Nobels: 2006: Orhan Pamuk

I skip over Doris Lessing and come to Orhan Pamuk and his third novel The White Castle. It is a short book (<150 pp) but it felt much longer, and not in a good way.

The story is quite sparse: an unnamed narrator, an Italian scholar, in captured into slavery in 17th century Istanbul. His owner, a Turkish scientist (more or less) called Hoja, works with him on a range of projects under the patronage of the Sultan, culminating in the invention of a military machine which ultimately proves ineffective in battle. During their collaboration their identities become almost fused, but towards the end one of them runs away and is reported to have gone to Italy and resumed the narrator's pre-capture life.

The whole point of the narrative is in the relationship between the narrator and Hoja and you can find material there for considering the following Big Questions:

- how and how far can a man know himself
- the differences between eastern and western philosophies of:
-- the self
-- the universe
-- dining tables
- the use and misuse of narrative
- our old friend, the unreliable narrator

It's in the nature of these things that no firm answer is given. Indeed, the whole narrative, and the framing narrative (an introduction by a fictitious modern scholar) is self-undermining.

It's compulsory to mention Borges in this context, and I was reminded of the way Borges constantly irritates me: huge intelligence put to the service of luxurious games. I think the worst thing is the way there's no anchoring of the play of ideas to any solidity of emotional involvement. But that's just me. Lots of people love this sort of thing and I can't possibly say they're wrong. I won't be searching out any of his other books.

Pamuk's Nobel citation says that he "in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures", which is about as bland as you can get. As with Alexievich a few years later, it's likely that the award was in part a reaction to the state-supported attacks on some unpopular opinions. Pamuk spoke up about the death of Armenians at the hands of Turkey, a subject that is extremely contentious, and the Academy - rightly, I'd say - wanted to defend free speech. You can read more about it at Pamuk's wikipedia entry.