual loss of memory which symbolises Turkey’s troubled relationship with its own past. Having similar first names, Celal the columnist (with his very fluid personality) and Jalal el-Din Al Rumi (who is buried in Konya) enrich the pages of the novel that really unfolds like a great symphony. I will undoubtedly read this book more than twice.
—Carlo
To what degree can we be ourselves? “To be or not to be oneself”, considers Pamuk, is life’s ultimate question. A roller-coaster which is alike in many aspects with a detective novel, this story is suffused with possible answers to the question above and explorations of how, only by telling stories, a man can really be himself. Through hypotheses developed in stories with a prince embarking on quests of finding his real self in order to be able to guide his people if he would come next in line to the throne, with an executioner who feels remorse after beheading a certain individual who expresses regret for his life differently than others, with an eye which can follow you anywhere you go, with stories about Rumi and Shams of Tabriz and inherently about Sufis, with stories about people who can read letters on faces, Pamuk immerses the reader in a metaphysical ride, touching with great charm aspects like history, mysticism, differences between East and West, family relations and love.Although I discovered touches of brilliancy in this book and ideas that kept me pondering, I constantly had the feeling that I was missing out on things, that some meanings were eluding me because of the translation or maybe because of the fact that I am not so familiar with Turkish culture. Some things didn’t add up, some loose ends kept me wondering if I should give this story 5 stars or 4 or 3. There were paragraphs which really resonated with me and I felt elated while reading them, paragraphs which made me think that I would definitely rate this book 5 stars and paragraphs which annoyed me because I could not see their sense. However, maybe this is Pamuk’s way of introducing his readers to a Turkish atmosphere throughout the book: a blend of historical and cultural influences, either different because of the spatial component (influences from Western cultures which people adopt from movies, Western writers, singers and tourists) or because of the temporal component (every aspect from Turkey’s history meant adopting a different influence, depending on the countries they conquered or they only came in contact with: Istanbul, for instance, is a blend of civilizations and its name over time can say many things about the idea I pointed above: Byzantium, Constantinople, Asitane (The Doorstep), New Rome, Stamboul etc. The fragment below is, in my opinion, expressing in a condensed and elegant fashion what I wanted to point above: “When he stepped onto Ataturk Bridge, Galip had resolved to look only at faces. Watching each face brighten at his gaze, he could almost see question marks bubbling from their heads – the way they did in the Turkish versions of Spanish and Italian photo novels – but they vanished in the air without leaving a trace. Gazing across the bridge at the skyline, he thought he saw each and every one of their faces shimmering behind its dull gray veil, but this too was an illusion. It was perhaps possible to look into the faces of his fellow citizens and see in them the city’s long history – its misfortunes, its lost magnificence, its melancholy and pain – but these were not carefully arranged clues pointing to a secret world; they came from a shared defeat, a shared history, a shared shame. As they churned across the gray-blue waters of the Golden Horn, they left a trail of ugly brown bubbles in their wake.”I loved the story about Alladdin and his shop and I loved the fragment about Galip’s love for Ruya (the two of them, although they were two married people, living together in the same outer reality, had minds and imaginations which inhabited different realms). I loved the ideas in this book, but didn’t quite like the story. I actually found it a bit absurd, although I am sure that the idea Pamuk wanted to express prevailed and the story was only used as a means of revealing what he wanted. I understood that Galip assumed Celal’s identity and that he embarked on a spiritual quest which helped him find himself rather than his missing wife or his uncle. The ending seemed however far-fetched and only able to dignify a soap-opera. Putting aside the spiritual journey, at a factual level the pursuit Galip embarks upon throughout the novel is destined to find Celal, rather than Ruya. The way she ends up being found and her supposed actions during her absence are rather secondary next to Celal’s, while Pamuk wants us to believe his hero is looking for her, rather than Celal. A flawed novel I would say, but an enticing one. Plus, I cannot help but wonder, weren’t these flaws there on purpose used by Pamuk for a certain effect? The fragment below would seem to say so. “If every letter in every face had a hidden meaning and if each signified a concept, it followed that every word composed of those letters must also carry a second hidden meaning (…). The same could be said of sentences and paragraphs – in short all written text carried second, hidden meanings. But if one bore in mind that these meanings could be expressed in other sentences or other words…, one could, through interpretation, glean a third meaning from the second, and a fourth from the third, ad infinitum – so there were, in fact, an infinite numbers of possible interpretations to any given text. It was like an unending maze of city streets, with each street leading to another: maps resembling human faces. So a reader who set out to solve the mystery in his own way, following his own logic, was no different from a traveler who finds the mystery of a city slowly unfurling before him as he wanders through streets on that map: The more he discovers, the more the mystery spreads; the more the mystery spreads, the more is revealed and the more clearly he sees the mystery in the streets he himself has chosen, the roads he’s walked down and the alleys he’s walked up; for the mystery resides in his own journey, his own life.”
—Deea
This was the first book I have read by Orhan Pamuk...apparently, it is not his best known...described as a "cult classic" by the Times Of London...and it appears to have come into translation much later than his other works. The story is s a rather bizarre "mystery" focusing on themes of identity, loss and isolation, amongst other things...and while Pamuk is obviously an amazing stylist (they don't tend to give out Noble Prizes willy-nilly), this particular book seems to have lost quite a bit in the translation...I suspect it would it would have been much more engaging had I been Turkish (lots of references to Turkish history, and specific references to modern day and historical Istanbul) and perhaps reading it in it's native language...there is even a translator's afterword that explains some of the difficulties of the translation, which would have served much better as a forward; setting the template so to speak...while I enjoyed the book overall, I was never completely hooked by it, and even found myself losing interest in the plots and the characters about 2/3 of the way through...though things did pick up a bit and seemed to come together in a much more engaging way towards the end. If my calculations are correct this was Pamuk's first novel, and frankly it reads like one. But it definitely intrigued me enough to check out more of his work.
—Martin
