Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul's Melancholy, Prosecuted

In February 2005 a Turkish novelist told the Swiss magazine *Das Magazin*: "Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do." A lawyer promptly filed suit under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which made it a crime to insult "Turkishness." Charges were dropped in January 2006 and then reopened. In October of that same year the Swedish Academy gave Orhan Pamuk the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the first Turk to receive it, and he received it while under prosecution at home.

A Declining Upper-Class Family

He was born in Istanbul on 7 June 1952 into a wealthy but declining upper-class family — a specific social position, secular, Westernised, and slowly running out of money, which supplied the emotional weather of nearly everything he later wrote. He was educated at Robert College, the city's elite American secondary school.

The formative fact of his childhood was not literary but visual: he wanted to be a painter. That ambition survives in the prose, which is unusually preoccupied with looking — with pictures, with objects, with the way a city is seen.

Architecture, Then Abandonment

He enrolled to study architecture at Istanbul Technical University, the nearest respectable discipline to painting. Three years in, he abandoned it. He took a degree from the Institute of Journalism at the University of Istanbul in 1976 and began writing seriously in 1974, which is to say he decided to be a novelist before he had any evidence it would work.

The evidence arrived slowly. His first novel, written as *Karanlık ve Işık* and published in 1982 as *Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları*, shared the 1979 Milliyet Press Novel Contest prize — a family chronicle in the nineteenth-century manner, produced by a young man who would spend the rest of his career dismantling that manner.

Turkey's Best-Selling Writer

What followed is one of the more consistent bodies of work in contemporary fiction: *Sessiz Ev* (Silent House, 1983), *Beyaz Kale* (The White Castle, 1985), *Kara Kitap* (The Black Book, 1990), *Yeni Hayat* (The New Life, 1994) — which became the fastest-selling book in Turkish history — *Benim Adım Kırmızı* (My Name Is Red, 1998), *Kar* (Snow, 2002), *Masumiyet Müzesi* (The Museum of Innocence, 2008), *Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık* (A Strangeness in My Mind, 2014), *Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın* (The Red-Haired Woman, 2016) and *Veba Geceleri* (Nights of Plague, 2021).

He has sold more than 13 million books in 63 languages and is Turkey's best-selling writer. *My Name Is Red* took the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 2002 and the International Dublin Literary Award in 2003.

Article 301

The 2005 prosecution turned a novelist into a test case. Pamuk's own account was that his point had been about freedom of speech in Turkey rather than about history as such — a distinction that satisfied nobody, since the prosecution proved his point by existing. International writers mobilised: José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez and Günter Grass among them. The criminal case eventually dissolved, but on 27 March 2011 a court ordered him to pay 6,000 lira in compensation to five individuals for insulting their honour.

What the Citation Named

The Nobel motivation of 2006 honoured a writer "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures." Both halves are precise. Istanbul is not a setting in Pamuk's work but its central character and its governing mood — a specifically Turkish melancholy that he made legible to readers who have never been there. And "clash and interlacing" is a better formulation than the lazy "East meets West": his subject is not two civilisations colliding but the impossibility of separating them inside a single person.

He describes himself as a cultural Muslim — identifying with Islam historically and culturally while disclaiming religious belief — which is roughly the position his novels dramatise.

A Museum That Actually Exists

In one of the odder acts in modern literature, Pamuk built the Museum of Innocence. Not in a novel: in a house in Istanbul, filled with the everyday objects that appear in the book of the same name. It is open to visitors. A novel and a museum were designed together, each authenticating the other, and the project was later extended into the documentary *The Innocence of Memories*. Whatever else it is, it is the most complete refusal of the boundary between fiction and object that any major novelist has attempted.

Why Orhan Is Called a Genius

The identifiable faculty is the conversion of a private mood into a transmissible one. What the Nobel committee called "the melancholic soul of his native city" is a local and largely untranslatable feeling; Pamuk's achievement was to build narrative structures that carry it into sixty-three languages without it turning into tourism. That is harder than it sounds, and the Swedish Academy's phrase — "discovered new symbols" — is a technical claim, not a compliment. He built devices for the job: multiple unreliable narrators, objects that accumulate meaning until they become arguments, plots that are also epistemological puzzles about who is entitled to represent whom. The Museum of Innocence takes this to its logical end by manufacturing the objects themselves.

The counter-case has two strands. The first is that his international standing has always exceeded his domestic one, and that some of his global prominence derives from the 2005 prosecution and the political appetite in the West for a liberal Turkish dissident — a charge he cannot disprove and which the timing of the Nobel does nothing to dispel. The second is formal: the novels can be slow and heavily architectural, the ideas visible through the story like scaffolding, and readers who want narrative propulsion often do not find it. He is a writer of atmosphere and structure rather than of momentum. Set against that is the consistency — four decades, eleven novels, no obvious decline — and the fact that he did all of it in Turkish, for that readership first.

The Standing of a National Novelist

Pamuk holds the Robert Yik-Fong Tam professorship in the humanities at Columbia and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018. He married the historian Aylin Türegün in 1982 and divorced in 2002; their daughter is named Rüya, the Turkish word for dream. He married Aslı Akyavaş in 2022. He goes on writing in Turkish, about Istanbul, having stayed a Turkish novelist rather than becoming an exiled one — which, given that the state once took him to court over a sentence spoken to a Swiss magazine, is the most substantial thing anyone could say about him.

Achievements

• Independent Foreign Fiction Prize — 1990
• Grinzane Cavour Prize — 2002
• Peace Prize of the German Publishers' and Booksellers' Association — 2005
• Notable work: The White Castle
• Notable work: The Black Book
• Notable work: The New Life
• Notable work: My Name Is Red
• Genres: autobiography and essay