Tag Archives: John Lee

May 18, 2012 · 9:22 am

My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Erdağ M. Göknar

Mixed in with the many death-and-destruction titles I’ve been reading the last few months, my most recent choices inadvertently seem to have an added layer of death-and-destruction-in-the-name-of-God. Too many books, regardless of genre or target audience, seem to offer irrefutable proof that the rules and regulations of religion – any major religion! – certainly have had (and continue to have) dire consequences. Supreme irony indeed.

In My Name Is Red, 2006 Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk takes on the intertwinings of religion and art during the Ottoman Empire of the late-16th century. Considered to be the novel that cemented Pamuk’s international reputation, Red is an amalgamation of art history, religious theory, philosophical exploration, love story, and murder mystery. It begins with a talking corpse at the bottom of a well … and ends with a mother’s narrative bequeathal to her younger son Orhan (!) with the warning: “For the sake of a delightful and convincing story, there isn’t a lie Orhan wouldn’t deign to tell.” [In an interview that appears on his U.S. publisher's website, Pamuk says, "Orhan is not my alter ego, he is me. ... I also kept my mother's and brother's names in the story."]

Between the decaying corpse and this unreliable Orhan, multiple narrators – including a dog, a tree, a gold coin, a horse, as well as Death and Satan – take turns revealing the puzzle-piece-like chapters of a multi-faceted drama about the perils of making miniaturist art against the repressive doctrines of Islam. A master artist is dead, expunged from working further on the Sultan’s secret commission; more bloodshed is forthcoming. Death draws a man named Black home to Istanbul after 12 peripatetic years serving pashas, renewing his love for the girl of his dreams – who is also his cousin, 12 years his junior, who is now a married woman with two sons still awaiting the return of her missing husband. Only by exposing the murderer can Black hope to earn love’s consummation.

In my misplaced determination to whittle down my should-read stacks, Pamuk’s Snow and Museum of Innocence proved disappointing (although well-deserved kudos go to the ever-diligent John Lee, apparently the official Pamuk narrator). Red was certainly the better of the three, yet I remain befuddled as to its ubiquitous appeal. While these three tomes seem personally lost in translation, I confess to a fascination and appreciation for Pamuk’s entertaining metafictional self-references in each … not that I’ve ever laughed at him, but I’ll certainly remember having laughed with him. At least on the page.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2001 (United States)

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April 12, 2012 · 10:04 am

Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely

In spite of its heft (500+ pages, or 20.5 hours if you let the perfectly-paced John Lee read to you), not much really happens in The Museum of Innocence. I’m adding here the requisite spoiler alert, but I’m fairly certain that most readers will guess the outcome lonnnggggg before the final pages.

In Istanbul in 1975, rich man Kemal (30) falls in love with poor distant relation Füsun (18). Kemal goes ahead anyway with his long-planned engagement to perfect partner Sibel; Füsun disappears. Kemal finally breaks off with Sibel, finds Füsun, waits eight years for her to dump her “fatso” husband (by going to her family’s home some four times a week). Füsun dies. Kemal builds a museum to her memory, filled with everyday objects from her life (4,213 cigarette butts alone!). He passes on April 12, 2007 [hence today's post] on what would have been her 50th birthday. A character named Orhan Pamuk authors the dead man’s obsessive story.

In supreme irony, that writer-character – ”chain-smoking twenty-three-year-old Orhan” – makes his first appearance at Kemal and Sibel’s lavish engagement party. Kemal disses the young man as “nothing special,” then dismisses the entire Pamuk table – “his beautiful mother, his father, his elder brother, his uncle, and his cousins” – as “tedious.” Four hundred pages (and some three decades) later, that tedious young man morphs into “the esteemed Orhan Pamuk,” whom Kemal chooses to “[narrate] the story in my name, and with my approval” – which might remind devoted Pamuk readers that this meta-Orhan announced he was writing a new novel titled The Museum of Innocence about half-way through the real Pamuk’s Snow.

Kemal confesses on the second-to-the-last page of Museum that although he read Snow “all the way to the end,” it proved to be “a bit of a struggle” given his dislike of politics. Snow‘s protagonist Ka even gets a quick mention in Museum as meta-Orhan laments over the public’s accusations of misrepresentations in his work – which might make you consider why Kemal would choose this Orhan as his mouthpiece. Apolitical a character as Kemal might be, Museum merely glosses over class, East/West identity, restrictively gendered mores, the nature of literature (and so much more), for the numbing details of Kemal’s fixated stalking and skeezy kleptomania. By book’s end, perhaps we can just blame this meta-Orhan for all the novel’s weaknesses.

When I lamented over my grave disappointment to an erudite literary scholar buddy (because I knew he’s a huge fan of Pamuk’s Snow), he mentioned the post-Nobel curse that’s plagued other great writers like J.M. Coetzee; he also admitted he never finished Museum. Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature; his gorgeous Nobel Lecture, “My Father’s Suitcase,” makes for a heartfelt antidote to Museum. Interestingly, an actual museum is apparently still planned to open in a building that Pamuk bought in 1999 in the Çukurcuma neighborhood of Istanbul, where much of the novel is set.

Which means .. if, after you’ve read Museum, and still haven’t had enough of this obsession, rest assured, your entry is guaranteed on page 520.

Tidbit: I can’t believe this turned up in my inbox less than an hour after I hit ‘publish’ for this post: The Innocence of Objects – Pamuk’s catalog of the objects in his real-life Museum (!) – debuts this fall! The timing feels surreal!

Readers: Adult

Published: 2009 (United States)

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August 26, 2011 · 4:35 pm

Snow by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely

Here are the two most important things I got out of Snow: 1. it definitely had memorable glimpses of Turkish social and cultural history that I had little to no knowledge of previously; 2. Orhan Pamuk is a clever, intelligent writer, which – given his array of hard-to-miss international accolades – I definitely had an inkling of before opening a single page.

So here’s what I didn’t experience: the highly-anticipated WOW factor in finally reading the 2006 Nobel Prize-winning author’s work. Why, oh why …

The basic story revolves around a poet named Ka, recently returned to his native Turkey from 12 years of political exile in Germany. He travels from Istanbul to a remote town, Kars, allegedly to write an investigative piece about the recent succession of suicides by young women – the “head-scarf girls” – who chose what they believed to be an honorable death rather than impiously baring their heads. In this provincial society, certainly no separation of church and state exists.

While in Kars, Ka is serendipitously reunited with a woman from his student days, the beautiful İpek, who conveniently happens to be divorced from her husband. Ka, convinced he is madly in love with İpek, is suddenly inspired by fresh creative surges that allow him to write one stunning poem after another. Amidst finding love, Ka is swayed back and forth in his religious beliefs by various residents he meets, befriends, rejects, and even betrays, who run the gamut from avowed secularist to wanted militant Muslim terrorist.

Beyond the story, the more intriguing characteristic about this novel is its format, presented in multiple layers of exposition. While Ka’s is clearly the primary point of view, the actual I-narrator is a character named Orhan who is Ka’s longtime novelist friend. Years after Ka’s death, Orhan journeys to Kars hoping to find further record of Ka’s missing poems. This Orhan happens to mention he’s working on a new novel, The Museum of Innocence, which is the title of the real-life Pamuk’s most recent novel, published in 2008 and in English translation in 2009.

At book’s end appears a provocative appendix, “The Order in Which Ka Wrote His Poems,” complete with poem title, the chapter in the novel in which the poem is mentioned, and the corresponding page number … as if the reader could – should? – continue the poetic search long after the story itself has concluded. The novel’s potential afterlife proves to be more captivating than the actual pages … long after the book is back on the shelf, Ka’s missing poems continue to resonate.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2004 (United States)

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