A Turkish novelist makes a breakthrough
Reviewed by Susan Miron
Three times in The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's preeminent novelist, has different voices marvel: "Nothing can be as astounding as life — except writing."
In this complex and artful book, he sets out to prove he's got all the razzle-dazzle, craft and cleverness to place this, his fourth novel, securely on the literary map. While Pamuk's last novel — the slender, Intriguing The White Castle — garnered favorable reviews when it appeared in 1991, that book seems now almost like a warm-up for this breakthrough novel, a literary sensation that spawned vicious media attacks against its 42-year-old author in Turkey.
It is clear from the epigraphs that Pamuk has used with each chapter that the unmistakably bookish writer has digested the best of both Western and Eastern literature. Often compared to Anton Shammas, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce, Pamuk here brings to mind Lewis Carroll cross-pollinated with a Turkish mutation of Philip Roth at his postmodern wackiest.
Two questions fester at the heart of The Black Book and The White Castle: Just how deep are Asian and European Influences In Turkish civilization and identity, and how successfully can two look-alikes change identities? How permeable are the boundaries of self, and how convincingly can we change our Identities?
Pamuk's characters seem to inhabit a Wonderland of personality flux, inebriated with the possibilities that a new identity might confer, yet at the same time, haunted by the feeling that they seem to have become their own ghosts. Add to this heady mixture Pamuk's insistence that we must be ourselves, rather than "imitations" of ourselves, and his idea that we can "read" words and letters in faces, "penetrating the hidden poetry in a countenance, the terrifying mystery in a gaze." Now you have an idea of the looking-glass realm into which Pamuk leads the reader, a world in a constant state of mutation, full of distorting mirrors, puzzling dreams, private messages that yearn for decoding, where distinctions between the imitator and imitated dissolve "into the mist and smoke of imagination."
As The Black Book opens, Ruya, the wife and first cousin of an Istanbul lawyer, Galip, has just vanished, leaving behind a goodbye letter — 19 words in green ink, including the conspiratorial and cryptic message: "Handle Mom and the others."
Has Ruya, Galip's playmate and love since early childhood, abandoned their marriage or merely their apartment? And why on Earth has she absconded with, we surmise, her half-brother, the famous newspaper columnist Jelal, 20 years her senior?
Chapters focusing on Galip's week-long investigation into the disappearance of Ruya and Jelal alternate with chapters of hypnotically alluring tales written by Jelal. In his quest to find the missing duo, Galip inexorably moves into the life his cousin vacated. He searches Jelal's writings for clues and begins writing Jelal's newspaper column. He wears Jelal's clothes, answers his phone and receives death threats meant for Jelal. In a wonderful chapter, "I Am Not a Mental Case, Just One of Your Loyal Readers," a hysterical reader lashes out with what seems like Pamuk's real message: "No one can ever be himself in this land! In the land of the defeated ... to be is to be someone else ... Who's going to prove to me that my whole life was not just a hoax, a bad joke?"
Beneath the literary bravura and legerdemain, behind the cute postmodern exchanges with the reader, lurk wretched sadness and a nihilistic nightmare in Pamuk's Istanbul Itself, "a grand place, an incomprehensible place," as fraught with puzzlement as the human heart.
"Even setting one foot in Istanbul was to surrender, or admit defeat," Pamuk writes. "That frightful city now rolled with the images that we once only saw in the movies. Hopeless crowds, dilapidated cars, bridges that slowly sank in the water, piles of tin cans, highways made out of potholes, meaningless torn panels, minarets devoid of calls to prayer, mounds of rubble, dust, mud ... Nothing could be expected from such wreckage."
The Black Book slithers through a dizzying maze of genres — detective story, political and historical commentary, parable and fable. In part, It Is an unabashed ode to the joy of writing, our "sole consolation."
Pamuk has modestly stated that all he wanted to do In this novel "was to write a huge, richly textured narrative that would capture the schizophrenic angst of Istanbul."
A masterful storyteller, Pamuk succeeds at capturing far more than the tragic drama of his hometown.
Susan Miron is a writer who lives in the Boston area.