A Quick Guide to Orhan Pamuk

One of Pamuk's most enduring themes is the tension between the values of East and West. “Snow” (2002), his latest novel, is set in a snowbound city on the edges of contemporary Turkey—and, symbolically, on the margins of Western civilization. Its protagonist, a poet, finds himself caught in a web of conflicting ideologies, from religious extremism to totalitarianism—all the -isms that have stalked the Turkish Republic since it first emerged as a secularized, Westernized state out of the ruins of the Ottoman past a century ago.

"Snow" takes place in the 1990s in the actual Turkish city of Kars, but while the story, packed with nationalists, socialists and militant Islamists, has a superficial currency, its reality is dreamlike. Snow falls for most of the novel, isolating the town, where a poet, called Ka, has come to investigate a series of suicides by teenage Muslim girls who refuse the secular government's order to remove their headscarves. Artistically blocked for years, Ka, a Westernized sophisticate, suddenly begins to write poetry again. He falls in love so deeply that he begins to betray everything—even his own scruples—to preserve his happiness. Because he believes in nothing beyond his own desire, he is marked for tragedy.

In “Istanbul” (2005), which is both an autobiography and a brilliant portrait of modern Turkey, Pamuk uses his native city—which is located literally on the geographical dividing line between the Christian West and the Muslim East—as a metaphor for a culture that wants to look forward but can’t help simultaneously looking backward—with melancholy and a terrific sense of loss—at the glories of its past civilization. It is also a very sensual, almost street-by-street celebration of a very real place. Few writers mix ideas with the grittiness of the real world better than Pamuk, who has always identified with the outsider, the observer, the recording angel: the "imaginative exploration of the other, the enemy who resides in all our minds" is a novelist's most important function, he says.

What’s his writing like?

Here’s a sample, from “Istanbul”:

To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire gloom, a pained submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty that must be endured like an incurable disease. It is resignation that nourishes Istanbul’s inward-looking soul. To see the city in black and white, to see the haze that sits over it and breathe in the melancholy its inhabitants have embraced as their common fate, you need only to fly in from a rich western city and head straight to the crowded streets; if it’s winter, every man on the Galata Bridge will be wearing the same, pale, drab, shadowy clothes. The Istanbullus of my era have shunned the vibrant reds, greens and oranges of their rich, proud ancestors; to foreign visitors, it looks as if they have done so deliberately, to make a moral point. They have not—but there is in their dense gloom a suggestion of modesty. This is how you dress in a black-and-white city, they seem to be saying; this is how you grieve for a city that has been in decline for a hundred and fifty years.