{"id":58734,"date":"2012-11-10T08:47:24","date_gmt":"2012-11-10T06:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=58734"},"modified":"2014-01-07T21:32:55","modified_gmt":"2014-01-07T19:32:55","slug":"a-book-is-a-promise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2012\/11\/10\/a-book-is-a-promise\/","title":{"rendered":"A book is a promise"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<h1>Orhan Pamuk: A book is a promise<\/h1>\n<h2>The Turkish laureate Orhan Pamuk tells Sameer Rahim why he has made his fictional museum a reality.<\/h2>\n<div>\n<div id=\"storyEmbSlide\">\n<div>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-58735\" title=\"InnocenceOfObjects_BackCover.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/rahim_main_2392424b.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"620\" height=\"388\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/rahim_main_2392424b.jpg 620w, https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/rahim_main_2392424b-300x188.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\" \/><\/div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Orhan Pamuk, in the museum he created for his novel.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>By Sameer Rahim<\/p>\n<p>7:00AM GMT 09 Nov 2012<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>In Orhan Pamuk\u2019s second novel, <em>Silent House<\/em>, published in Turkey in 1983 and newly translated into English, the lovelorn Hasan secretly looks through his beloved\u2019s handbag while she is out swimming. Among the suntan lotion, wallet, hair clips and cigarettes, he spies a green comb. Before she returns he swipes the comb, keeping it as a memento of his unrequited passion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>\u201cBefore I reread the novel, I had forgotten about this moment,\u201d Pamuk tells me when I meet him at his publisher\u2019s offices. Objects are incredibly important in the fiction of the Nobel Prize-winner: in <em>My Name Is Red<\/em>, his murder mystery set among Ottoman miniaturist painters, one chapter is narrated by a coin. Pamuk\u2019s object obsession was brought to new heights in his wonderful 2009 novel, <em>The Museum of Innocence<\/em>, in which the narrator, Kemal, like Hasan in unrequited love, collects dozens of things owned by his beautiful cousin F\u00fcsun, and arranges them in a museum.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Pamuk, who was born in 1952 to upper-class parents, assures me that his interest in stealing women\u2019s trinkets is imaginative, not autobiographical. \u201cGetting an object secretly and returning home is not my fantasy, but the idea of possessing a woman in a culture where a man and a woman cannot come together outside of marriage that easily. You cannot possess her sexually, but you can possess the objects.\u201d He speaks English rapidly, only occasionally groping for a word; when he finds it, he takes off fluently.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>In other respects, Hasan in <em>Silent House<\/em> is a very different character from the upper-class dilettante Kemal from <em>The Museum of Innocence<\/em>. Hasan has dropped out of school is hanging out with Turkish nationalists. He falls for an upper-class Leftist with a taste for Turgenev. His story ends in violence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>I wonder where this pervasive longing comes from. \u201cIn classical Islamic literature, the desire for the beloved is a metaphor for the desire for God,\u201d says Pamuk. \u201cBut in my novel, Hasan\u2019s longing, in all its radicalism, reflects a desire for a better life. I like that idea; it\u2019s an artistic idea. But it\u2019s also a very realistic idea. We fall in love more deeply when we\u2019re unhappy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"tmg-related-links\">\n<div>\n<h2>Related Articles<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>Orhan Pamuk &#8211; The Innocence of Objects\n<p>07 Nov 2012<\/li>\n<li>The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk: review\n<p>18 Mar 2011<\/li>\n<li>Orhan Pamuk interveiw\n<p>01 Jan 2010<\/li>\n<li>The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk: review\n<p>27 Feb 2011<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>Anyone who has visited Istanbul will know the city is haunted by its Ottoman past. Turkey\u2019s new assertiveness \u2013 over its former possession Syria, for example \u2013 has led some observers to think the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, longs to revive the past. Pamuk, though, is nervous of being drawn on the political aspects of his work: \u201cI never thought it was a political novel when I published it,\u201d he says of <em>Silent House<\/em>, \u201cand no one said it was a political novel in Turkey.\u201d If one visits the mausoleum of Mehmet the Conqueror in Istanbul, I press, there is a strikingly nationalist atmosphere. \u201cIstanbul is a vast place,\u201d he says carefully. \u201cThere are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>His wariness is understandable. After his 2005 comments highlighting the Armenian massacres following the break up of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish authorities pursued him under Article 301 of the penal code, which made it a crime to \u201cinsult Turkishness\u201d. The case ended in 2009 and the law has since been amended, but he still reportedly has bodyguards when he is in Istanbul. (He spends the rest of his time teaching at Columbia University, New York.) \u201cEveryone is saying the same thing now,\u201d he says of the Armenian issue, the note of pride at having opened up freedom of speech in his homeland tinged with melancholy at what his stance has cost him.<\/p>\n<p>He is delighted the Turkish public took so warmly to <em>The Museum of Innocence<\/em>. \u201cIt was a sweet reception \u2013 not something, I confess, I was used to from the Turkish media. <em>The Museum of Innocence<\/em> is not about politics, it\u2019s a love story, but I think it\u2019s political in the sense that it wants to capture how a man suppresses a woman. The more he is in love, the more he suppresses her \u2013 a typical non-Western, Middle Eastern situation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Not that one should make easy assumptions about the place of women in Turkish society. \u201cI have seen so many photos of women on the covers of English books about feminism and Islam,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s almost nearly always the same photo: two women wearing headscarves, driving around on a motorcycle, or using a computer, or doing something modern. These are naive, almost uneducated Western responses in understanding what is happening. They seemingly imply that if you wear a headscarf you don\u2019t ever leave the house, whereas actually, you only wear the headscarf in order to leave the house.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In an unusual twist, <em>The Museum of Innocence <\/em>is not only a novel: it is also now an actual museum. In April this year Pamuk opened for real what his character Kemal created in his fiction: a collection of F\u00fcsun\u2019s objects arranged according to his memories. It is an \u201cuncanny\u201d project, he admits, but one that has happily taken him back to his roots as an architecture student and an artist: his earliest ambition was to be a painter.<\/p>\n<p>Pamuk corrects me when I describe it as though it were, like a film, the museum version of the novel. \u201cIt\u2019s not that I wrote the novel first and it was successful, and I thought let\u2019s do an adaptation. I wrote the novel as I collected the objects that would end up in the museum.\u201d To help him describe them in the novel, the author bought his character\u2019s dress, earrings and slippers, now displayed in the museum. \u201cPostcards, photos, objects, not only F\u00fcsun\u2019s, but the whole epoch,\u201d he says, twitching with excitement. \u201cIt was a desire to grasp that period with objects.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He carries on: \u201cWhen people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass and all they will remember are five pages. They don\u2019t remember the text \u2013 instead they remember the sensations the text gives them. In <em>The Museum of Innocence<\/em>, we are trying to give illustrations to those emotions. The layout of the museum is based on the chapters of the novel: the novel has 83 chapters so the museum has 83 display cabinets, and each box corresponds to the emotion of that chapter.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>One of the most extraordinary exhibits is the collection of F\u00fcsun\u2019s 4,213 cigarette stubs saved by Kemal. Each one is handcrafted to represent F\u00fcsun\u2019s emotional state on the day she smoked it: some are twisted from when she angrily crushed it on the ashtray, some only half-smoked from when she had to leave early; all have traces of red lipstick. If this were not detailed enough, Pamuk writes a sentence under each one adding up to a miniature history of their relationship: \u201cYou\u2019re very cautious\u201d, \u201cLate-night shame\u201d, \u201cThere is no turning back\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt didn\u2019t take too long \u2013 but it\u2019s fun,\u201d he says, bursting into laughter. \u201cA lot of work \u2013 but all good fun!\u201d He took six months off his forthcoming novel \u2013 also set in Seventies Istanbul, but this time from the point of view of a street vendor \u2013 to complete the project. Since the museum opened it has been well attended \u2013 about one third are tourists and about two thirds Turks.<\/p>\n<p>Making a real museum memorialising a fictional person you have created might indicate that Pamuk has become as obsessed as his character. \u201cI\u2019m not an obsessive collector,\u201d he says. \u201cI perhaps have 16,000 books and wouldn\u2019t mind if one was stolen. A collector is a person who has 16,000 books and he is proud to have not read any of them. I\u2019m not like that \u2013 I use them and read them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Pamuk has the habit of slipping a character called \u201cOrhan Pamuk\u201d into his novels: in <em>Silent House<\/em> he is \u201csupposedly writing a novel\u201d; in <em>The Museum of Innocence<\/em>, he is at Kemal\u2019s engagement party, chain-smoking with a \u201cmocking smile\u201d. Why is he so interested in blurring the boundary between fiction and reality? \u201cI appear in my novels not necessarily in a Hitchcock way,\u201d he says. \u201cNot to make people wonder what is fiction and what is reality, nothing like that, but I appear to remind the reader that this is fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Has he put his own picture in the museum? \u201cI appear,\u201d he teases. \u201cThere are little hints to me and my family, private jokes, but you don\u2019t miss much if you don\u2019t get it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He has lived with these objects for so long they are not mere fictional props but, like the books on his shelf, resonant with gathered meaning. \u201cAll art is about seeing other worlds through the details of this world. Holding a copy of a book is akin to holding optimism in your hand \u2013 that you will follow the story, you will learn about the human heart. A book is a promise.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>* Silent House is published by Faber at \u00a318.99 and The Museum of Innocence at \u00a37.99<\/p>\n<p>* The Innocence of Objects, the museum catalogue, is published by Abrams at \u00a321.99<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Orhan Pamuk: A book is a promise The Turkish laureate Orhan Pamuk tells Sameer Rahim why he has made his fictional museum a reality. Orhan Pamuk, in the museum he created for his novel. By Sameer Rahim 7:00AM GMT 09 Nov 2012 &nbsp; In Orhan Pamuk\u2019s second novel, Silent House, published in Turkey in 1983 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":58735,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2939],"tags":[4462],"class_list":["post-58734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cultureart","tag-orhan-pamuk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}