Orhan Pamuk, the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, is much better known in this country than many recent winners, because most of his books have actually been published and widely reviewed here. It also does not hurt that he recently got himself in political hot water in his native Turkey and then became a cause célèbre.
In a 2005 interview with a Swiss magazine, Mr. Pamuk talked about the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915, something Turkey still does not acknowledge, and soon found himself accused of “insulting Turkish identity.” The charges were eventually dropped, but only after the case attracted so much international protest and publicity that it proved embarrassing to the Turkish government.
Mr. Pamuk is a somewhat reluctant political figure. Only his most recent novel, “Snow,” released in the United States in 2004, is specifically contemporary in its setting and concerns: in this case the conflict between Turkish secularism and the rise of militant Islam. But in another way the tension between East and West, between the secular Turkey of Ataturk and the older Ottoman tradition, and even between traditional and postmodern styles of storytelling, have shaped his entire career.
“The White Castle,” the first of Mr. Pamuk's books to be translated into English, in 1991, put him on the map. In some ways it remains his most accessible, establishing from the beginning the theme of East versus West, and also introducing what would prove to be an enduring Pamuk preoccupation: the idea of doubleness or split identity. In the first chapter of his latest book, “Istanbul: Memories and the City” (published in English in 2005), he recalls fantasizing as a child about “another Orhan,” a twin version of himself, who lives in another apartment with another family.
Set in the 17th century, on the eve of Ottoman decline, and told as a sort of dream or fairy tale, “The White Castle” is the story of two look-alikes, a cranky Turkish scholar known as Hoja, or Master, and a captured Venetian who becomes his slave. It ends with the two men exchanging identities; after a military defeat Hoja takes off into the fog for Venice, while the Venetian remains behind, assuming Hoja's name.
Many Western readers found Mr. Pamuk's next two books, “The Black Book” (1994) and “The New Life” (1997), tougher going. Heavily influenced both by Borges and Joyce, between them they empty the whole trunk of postmodern literary devices: narratives within narratives, texts that come alive, labyrinths of signs and symbols, more doubleness and identity swapping.
“The New Life” is about a young man, Osman, whose life is literally changed by reading a book — the exact nature of which the reader never learns, unless possibly it is the very one he is holding — and whose search for a beguiling fellow reader, a young woman named Janan, leads him on a surreal journey in which nothing is exactly as it seems. In “The Black Book” the protagonist, Galip, an Istanbul lawyer, searches for his missing wife, whom he suspects has run off with her half-brother, Jelal, a prominent newspaper columnist. Investigating Jelal, Galip eventually becomes him, wearing his clothes and even writing his columns.
To this formidable arsenal of tricks, Mr. Pamuk's next book, “My Name Is Red,” added magic realism. This 2001 novel is a long and sprawling murder mystery set in the late 16th century and told by 12 different narrators, including a dog, a tree, a gold coin, several dead people and even the color crimson, which gives the book its title. But “My Name Is Red,” Mr. Pamuk's masterpiece in the opinion of many critics, is also his richest expression of the doubleness of Turkey, torn between past and present, European modernity and Islamic traditionalism.
At its heart is a clash between styles of artistic representation — traditional Persian miniature painting and Western realism, in particular Italian Renaissance painting, which the sultan has secretly encouraged some artists to imitate — and each side is so eloquently defended that the inevitable victory of the West comes at a huge price.
“Snow,” Mr. Pamuk's latest novel, by no means divests itself of modernist special effects. It owes something to Proust, even more to Kafka, and includes a Borgesian moment in which events begin to take place precisely because they have been written down first. But the conflict at the heart of the book is a particularly timely one: the question of whether young girls should wear head scarves in school.
The protagonist, a failed poet and secular Turk named Ka, who has been living in exile, returns to Turkey and, posing as a journalist, investigates a rumor about a remote village where some girls have killed themselves rather then remove their scarves, as Turkish laws requires. Ka quickly finds himself in a fierce blizzard and, wandering from encounter to encounter, finds all his certainties challenged; he flirts with the idea of returning for good, not just to Turkey but to the fold of Islam.
In the end, it almost goes without saying, he fits in nowhere, and the snowstorm — blinding, shape-distorting, but also beautiful and seductive — proves to be metaphorical as well as literal. It is in the very nature of being Turkish, Mr. Pamuk seems to be saying, to find yourself caught in drifts of contradiction.
