Orhan Pamuk in Cimen Gunay Erol and Bur

Orhan Pamuk
(7 June 1952 –

)

Yan Overield Shaw
Bilkent University

BOOKS: Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (Istanbul: Karacan,
1982);
Sessiz Ev (Istanbul: Can, 1983); translated by Robert
P. Finn as Silent House (New York: Knopf, 2012);
Beyaz Kale (Istanbul: Can, 1985); translated by Victoria Rowe Holbrook as The White Castle (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1990; New York:
George Braziller, 1991);
Kara Kitap (Istanbul: Can, 1990); translated by Güneli
Gün as The Black Book (New York: Farrar, Strauss
& Giroux, 1994);
Gizli Yüz, Senaryo (Istanbul: Can, 1992);
Yeni Hayat (Istanbul: İletişim, 1994); translated by
Gün as The New Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss
& Giroux, 1997);

Benim Adım Kırmızı (Istanbul: İletişim, 1998); translated by Erdağ M. Göknar as My Name Is Red
(New York: Knopf, 2001; republished, with an
introduction by Pamuk, 2010);
Öteki Renkler: Seçme Yazılar ve Bir Hikâye (Istanbul:
İletişim, 1999);
Kar (Istanbul: İletişim, 2002); translated by Maureen
Freely as Snow (New York: Knopf, 2004; republished, with a postscript by Pamuk, 2011);
İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir (Istanbul: İletişim, 2003);
translated by Freely as Istanbul: Memories and the
City (New York: Knopf, 2005);
Babamın Bavulu (Istanbul: İletişim, 2007); translated
by Freely as My Father’s Suitcase, the Nobel Lecture
(London: Faber & Faber, 2006);
Masumiyet Müzesi (Istanbul: İletişim, 2008); translated by Freely as The Museum of Innocence (New
York: Knopf, 2009);
Manzaradan Parçalar: Hayat, Sokaklar, Edebiyat (Istanbul: İletişim, 2010);
Saf ve Düşünceli Romancı (Istanbul: İletişim, 2011);
translated by Nazım Hikmet Dikbaş as The
Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010);

Orhan Pamuk in New York, 12 October 2006, after
learning he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in
Literature (AP Photo/John Smock)

Şeylerin Masumiyeti (Istanbul: İletişim, 2012); translated by Ekin Oklap as The Innocence of Objects
(New York: Abrams, 2012);
Ben Bir Ağacım (Istanbul: YKY, 2013).
Editions in English: The Black Book, translated by Maureen Freely (London: Faber & Faber, 2006);
Other Colors: Essays and a Story (New York: Knopf, 2007);
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Ara Güler’s Istanbul, by Pamuk and Ara Güler (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009).

Orhan Pamuk is a world-renowned Turkish
writer who has dedicated his life and career almost

exclusively to the novel. His complex and highly
crafted texts address Turkey’s diverse literary and
artistic heritages, often through an exploration of
the cultural eddies of his home city, Istanbul. His
work inherits the dilemmas and contradictions of the
Republican modernist novel, and his declared literary inspirations range from modern and “Western”
permutations of his chosen form—from Russian realism to German symbolism to French existentialism to
British and American modernism—to the sacred and
“Eastern” themes of Ottoman, Arabic, and Persian
literatures. Accordingly, his translated novels and
essays have become much read in Europe and America as an antidote to the idea of a destructive “clash”
between the Muslim East and secular or Christian
West. Turkish and other international audiences,
however, value his work chiely for its intellectual satire of personal and political responses to the sense of
disheritance and marginalization felt in the face of
cultural Westernization and globalization.
In Turkey’s fraught cultural politics, Pamuk
and his work are often associated with the liberal,
cosmopolitan, and postmodern reassessments of the
Republican and socialist heritage after 1980. His bestselling novels and outspoken criticism of the ideological taboos of the Republic have often made him

a high-proile target for Turkey’s authoritarian and
popular nationalist elements. Internationally, he has
received many awards and honors for his contributions to world literature and his defense of freedom
of expression; most famously and controversially, he
is the irst Turkish author ever to receive the Nobel
Prize in Literature.
Ferit Orhan Pamuk was born on 7 June 1952,
the youngest son of Gündüz Pamuk and Şeküre
Ferit. His brother Şevket Pamuk, two years older,
became an eminent professor of economic history.
His was a wealthy, high bourgeois class Istanbul family with roots in both the faded Ottoman past and the
early Republican boom years. His maternal grandfather, Cevdet Ferit Basman, had been a law professor and textile merchant who claimed descent from
Chief Admiral İbrahim Pasha. His paternal grandfather, Mustafa Şevket, was a civil engineer from a
prominent provincial family who had made a fortune
building railroads in the 1920s before investing the
proits in a rope factory in Istanbul. Though both
patriarchs had passed away by Pamuk’s irst birthday,
his immediate family still lived comfortably on Mustafa Şevket’s legacy.
His extended family lived in the Pamuk Apartments, the modern building his father and uncles

PRODUCED SCRIPT: Gizli Yüz, motion picture, Alfa
Film, 1991.
OTHER: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Cinler, translated by
Ergin Altay, edited, with a foreword, by Pamuk
(Istanbul: İletişim, 2000);
Dostoevsky, Ezilmiş ve Aşağılanmışlar, translated by
Altay, foreword by Pamuk (Istanbul: İletişim,
2000);
Dostoevsky, İnsancıklar, translated by Altay, foreword
by Pamuk (Istanbul: İletişim, 2000);
Orhan Kemal, The Idle Years, translated by Cengiz
Lugal, foreword by Pamuk (London: Peter
Owen, 2008);
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Yaşlı Gemici, translated by
Şavkar Altnel, foreword by Pamuk (Istanbul:
İletişim, 2008).
SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATION —
UNCOLLECTED:
fiction
“The White Sea is Azure,” Mediterraneans, 10 (Winter

1997–1998): 487–491;
“The Boy Who Watched the Ships Go By,” translated
by Güneli Gün, in Granta 61: The Sea, Voyages,
Mysteries, Discoveries, Disasters. How Much Do We
Know? (New York: Granta USA, 1998): 69–82;
“Famous People,” translated by Erdağ M. Göknar, in
Granta 68: Love Stories (New York: Granta USA,
1999): 69–72.
nonfiction
“A Taste for Death—Patricia Highsmith’s Crime Time,”
Village Voice, 17 November 1992, pp. 107–108;
“Forgive our Misery,” TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, 4773 (21 October 1994): 32;
“Salaam Bombay! The Mellowing of Magic Realism
in Salman Rushdie’s Family Saga,” TLS: The
Times Literary Supplement, 4823 (8 September
1995): 3;
“Landscape of violence,” TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, 4864 (21 June 1996): 22;
“Orhan Pamuk—Biographical,” translated by Maureen Freely, Nobelprize.org, 2006 [Web., accessed
23 July 2013];
“My Turkish Library,” New York Review of Books, 18

December 2008;
“The Fading Dream of Europe,” New York Review
of Books, 10 February 2011 [Web., accessed 15
August 2013];
“Memories of a Public Square,” ww.newyorker.com, 5
June 2013 [Web., accessed 15 August 2013].
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Covers for Pamuk’s 1983 novel and its French translation, his irst translated edition
(Boğaziçi University Library; Collection of Yan Overield Shaw)

had constructed on land adjoining the family’s grand
old Ottoman mansion, by then rented out as an elementary school. In his memoir İstanbul: Hatıralar ve
Şehir (2003; translated as Istanbul: Memories of the City,
2005) he describes the early happiness and security
he felt among his large family, its branches spread

across the diferent loors. He regularly visited his
educated grandmother in her bed on the top loor,
and she taught him to read and write the Latin alphabet before he started school. He was also placed in
the care of relatives or the family servants, particularly during the occasional storms in his parents’
marriage.
By birth and inclination, the Pamuk family was
close to the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP (Republican People’s Party), Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s organ of
social reform. Pamuk’s father was a childhood friend
of Erdal İnönü and knew his father, President İsmet
İnönü. Pamuk’s grandmother and male relatives
were typical of their class in the aggressively positivist

attitude they took toward religion, ridiculing the
faith, rituals and superstitions of the lower classes.
Yet, the servants of the family remained devout Muslims. His mother also preserved more respect for religious sentiment and public propriety, which Pamuk
has likened to a residual Sui asceticism.
Despite the family’s tradition of engineering,
there was plenty of space for art in his home, especially poetry. When the national atmosphere of religious populism aggravated his grandmother, she
recited verses from Tevik Fikret, the late-Ottoman
radical atheist poet. His father also recited Turkish

poetry, especially the recent poetry of the Turkish
“Birinci Yeni” (First New). Though necessity made
his father a man of business, Gündüz Pamuk had also
translated Paul Valéry into Turkish and dabbled as a
writer throughout his life. A Francophile, the shelves
of his library also boasted the entire catalog of Gallimard editions. Pamuk credits his father’s passion for
art, literature, and music with teaching him to see
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culture as important and worthy of respect from an
early age.
In 1958 Pamuk began attending the Işık High
School in Nişantaşı. Though a reluctant pupil and
not academically precocious, he became an avid
child and adolescent painter. He illed his schoolbooks with drawings and tried to copy reproductions
of French impressionist paintings as well as Ottoman

and Persian miniatures. He credits the exaggerated
praise these eforts received from his father in particular with encouraging his appetite for producing
for the appreciation of others.
After the sale of the rope factory and diiculty with the family’s property investments in 1959,
Pamuk’s father suddenly left for Paris, living a bohemian life for a few months until his grandmother
cut of his allowance. He then took up a managerial
position at IBM Paris, later transferring to Geneva,
where Pamuk’s mother joined him. Eventually, he
was appointed head of the company’s Turkish operations, and the family relocated to Ankara, where
Pamuk remembers living through the 1960 military
coup. The family returned to Istanbul in 1962, and he
continued his secondary education at the less exclusive (and less expensive) Şişli Terakki Lisesi (Şişli
Progress School). In 1963 his father declared bankruptcy, sold the family compound and buildings,
and moved his family to an old apartment owned
by Pamuk’s maternal grandmother in the downscale
Cihangir neighborhood. Nevertheless, later that year
he was able to invest in a summerhouse in the luxury
coastal resort of Bayramoğlu near Gebze. The family’s inances improved again after 1964, when his
father started as a senior manager with the powerful
Koç Holding.

In 1966 Pamuk matriculated at Istanbul’s exclusive Robert College for boys. He became popular in
the all-male environment for his saucy jokes and caricatures of teachers. He also had a good relationship
with his basketball coach, the scholar of Ottoman
literature, Walter Andrews. Robert College opened
his eyes to world culture and provided him access
to an extensive library of literature, some in Eastern
and European languages, but mainly in English. He
remembers, however, feeling some alienation from
his wealthier classmates, and his elder brother’s academic successes fueled his sense of their intellectual
rivalry.
In 1967 the family moved to another apartment in Beşiktaş, and Pamuk began to photograph
Istanbul’s poor neighborhoods. Having read Man
of Monmartre (1958), he began to imagine himself
as Maurice Utrillo, transforming the Istanbul backstreets into echoes of Paris on Utrillo’s characteristic

white backgrounds. In 1968, after his brother left to
study at Yale in the United States, his mother allowed
Pamuk to use the family’s old Cihangir apartment
to work on his ever-larger canvasses. His family now
decided to encourage him to study architecture as a
compromise between art and engineering.
In his later teenage years, Pamuk turned more
seriously to literature, raiding his father’s library, as
well as spending his generous allowance at the old
booksellers’ market in Beyazıt and the backstreet
bookstores of Istanbul. In addition to Turkish literature, he became interested in Western modernism, reading translations of Henry James and James
Joyce. Drawn to Turkish literature, he began youthful experiments in its privileged form, poetry, but
found his eforts uninspired. He also began a diary,
and recalls that he gradually came to depend on the
sense of achievement and satisfaction that a full page
gave him.
In 1970 Pamuk enrolled at the architecture faculty of the İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, İTÜ (Istanbul
Technical University), obediently following the family tradition by entering this science and engineering
institution. That year was, however, a high tide of both
Marxist-Leninist revolutionists and their fascist antagonists among Turkish students. Turkish campuses
became notorious centers of militancy, with frequent
armed clashes between rightist and leftist groups
and the police. Pamuk read the requisite theory and
joined a group he describes as upper-class Marxists—
privileged revolutionaries who held high hopes for a
future coup by a bloc of radical military oicers.
Pamuk’s Marxism probably remained more
aesthetic than factional, and he has described happily wandering among Leftists and Rightists alike
during the frequent political rallies on Taksim
Square in the mid 1970s, before the Labor Day massacre of 1977 cast its shadow. As an adolescent, he
identiied with the plight and heroism of imprisoned
communists, such as the novelists Orhan Kemal and
Kemal Tahir and the poet Nâzım Hikmet. He also
basked in the approval of his Westernized Marxist
friends for his library, bulging with Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann,
William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf,
Albert Camus, and Jean Paul Sartre. Yet, after the
international student protests of 1968 and Mao’s cultural revolution in the East, many leftists increasingly
felt that Third World intellectuals had a duty to turn
their backs on Hegelian and literary questions and
learn to serve the struggle and the nation in practical ways. Indeed, even Pamuk and his father's literary hero Sartre had quipped during the recently
ended Nigerian civil war that, had he been a Biafran
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Orhan Pamuk

intellectual, he could not justify writing novels: a
position that Pamuk increasingly came to resent as
a double standard.
Then, on 12 March 1971, the Chief of the General Staf Memduh Tağmaç issued a “coup by memorandum,” forestalling the “progressive” coup and
purging radical oicers. The junta clamped down on
leftist tendencies, and turned a blind eye to the activities of the rightist paramilitaries who attacked student
activists and oppositional academics, forcing leftwing ideas and culture underground. That summer
Pamuk retreated to his parents’ luxury summerhouse, illing a spare room with books and spending
his time reading and painting, guarded from the
political violence outside by high fences. In his memoir, he describes beginning a relationship with a
younger girl from his neighborhood who modeled
for him. The couple continued their liaisons back in
Istanbul at his Cihangir studio. Her father, however,
found him, with his bohemian lifestyle and plans, an
unsuitable future son-in-law, and sent the girl away to
boarding school in Switzerland in 1972.
When his parents inally separated in 1972, his
father moved out, apparently to live with another
woman, and Pamuk moved in with his mother. His
anger at his parents mingled with his resentment at
the loss of his lover, his art, and his friends’ political
hopes. Uninspired by the instrumental aesthetics of
his architecture teachers, he began cutting his İTÜ
classes. His behavior did little to improve his relationship with his mother, who worried about his mental
health and suggested he try out for medical school.
In 1973 Pamuk quit İTÜ and enrolled at the
journalism department of Istanbul University (İÜ).
He had no wish, however, to become a journalist, or
even a columnist. Seeking an outlet for his frustration
at his Westernized, bourgeois world, he determined
early on to write novels. He believed being a novelist
would also enable him to re-create the joy he had previously taken in painting—that of “being another” in
a world of his own creation. His enrollment in the
journalism degree allowed him to dedicate himself
full time to creative writing, and he obtained his
diploma largely without attending classes.
Pamuk researched and wrote his irst novel
from 1973 to 1978, under what he has described as
diicult creative circumstances. Writing and chainsmoking all night in a tiny room in his mother’s
apartment, he was subject to her constant discouragement. His friends, though supportive, also questioned his chosen career when he had so little life
experience behind him on which to base his writing.
Nevertheless, his father, though emotionally distant,
continued to pay him his allowance. He also began

his irst serious relationship, with Aylin Türegün. His
social equal, from a White Russian immigrant family,
Türegün was a trained historian who could research
systematically and read Ottoman.
Pamuk had high ambitions for his irst novel,
in which he wanted to address the rupture and loss
as well as the continuities in Turkish life throughout
the twentieth century. He was initially inspired by the
fate of his family’s Ottoman mansion, and he drew
heavily on his family and personal life to create his
irst characters. He also drew on a range of Turkish
and Western literary inluences. Though he admired
Yaşar Kemal’s lyrical work, he also wanted to break
with the dominant trend of Anatolian realism or köy
romanı (the village novel). Instead, he conceived an
empire-to-republic generational odyssey reminiscent
of Thomas Mann’s irst work, Buddenbrooks (1901).
Bourgeois, urban life as a site of Republican crisis
was also a major theme in his favorite Turkish writers,
including Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Oğuz Atay. In
1974 he wrote his irst critical essay about modern
style in Atay, though it was not published. Searching
for a writerly voice, he also placed the English text of
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury next to the
Turkish translation, studying the language and characterization, though he did not yet use Faulkner’s
irst-person narration.
Pamuk himself, however, was not yet ready for
formal experimentation. Inspired by György Lukàcs’
reading of Tolstoy and the historical novel, he aimed
to use a collage of everyday details to evoke his
characters’ “historical consciousness.” He scoured
his grandfather’s railway journals and second-hand
bookshops for historical minutiae from which to
build convincing slices of life. To research the Eastern chapters, he took a rail trip across Turkey in 1974,
following the Sivas-Erzurum railroad all the way to
Kars, on Turkey’s Eastern border, whose decaying
Russian and Armenian buildings and poetic remoteness impressed him.
In 1977 Pamuk graduated in journalism from
Istanbul University and immediately entered the
master’s program, chiely to postpone his compulsory military service. He was by now writing his
manuscript in ballpoint pen, into spiral-bound notebooks of graph paper, establishing a lifelong working habit. He inished his 600-page manuscript in
1978, exhausted by both his studies and crushing
writing schedule. Nevertheless, his relationship with
Türegün had grown steadily over the period. His
father also lavished him with encouragement when
he read the manuscript, conidently asserting that
his son would one day win the Nobel Prize.
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Cover for Pamuk’s 1985 novel (Boğaziçi University Library)

Cover and dust jacket for the English and American editions of Pamuk’s novel originally published in
1985 as Beyaz Kale, his irst English translations (Richland Library)

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Orhan Pamuk

His irst manuscript, “Karanlık ve Işık” (Darkness and Light), traced the fortunes of the Işıkçı
(light-seller) family from late Ottoman Empire to just
before the 1971 coup. The narration is omniscient
but complex, focalizing key characters. The opening movement takes place over the course of a single
day, 24 July 1905. The successful merchant Cevdet
Bey struggles to overcome his sense of belittlement
and exclusion from late-Ottoman aristocratic society,
and his dying Young Turk brother charges him with
the care of his son. The second and longest movement of the novel is set during the period of high
republican reforms in 1936–1939. This section traces
how the aspirations of the second generation and
the republican project are defeated by plutocracy or
subverted by doubt. The inal movement occurs on
12 December 1970. Young Ahmet Işıkçı is struggling
to become an artist in the family apartments built on
the site of Cevdet Bey’s mansion. A visit by his radical
oicer uncle foreshadows the fast-approaching coup.
His revolutionary friend’s harsh verdict on his bourgeois subject matter momentarily shakes his selfbelief, but his historian girlfriend encourages him to
return to his studio. When he arrives home, he inds
his grandmother, increasingly bereft of her memories of the Ottoman past, has passed away. He then
turns hopefully back to his painting.
In 1979 Pamuk entered a competition for the
best previously unpublished novel, held by Milliyet
Publishing, the literature wing of the Milliyet newspaper group, for a 10,000 lira lump sum and publication. In April the jury announced that his novel
had won, though he shared the award with Mehmet
Eroğlu’s Issızlığın Ortası (The Midst of Desolation),
which dealt with the experience of leftists around the
1971 coup. The jury’s award to two books critical of
the military took place in the context of the assassination that February of Milliyet’s liberal editor-in-chief,
Abdi İpekçi, shot down in Pamuk’s native Nişantaşı
by ultra-nationalist gunmen aided by senior soldiers.
Milliyet’s publishing director, however, equivocated
over publication, citing the failing Turkish economy.
Later that year, buoyed up by his award, Pamuk
immediately started working on a second and more
explicitly political novel that drew on his time at İTÜ.
He envisioned a satirical novel about upper-class
Marxists whose desperate plot to throw a bomb at
the Turkish prime minister would contrast amusingly
with their privileged and leisured lifestyles. After
the intense research efort of “Karanlık ve Işık,” the
autobiographically-inspired material lowed more
naturally, and he inished 250 pages of the manuscript in the irst twelve months. In 1980 his half

sister, Hümeyra, was born to his father and his new
wife, Fatma Feyza Geç.
On 12 September 1980 the armed forces led by
General Kenan Evren staged Turkey’s third coup in
twenty years, banning all political parties and imposing military order on the parliament, the turbulent
streets, and the ailing economy. As a senior member
of the business community, Pamuk’s father helped
found SODEP, the republican social-democrat party
set up to keep the CHP lame alive, though its candidates were quickly disallowed. As the junta forcibly
depoliticized Turkish public life, the arrest and torture of leftist and liberal intellectuals by state forces
became a routine.
Under such circumstances Pamuk understood
there was little hope of Milliyet publishing his irst
novel, let alone his new one about Marxist terrorists,
and he abandoned his uninished new manuscript.
When his master’s course ended in summer 1980, he
could no longer delay his compulsory military service. He received a non-combat posting to Tuzla, a
suburb of Istanbul, for only four months. When he
left the army in 1981, he began rewriting elements of
his political story as a new novel, dealing again with
the disjunctures of Turkish history.
Pamuk’s inspiration this time was the correspondence between his maternal grandparents after
their engagement. In Berlin to study law in the 1920s,
an impressed Cevdet Ferit had written to Ayşe Nikfal
of the progress of the women’s movement, which
she latly replied was a sin and forbidden. These letters inspired Pamuk to create the antagonistic relationship between the dictatorial positivist Selahettin
Darvinoğlu (Son of Darwin) and his pious wife
Fatma. Against this background, the writer preserves
the idea of the happy crowd of youths, but, instead
of rich radicals, he describes the apolitical hedonism
of his own Bayramoğlu summer crowd. He began a
further exploration of narrative technique, drawing
on Faulkner and Woolf to create a convincing irstperson narration, though one that deliberately
avoided the provincial dialects of Anatolian realism.
In early 1982 Pamuk inally managed to get his
irst novel published. He had spent three angry years
since 1979 trying to persuade Milliyet Publishing to
come through on its promise. In this struggle he had
had no literary friendships to call on as he had maintained his distance from the Istanbul literary scene.
He and Türegün had even seriously considered
advertising his prize-winning novel for sale in the
art journals. Eventually, Pamuk threatened a lawsuit,
and three thousand copies were printed by Karacan,
under the new title of Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (Cevdet
Bey and Sons), to ecstatic reviews from Turkish critics
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family’s past, which ultimately leads to tragedy for
the younger generation in the present. Pamuk’s
Faulknerian narrators personify tendencies in Turkish intellectual life, and there are repeated references to Ivan Turgenev’s Ottsy i deti (1862, Fathers
and Sons). The novel also anticipates the writer’s
later postmodern concerns, as three generations
of Darvinoğlus fail to realize three equally quixotic
intellectual quests. In a kind of hidden signature,
Pamuk also included anachronistic references to
himself and his brother and to characters from Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları. In the last scene, Fatma seems to
airm the value of literature as a secular transcendence of linear time and existential ennui.
Excitement around Pamuk’s two awards boosted
sales of Sessiz Ev to 8,000 copies in the irst year. In
April 1984 the novel won the Madaralı Novel Award.
Media interest in the “thrice awarded” Pamuk predictably exploded, and the evident pleasure he took
in giving his irst newspaper interviews set an enduring pattern of media engagement. The reviews of Sessiz Ev, however, were generally less positive, and one
critic complained about the novel’s exchanges of
unattributed “theatrical” dialogue. At the same time,
probably in response to his success at the awards,
in a generally positive review of Pamuk’s irst novel,
another critic noted its sometimes clumsy reporting
structures. Pamuk responded that his experiments in
stream-of-consciousness in Sessiz Ev had partly been
an attempt to avoid such phrases, though he did alter
his treatment of dialogue in his next novel.
By 1984 Pamuk’s income from his novels, interviews, and articles allowed his father to end his regular allowance payments. After his grandmother
passed away in January 1984, Pamuk remarked in Milliyet, 19 April 1984, that Sessiz Ev’s Fatma Hanım had
been partly based on his sharp and digniied paternal
grandmother. In his writing as well as his life, his family now began to lose its central position. Later that
year, he received a letter from the prestigious Paris
publisher Gallimard, requesting translation rights
for Sessiz Ev. The translation was suggested by literary elder stateswomen Thilda Kemal and Münnevver
Andaç. Andaç met Pamuk in Paris several times during the next few years to work on the translation, and
she helped smooth his way into this new, European
literary world.
For his third novel, Pamuk decided on a new
approach to Turkey’s neglected Ottoman heritage.
After the 1980 coup, literary and historical “neoOttomanism” became a way for artists and scholars to
challenge the ideological taboos of secular nationalism, including multiculturalism, religion, and homosexuality, at a safe historical distance. He chose to

Cover for Pamuk’s 1994 novel (Bahçeşehir University Library)

who praised its historical sweep and psychological
nuance. On 1 March 1982 he and Türegün married.
By 1983 Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları had sold 2,000
copies, and in May the novel won its second award,
the prestigious Orhan Kemal Roman Armağanı
(Orhan Kemal Novel Prize). In August, Pamuk took
the opportunity to make a critical statement himself, publishing an article, “Roman Gibi Roman bu
Roman” (This Novel is a Novel-like Novel) in Gösteri
(August 1983), criticizing Turkish novelists’ timid
devotion to Anatolian realism, though praising the
modernist experiments of Tanpınar, Atay, and Yusuf
Atılgan, and the augmented realism of Yaşar Kemal
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Later in 1983, Can Publishers released Pamuk’s
second novel, Sessiz Ev (translated as Silent House,
2012). It is set in the economic turmoil and social violence before the 1980 coup, as three grandchildren
visit their aging grandmother in her decaying Ottoman mansion. The untitled chapters shuttle the
narration between ive characters. The grandmother’s memories reveal the violent bifurcation in the
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Orhan Pamuk

A 27 October 1994 advertisement trumpeting the runaway sales for Pamuk’s novel

set his novel in a particularly neglected period, the
seventeenth-century reign of Sultan Mehmed IV,
under whom the empire began to sufer defeats at
the hands of the technologically superior European
powers, and he read a huge array of transliterated
contemporary sources. He also decided to embrace

more international and postmodernist concerns and
techniques. He suggested in a 24 July 1985 interview
in Milliyet that his new novel was “yarı tarih, yarı
masal” (half history, half fairytale), but perhaps neither, and wondered whether the book’s style, shortness, and tempo were what Europeans would call
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novelistic. His proposed title, "Gölgeler Kitabı" (The
Book of Shadows), referred both to the book’s selfconscious ictionality and to the Ottoman Karagöz
shadow theater, but his publishers asked him to suggest another title.
Beyaz Kale (translated as The White Castle, 1990)
was released in late 1985. It is framed by a “preface” by
Sessiz Ev’s historian, Faruk Darvinoğlu, who presents
it as a found Ottoman manuscript with resonance for
contemporary struggles between East and West. He
dedicates the book to his loving sister Nilgün, whose
life spans the dates of Turkey’s military takeovers
(1960–1981). The narrative proper is apparently that
of a noble Venetian youth, captured en route to
Naples by the Turkish leet and enslaved. He poses as
a man of science, with knowledge of medicine, and
is then bound to an Ottoman scholar called simply
“Hoja,” meaning “teacher,” “preacher,” or “master.”
The two men are physically identical, and become
involved in an almost sadomasochistic exchange of
scientiic and personal knowledge, recalling Hegel’s
master-slave dialectic. After local superstitions make
it impossible for Hoja to continue his work in the
empire, the two men’s distinct identities become
blurred into a single, shadowy, and seemingly deiied Other, “O/Onun” (He/Him). In the last scene
of the novel, an Italian traveler begins to search the
manuscript for clues to the narrator’s true identity.
The novel immediately doubled Pamuk’s sales
to 16,000 copies in its irst year. Some critics were
enthusiastic about his new and original stylistic direction. Others, however, bemoaned the lack of the rich
historical and psychological detail of his irst two
works. His postmodernist approach to the sources
also drew accusations of plagiarism, with critics noting similarities between the opening passages of
Beyaz Kale and the Turkish translation of a contemporary account of the Ottoman lands by Spanish captive Pedro de Urdemalas. In a later afterword, Pamuk
playfully accused Miguel de Cervantes of plagiarizing
a (ictional) Arab historian to create Don Quixote, and
denied any culpability in “Faruk’s” cavalier attitude
to the archive.
Spring 1985 provided Pamuk with political
inspiration for his fourth novel. Evren’s regime had
maintained pressure on critical writers and intellectuals and was taking an increasingly harder line
on the Kurdish question. Playwrights Harold Pinter
and Arthur Miller came to Istanbul as part of a joint
international PEN and Helsinki Watch human-rights
delegation. Pamuk took Pinter and Miller to visit
journalists imprisoned and tortured by the state. The
stories of such victims aroused Pamuk’s feelings of
pity and solidarity but also the desire to retreat to the

safety of an ivory tower. In summer he was accepted
as a fellow of the University of Iowa’s International
Writing Program. His wife had also been accepted
to Columbia University’s history department to study
for a doctorate, and the couple moved to America.
In 1986 he began to teach Turkish courses at Columbia. Given a cubicle in the school’s Butler Library, he
was blissfully situated above three million books, with
access to the full richness of world culture.
At Columbia, Pamuk reevaluated his relationship to Turkish culture’s Islamic heritage. He reread
the classical Sui literature that he had associated
with religious conservatism as a young man. He studied two texts in particular: the Masnavi (Turkish,
Mesnevi), the Persian poem by the founder of the
Mevlevi sect, Mevlânâ Celâleddin Mehmed Rumi,
inspired by his search for his lost beloved, Şems of
Tabriz; and Hüsn ü Aşk (Beauty and Love), by the
eighteenth-century poet Sheikh Galip, an allegorical
love story based on his repeated readings of Rumi.
Pamuk read these works in dialogue with Jorge Luis
Borges’ ideas about the “metaphysics” of literature,
distinguishing and emphasizing the form of the parable over its religious content. Nevertheless, the Sui
tradition’s ability to create something new by an elegant development or recombination of an ancient
theme suggested to Pamuk an aesthetic critique
of Romantic and Modernist notions of originality.
Searching for a secular setting for the Sui path, in
which the seeker eventually “becomes” the beloved,
he decided on the world of Istanbul’s newspaper columnists, all-knowing “professors of everything” who
shape how their reader’s interpret the world, becoming “a kind of God,” according to an interview with
Maureen Freely in Granta 93, God’s Own Countries
(Spring 2006).
Despite the social and cultural alienation he
felt in New York, Pamuk also made valuable intellectual friendships and contacts during his Columbia
years, including his agent, Anne Dubuisson, of the
New York Ellen Levine Literary Agency, and Victoria
Rowe Holbrook, at that time a postdoctoral fellow in
Islamic literature at Columbia. In 1987 the New York
representative of the British publisher Carcanet,
Keith Greenwood, received a copy of Beyaz Kale in
partial translation, and recommended it for publication. Carcanet settled on Holbrook as translator that
June. In 1988 Andaç’s French translation of his second novel, La Maison du Silence, was published to critical acclaim. The novel was short-listed for the 1988
Prix Medicis Étranger. Writing in Le Monde, Nicole
Zand (18 November 1988) noted the novel’s “curiously Chekovian … absurd drama,” declaring Pamuk
one of the “new generation of Turkish prose writers
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[…] searching for the continuities in their country’s
history, rather than its folklore.”
Pamuk returned to Istanbul in 1988 with the
manuscript of his dense and ambitious fourth book,
continuing to work on it intensely. He considered
the title “Kayıp Esrar” (The Lost Mystery) to suggest the simultaneous demystiication and inscrutability of modern, urban life. He inally decided the
title made his novel sound too much like a crime
thriller.
In February 1989 the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, supreme leader in Iran, capitalized on growing Muslim anger at the treatment of the Koran in
British Indian writer Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic
Verses and declared a fatwa against the writer’s life.
Pamuk, along with writers Yaşar Kemal and Aziz
Nesin, was quick to issue a solidarity statement, being
among the irst from a Muslim country to do so. Just
a week later, he wrote an article for the 21 February 1989 issue of Cumhuriyet (Republic) newspaper,
explaining the content of the novel and criticizing
the demagogic response in the Turkish press.
In summer 1989, just as Pamuk was inishing his
new manuscript, Victoria Holbrook suddenly threatened to withdraw her English translation of Beyaz
Kale. She was unhappy with edits made to her manuscript by a Carcanet editor, and Pamuk was forced to
visit the publishers and revise the manuscript. He still
fretted about the title and preface, which he worried
would draw comparisons to Umberto Eco. In early
1990, The White Castle was published to overwhelmingly favorable U.K. reviews, particularly by Şavkar
Altınel in the inluential TLS: The Times Literary Supplement (12 October 1990), though the preface by the
mysterious Faruk Darvinoğlu left some British readers puzzled. In May 1990 the novel won the irst-ever
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, awarded equally
to Pamuk and Holbrook.
In Turkey, Can released Pamuk’s fourth novel
under the enigmatic title Kara Kitap (1990; translated
as The Black Book, 1994). Similar to the Sui parables
and the Thousand and One Nights, it has a double
structure that is inally revealed as a unity. The frame
narrative is an inverted and unsolved murder mystery: a bland, middle-aged lawyer named Galip (after
Sheikh Galip) searches for his wife, Rüya (Dream),
who he believes has probably run of with his half
brother, a famous newspaper columnist called Celâl
(after Rumi). As he journeys through Istanbul, he
meets a constellation of copies, fakes, and doubles
who trouble or deny their originals. Into this frame
narrative are woven, in alternating chapters, a series
of newspaper columns written by (or in the style of)
Celâl, which develop the theme of identity and

Cover for Pamuk’s 1998 novel (Bahçeşehir University Library)

imitation in dialogue with Eastern sources, including
Harun al-Rashid’s adventure with the “False Caliph,”
set just after Atatürk’s death and Rumi’s parable
of the Chinese painters set in a Beyoğlu gangster’s
nightclub. The inal column, “Şehzadenin Hikâyesi”
(The Story of the Crown Prince) is an original story
that Galip tells three times to a BBC ilm crew in the
Pera Palace hotel; through this impersonation of
Celâl he inds his own writer’s voice. The epilogue
relates the aftermath of the 1980 coup, when Galip,
bereft of Rüya, discovers in writing under Celâl’s
name his “tek teselli” (sole consolation).
When Can Publishing released Kara Kitap in
1990, the long-awaited book sold 32,000 copies in
four editions in its irst year, and provoked an unprecedented critical debate. There was some controversy
over Pamuk’s appropriation of the Sui tradition,
which scandalized religious traditionalists, while
secularists accused him of playing into reactionary
hands. There were also attacks on his experiments
with prose style, some accusing him of grammatical
errors and others defending his linguistic innovation.
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of painting and representation. To gather details for
his book, he studied many illuminated books, mined
the Ottoman archives, and read widely in the revisionist historical and art-historical scholarship on the
period.
In Spring 1992 Pamuk attended a writer’s festival in Adelaide. Evoking Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
Kubla Khan, he credits half a sleeping pill Oliver
Sacks gave him with providing the inspiration for his
ifth work. He envisioned a puzzle book, in which
the reader would have to infer from the hero’s subsequent actions the contents of a life-transforming
text. For a change, the title came easily. Pamuk’s
choice of “Yeni Hayat” (The New Life) echoes Dante
Aligheri’s La Vita Nuovo, in which the poet meets
Beatrice, the unattainable love who releases his muse
and leads it through the Christian afterlife, as well as
Yeni Hayat, a posthumous collection by the Turkist
intellectual Ziya Gökalp, who based a utopia on the
principles of Turkish nationalism. Inspired by German Romantics, Pamuk wanted to write a “prose
poem” that would evoke Novalis’s idea of death and
Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Angelic Orders.” That summer
he stopped work on his historical novel and began to
plan the new book.
As Yeni Hayat (1994; translated as The New Life,
1997) neared completion, his new publisher, İletişim,
welcomed their new star author with an aggressive ad
campaign, and Turkey’s billboards carried his image
and his book’s enigmatic irst sentence: “Bir gün bir
kitap okudum ve bütün hayatım değişti” (I read a
book one day and my whole life was changed). The
narrator of Yeni Hayat is a young student, Osman,
who feels the mysterious book is addressed directly
to him and is illed with a mystical impatience. Pursuing his heart’s desire, a fellow reader called Canan
(Beloved) who actually loves Osman’s double and
rival, the mysterious Mehmet, Osman embarks on
a haphazard bus journey across Anatolia, seeking
the presence of the “Melek” (Angel) the book says
appears at bus crashes. The Turkish heartland he
travels through is a bleak one, sutured together by
its aging state railways and a rickety road network;
it is a region haunted by gangs of melancholy salesmen, alienated by globalization, and longing for an
authentic culture. Osman eventually meets the sinister Dr. Narin, determined to destroy the book, which
he believes is part of a great conspiracy by the agents
of the C.I.A. and the Coca-Cola Company to undermine Turkey and destroy its youth. Narin’s shadowy
network of “saatler” (watches) has already killed the
book’s author, and Osman hatches a violent plan of
his own to win Canan. Finally, after years of troubled
conscience and false seeking, Osman realizes too late

Critics were equally divided about the novel’s encyclopedic abundance of stories and objects, which
some felt disrupted the narrative. Finally, his postmodern turn was celebrated by some (particularly
in the United States), though others remained suspicious of the replacement of social and historical
representation with a tissue of literary intertextual
allusions. Feminist critics objected that the most
important symptom of his new approach was the
dilution of Rüya to a mere shade in an allegory of
male literary becoming. The novelist conceded that
he had not suiciently explained Rüya, and made
eforts to develop his subsequent female characters.
Later in 1990 Pamuk collaborated with Turkish
director Ömer Kavur in ilming the Kara Kitap story of
the nightclub photographer, itself based on Farid udDin Attar’s twelfth-century Sui allegory Ferîdüddîn-i
Attâr Mantıku’t-Tayr (translated as The Conference of the
Birds, 2011). Pamuk received valuable feedback from
Kavur on the script and learned much about the art of
narrative economy. The inished ilm, Gizli Yüz (The
Hidden Face), won several awards at the 1991 Altın
Portakal (Golden Orange) ilm awards in Antalya,
including best ilm and best screenplay, and went on
to win two international awards.
In 1991 Pamuk’s international reputation continued to improve. In France he won the Prix de
la Découverte Européenne (European Discovery
Award), rather belatedly, for La Maison du Silence. In
Britain, Faber and Faber purchased paperback rights
to The White Castle, becoming Pamuk’s sole U.K. publisher, and George Braziller brought the U.S. rights
to the book soon after. In the U.S., positive reviews
by Jay Parini (The New York Times, 19 May 1991), John
Updike (The New Yorker, 23 September 1991) and
Talât S. Halman (World & I, June 1991) drew comparisons to Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Anton
Shammas, and even Marcel Proust. Aided by positive
reviews by Turkish critic Jale Parla (World & I, June
1991) and Turkish-American novelist Güneli Gün
(World Literature Today, Winter 1992), U.S. expectations of Kara Kitap were high, and Gün began work
on a translation for Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Pamuk now borrowed money from his mother
to buy the penthouse of the Pamuk Apartments,
which he turned into an oice. He and Aylin’s daughter, Rüya, named after the evanescent heroine of
Kara Kitap, was born in 1991. He also started work on
his next project: a historical novel to popularize what
he regarded as the forgotten stories and artworks
of the Islamic, Ottoman past. He was particularly
fascinated by the igurative miniature paintings that
adorned Ottoman and Persian literary and historical manuscripts, with their wholly Eastern trajectory
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that the angel he had sought is simply a sublime and
eternal indiference.
Demand for Yeni Hayat quickly outstripped supply, with 100,000 sold in the irst month, twenty-two
new printings in its irst year, and 200,000 sales in less
than two years, with the book remaining even today
Pamuk’s top-selling title in Turkey. Baled by the success of his experimental and poetic book, Pamuk theorized that his book had tapped into national sentiments. Some critics, however, were alienated by the
book’s complexity. Hostile reviewers and columnists
even confessed being unable to inish it and attributed the book’s success to its publicity campaign.
In response, literature academic Yıldız Ecevit began
work on a book-length defense and exposition of
Pamuk’s complex literary aesthetic, Orhan Pamuk'u
Okumak, aligning his novels with postmodern literary
theory. Others speculated about his religious sympathies; in the World & I (September 1997), Halman
noted that the word he uses for accident—“kaza”—
also means predestination and redemption in Ottoman Turkish. In response, Pamuk reiterated that
his interest in Suism was purely as a literary source.
In fact, critics including Jale Parla have since read
the novel’s national allegory as partly a satire on the
pressures of globalization and the rightist ideology of
Turkish-Islamic synthesis.
In November 1994 Kara Kitap, translated by
Güneli Gün, was released as The Black Book. Most
American and British critics were dazzled by the
noir-ish novel, hailing Pamuk’s postmodernist innovation, his depth of knowledge of his Eastern literary
heritage, and his encyclopedic evocation of Istanbul,
drawing comparisons to Joyce’s Dublin and Robert
Musil’s Vienna. Yet, as more than an exotic whodunnit, Pamuk’s postmodernist work did defy easy digestion in some quarters. Those predisposed to dislike
international postmodernism raised notes of caution about Pamuk and/or Gün’s Turkish-American
voice. In the Village Voice (7 February 1995), John
Brenkman suggested that Pamuk ought, like Turkish
feminist author Latife Tekin, try to tell the stories of
Turkey’s poor and excluded.
In Turkey, Pamuk was asked by political friends
to use his new international status for the Kurdish
cause. The human costs of the war between the Marxist Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers'
Party, or PKK) and the Turkish Army in the southeast
were rising, with thousands killed and hundreds of
thousands internally displaced. His presence raised
the proile of street protests as well as of a campaign
supporting hunger strikes by Kurdish inmates. He
also signed up as one of 96 “editors” of a volume of
banned essays in an act of civil disobedience against

the laws in the 1982 constitution that prohibited
the defamation of the state or its security services.
In April 1995 Pamuk wrote an article in the German
press criticizing Turkey’s culture of misinformation
around the war. Nationalist commentators began to
call him a “vatan haini” (traitor), complaining he
had “insulted Turkey” to Europeans.
In Spring 1995 the French translation of Kara
Kitap, Le Livre Noir, was awarded the Prix France
Culture. That summer Pamuk returned to his historical novel and his research into life and art in
sixteenth-century Istanbul. Searching for a new narrative approach, he undertook a reassessment of
magical realism. In a critical review of Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh for the TLS, 8 September
1995, he praised the political intentions of Gabriel
Garcia Marquez. Nevertheless, he argued that the
magical and fantastic writing dominant in contemporary international literature had become a way of
“reducing the Other to tolerable proportions, […]
cute, lovable characters moving in situations that
seem merely folkloric, no matter how horriic they
really are.”
In 1996 Pamuk returned to the idea of an encyclopedic or catalog novel. Drawing inspiration from
the implied narrative of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale
Fire (1962), he wanted his story to emerge from a
series of ordered entries referring to objects related
to love and family life. He began to collect objects
from Istanbul’s antique shops and lea markets, and
he searched for an afordable house in the Beyoğlu
district in which to house his collection. During promotional tours abroad, he began to visit small, backstreet museums for inspiration, in particular the
Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris, the Frederic Marés
Museum in Barcelona, and the Sir John Soames
Museum in London. H