mystic demonism trumps marriage, sex, and social upheavals

Interview with Orhan Pamuk. Am I an idiot for being more interested in this novel than Museum of Innocence?

Pamuk: Yes, I have an unfinished novel, which is 25 years old, a Dostoyevskian political novel, in which radical leftist thought is melded with mystic demonism. But when we had our military coup in 1980 it became impossible to publish that novel. It was at that point in time I realized, not without shock, that some of my old Marxist friends were being tempted by radical Islam and its anti-Western logorrhea.

The continuing march towards social consciousness is not a complete turnoff though. Pamuk has yet to disappoint.

The Blind Owl

Not quite finished with The Blind Owl yet, but i am a little puzzled. Pamuk says that he has read it in a few interviews with the Persian press, but barely mentions the book otherwise... or at least, that's how it appears to in the English language. He praises the book. It's not as if he dismisses it in any way. However, in reading The Blind Owl, i recognized passages that are echoed in Pamuk's work... the obsessive, hallucinatory mania that creeps in, especially The White Castle... it feels drawn straight from the scorning alienation of the wildly unhinged, but wonderfully poetic narrator of The Blind Owl.

Anyway, i gotta go finish it. Setting back up the Wordpress blog tonight is beginning to feel too much like work.

Pamuk lecture in Portland, OR

Just read the notes on the Pamuk lecture in Portland, Oregon by James Tata.

The fact that he's distanced himself from the American Congress statement on the nearly century old Armenian genocide, saying that it's an internal matter is only slightly disappointing. Turkey is under enormous strain right not. Turkish troops entering northern Iraq, into Kurdish controlled regions, are going to cause even more strain between American and Turkish relations. As much as i loathe to say it, i'm not sure that making this an issue at this moment in history in Congress of all the times it has been and will be possible is all that wise. Bush might actually be right.

(I can be convinced otherwise though.)

As an American, my favorite Pamuk book is The Black Book, not Snow, and oddly, i believe that prefer the Guneli Gup translation to the Maureen Freely one.

Want to know a dirty little secret of mine? Of Pamuk's greatest novelists, Tolstoy, Mann, Dostoevsky, and Proust, i have read only Dostoevsky, and of him, only Notes from Underground and The Idiot. I barely remember either one, as those were in my chemical years.

The House of Silence

This story about Pamuk's The House of Silence being translated into Russian popped up. It is Pamuk's first book. It's described at length in this review of The White Castle from 1991. So now it's in translation in Russian, French, and Spanish.

Is it any great demand to ask for it in English?

Pamuk's Other Colors

It's great news that the new Pamuk novel The Museum of Innocence is going to be in English translation soon, but Bill pointed out to me the other day that Pamuk has a collection of essays coming out this September, Other Colors. 400 pages is bulky. I feared it was just going to be a slight packaging of his recent work published in the New Yorker. I'm pre-ordering mine as well.

sin of solitude

Antidisingenuousmentarianism has a comment on the Orhan Pamuk bit on Turkish street food in the New Yorker.

The ad that Pamuk describes reminds me a little of the ad campaign by Hebrew National for kosher hot dogs right before July 4th. Those parachuting cows sound awesome.

(As someone who frequents New Orleans though, i must admit that i never ate a Lucky Dog.)

Damn it. I don't even know a place where i can pick up the New Yorker around here.

Somehow Pamuk turns a piece on simple junk food craving into a meditation on the curse of isolation. I love that lonely bastard.

Pamuk edits the Turkish newspaper Radikal for a day

The Guardian article calls Radikal, "a major Turkish newspaper." This CBC news article says, "While Radikal has a circulation of only about 30,000, it is a highly regarded political paper," and notes that its regular editor-in-chief Ismet Berkan had similar charges to Pamuk brought against him last year. The paper was devoted to free expression of artists and acknowledged a 1951 article denouncing the poet Nazim Hikmet. He offered himself as scapegoat for anything in the paper that the readers took offense to, and directed any praise to the regular staff of Radikal.

I wonder if he's going to get into trouble again?