The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 was awarded to Orhan Pamuk "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures".
In his acceptance speech, he mentioned what one goes through when writing a novel, that it is "to dig a well with a needle."
What inspired me to add this page to my site here was having read Pamuk's The Naive and Sentimental Novelist, the book produced from his Norton lectures. My favorites of his novels (with links to reviews) are Snow, My Name Is Red, and The Black Book.
From Publishers Weekly: Taking his title and inspiration from Schiller's "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry," Nobel Prize–winning Turkish novelist Pamuk (The Museum of Innocence) dissects what happens when we read a novel. Making a distinction between naïve novelists, "unaware" of the novel's artificiality, and "sentimental" novelists (and readers) at the opposite end, who are "reflective," Pamuk is most interested in the "secret center" of literary novels, which is the wisdom they impart. Pamuk brings to the table firsthand knowledge regarding the centrality of character in the novel and how the novelist actually becomes the hero in the very act of writing. Readers, in their own symbiotic act of imagination, also inhabit the hero's character. And through that sense of identification with the hero's decisions and choices, Pamuk says, we learn that we can influence events. Reading novels in his youth, he writes, "I felt a breathtaking sense of freedom and self-confidence." Based on Pamuk's Norton Lectures, the book has some inevitable repetition, but is a passionate amalgam of wonder and analysis.
Orhan Pamuk says--
Orhan Pamuk says "the angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favours the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing – when he thinks his story is only his story – it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him stories, images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build."
Orhan Pamuk says that "writing a novel involves combining the emotions and thoughts of each protagonist with the objects that surround him, and then blending them, with a single deft stroke, in one sentence." Thus, "Tolstoy does not tell us what Anna's feelings are as she rides on the St. Petersburg train. Instead, he paints pictures that help us feel these emotions: the snow visible from the windows on the left, the activity in the compartment, the cold weather, and so on."
Orhan Pamuk also says "While one corner of my mind is busy creating fictional people, speaking and acting like my heroes, and generally trying to inhabit another person's skin, a different corner of my mind is carefully assessing the novel as a whole--surveying the overall composition, gauging how the reader will read, interpreting the narrative and the actors, and trying to predict the effect of my sentences. The more the novelist succeeds in simultaneously being both naive and sentimental, the better he writes."
Orhan Pamuk says that "Novels are unique structures that allow us to keep contradictory thoughts in our mind without uneasiness, and to understand differing points of view simultaneously."
Orhan Pamuk says that when we read, we can "break free of our selves, become another person, and for once see the world through someone else's eyes."
Orhan Pamuk says: "I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds."
Orhan Pamuk says...
"While one corner of my mind is busy creating fictional people, speaking and acting like my heroes, and generally trying to inhabit another person's skin, a different corner of my mind is carefully assessing the novel as a whole--surveying the overall composition, gauging how the reader will read, interpreting the narrative and the actors, and trying to predict the effect of my sentences. The more the novelist succeeds in simultaneously being both naive and sentimental, the better he writes."
 |
| Shah Tahmasp |
"...the Persian Shah Tahmasp, who was the archenemy of the Ottomans, as well as the world's greatest patron-king of the art of painting, began to grow senile and lost his enthusiasm for wine, music, poetry, and painting: furthermore, he quit drinking coffee, and naturally, his brain stopped working.
"One day when he had grown even older, he was possessed by a jinn, had a nervous fit and, begging God's forgiveness, completely swore off wine, handsome young boys, and painting, which is proof enough that after this great shah lost his taste for coffee, he also lost his mind."
Text: Pamuk, Orhan. My Name Is Red, Translated from the Turkish by Erdag M. Goknar, New York: Vintage Books, 2001, pp. 47-48.
An excerpt from Orhan Pamuk's novel, The Museum of Innocence.
Chapter 54.
From The Museum of Innocence:
The illusion that is time-- ...No one looked at the clock to know the time, but they did spend a lot of time talking about whether it had been wound or not, and about how a frozen pendulum might be set in motion again just by touching it once....
"Let it be. Let it tick. It's not hurting anyone. It reminds us that this house is a house." I think I would agree.
So the wall clock was not there to remind us of the time or to warn us that things were changing. It was there to persuade us that nothing whatsoever had changed.
...Even without our being aware of it, the clock always ticked in the same way. And when we sat at the table, eating our supper, it brought us the peace of knowing we hadn't changed. That all would stay the same with us. That the clock served to make us forget the time, even as it continually brought us back to the present, reminding us of our relations with others.
