Orhan Pamuk

Author

• Born: June 7, 1952
• Place of Birth: Istanbul, Turkey

TURKISH-BORN NOVELIST

Orhan Pamuk has been referred to as the most acclaimed Turkish novelist of his generation, embracing universal themes and winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Born: June 7, 1952; Istanbul, Turkey

Full name: Ferit Orhan Pamuk (fay-DEET or-HAHN pah-MOOK)

Areas of achievement: Literature

Early Life

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul, Turkey, and grew up in the middle-class Nisantasi district, the setting for many of his novels. Pamuk, his parents, his older brother, his grandmother, and several aunts and uncles lived on different floors of an apartment building, and Pamuk would continue living there as an adult. The family was well-to-do through a fortune amassed in the 1930s by Pamuk’s grandfather, a civil engineer and industrialist. Upon the grandfather’s death, Pamuk’s father and paternal uncle, both engineers, took over the estate and lost much of the family fortune. His father often disappeared to Paris, and his parents eventually divorced.

Pamuk attended Robert College, an elite, Americanized high school in Istanbul. Young Pamuk wanted to become a painter, but his family expected him to become an engineer. He studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University, his grandfather’s alma mater, and took part unenthusiastically in the school’s left-wing culture, preferring William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf to Marxist tracts. Pamuk was pleased that both his grandfather and Faulkner’s built railroads.

Never taking architecture too seriously, Pamuk dropped out before completing his degree. Determined to become a writer, he completed his undergraduate education by obtaining a degree in journalism from the University of Istanbul in 1976. When he was twenty-two, he locked himself in his bedroom to write but seemed to be unproductive for eight years, while his mother begged him to apply to medical school. In 1980, he discarded a novel about student revolutionaries, inspired by Joseph Conrad, and began a new work.

Life’s Work

In 1982, Pamuk married Aylin Tofajjal Türegün, a historian, and published his first novel, Cevdet Bey ve ogullari (1982; Cevdet Bey and His Sons). The novel looks at the influence of Western capitalism on Turkish society as represented by Cevdet Bey, a Muslim businessman, and his descendants. While Bey considers himself responsible for his family and indebted to his nation, his sons prefer to define themselves as individuals.

If Pamuk’s first novel was said to resemble the fiction of Thomas Mann, his second reminded critics of the modernism of Faulkner and Woolf. Sessiz ev (1983; Silent House) tells its story from five points of view and presents a week in the life of three upper-class siblings amid the political chaos of Turkey in the early 1980s.

Pamuk began breaking away from his modernist models with Beyaz Kale (1985; The White Castle). Its protagonists seem to be mirror images—one Turkish, the other Venetian—and one among many examples of doubles appearing in Pamuk’s fiction. A fantasy set in the 1690s, the novel has been described as having an intellectual playfulness that helped establish Pamuk’s reputation as a cerebral writer and won him his first international acclaim.

Pamuk was in New York from 1985 to 1988 as a visiting scholar at Columbia University while his wife attended graduate school. He wrote Kara Kitap (1990; The Black Book) in the university’s main library. In this novel, Pamuk tells the story of a lawyer who roams Istanbul’s streets looking for his missing wife. The lawyer assumes the identity of his wife’s half-brother, who has also disappeared. Yeni Hayat (1994; The New Life) also presents a man searching for a lost woman, as well as a group of people devoted to a mysterious book offering the hope of a new life.

Set in the sixteenth century, Benim adim Kirmizi (1998; My Name Is Red) is a postmodern mystery about the murder of an artist. Its narrators include a corpse, a horse, a tree, a coin, and the color red. Kar (2002; Snow), his first novel translated by Maureen Freely, with whom Pamuk attended high school, looks at the clash between Islamic fundamentalism and the ideals of the secular West as a writer returns to Turkey from exile in Germany. Masumiyet Müzesi (2008; The Museum of Innocence) is another treatment of lost love. The novel, encompassing the changes in Turkish society over the final quarter of the twentieth century, features characters from earlier novels and a cameo by Pamuk himself. Pamuk also published several nonfiction works, including the memoir Istanbul: Hatiralar ve Sehir (2003; Istanbul: Memories and the City). Subsequent works included the novels Sessiz Ev (2012; Silent House), Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık (2015; A Strangeness in My Mind), Kırmızı saçlı kadın (2017; The Red-Haired Woman), and Veba Geceleri (2022; Nights of Plague).

Pamuk was the subject of considerable controversy in Turkey through his campaigns for Kurdish rights and against police brutality and other authoritarian practices. In 2005, after Pamuk told a Swiss journalist that Turkey was ignoring its history of killing thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians, he was charged with “insulting Turkish identity” and faced three years in prison. Following an international uproar, the threat of prosecution was dropped. During this turmoil, Pamuk, divorced since 2001, lived for a time in New York, and Columbia University hired him to teach one semester a year.

Significance

Pamuk has won international acclaim unprecedented for a Turkish novelist. Only Yasar Kemal came close to finding as many readers outside Turkey. Pamuk was also popular in his native country, with many of his novels reaching the top of the Turkish bestseller list. The consistent quality and scope of his fiction and the universality of his themes helped Pamuk become the first Turk to earn the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, an honor dismissed as politically motivated by some Turks but acclaimed by the international literary community.

Bibliography

Eberstadt, Fernanda. “The Best Seller of Byzantium.” New York Times Magazine 4 May 1997: 33–37. Print. Biographical profile of Pamuk emphasizing Turkish politics.

Göknar, Erdağ. "Plagues and Painting with Words: Glimpses of Orhan Pamuk’s Writing Process." Los Angeles Review of Books, 8 Feb. 2023, lareviewofbooks.org/article/plagues-and-painting-with-words-glimpses-of-orhan-pamuks-writing-process. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

McGaha, Michael D. Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk: The Writer in His Novels. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2008. Print. Places Pamuk’s work within the context of Turkish history and literature. Includes a brief biography.

Mirze, Z. Esra. “Implementing Disform: An Interview with Orhan Pamuk.” PMLA 123.1 (Jan. 2008): 176–80. Print. Pamuk discusses his fiction, Turkish politics, and artistic freedom.

Perlson, Hili. "Orhan Pamuk on Dioramas, Dostoevsky, and the Death of the Painter in Him." Stir World, 18 June 2024, www.stirworld.com/see-features-orhan-pamuk-on-dioramas-dostoevsky-and-the-death-of-the-painter-in-him. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.