NYT: A Grab Bag of Postmodern Literary Devices Helps Shape Orhan Pamuks Career

[pynchonoid]

A Grab Bag of Postmodern Literary Devices Helps Shape
Orhan Pamuk’s Career


[...] Set in the 17th century, on the eve of Ottoman
decline, and told as a sort of dream or fairy tale,
“The White Castle” is the story of two look-alikes, a
cranky Turkish scholar known as Hoja, or Master, and a
captured Venetian who becomes his slave. It ends with
the two men exchanging identities; after a military
defeat Hoja takes off into the fog for Venice, while
the Venetian remains behind, assuming Hoja’s name.

Many Western readers found Mr. Pamuk’s next two books,
“The Black Book” (1994) and “The New Life” (1997),
tougher going. Heavily influenced both by Borges and
Joyce, between them they empty the whole trunk of
postmodern literary devices: narratives within
narratives, texts that come alive, labyrinths of signs
and symbols, more doubleness and identity swapping.

“The New Life” is about a young man, Osman, whose life
is literally changed by reading a book — the exact
nature of which the reader never learns, unless
possibly it is the very one he is holding — and whose
search for a beguiling fellow reader, a young woman
named Janan, leads him on a surreal journey in which
nothing is exactly as it seems. In “The Black Book”
the protagonist, Galip, an Istanbul lawyer, searches
for his missing wife, whom he suspects has run off
with her half-brother, Jelal, a prominent newspaper
columnist. Investigating Jelal, Galip eventually
becomes him, wearing his clothes and even writing his
columns.

To this formidable arsenal of tricks, Mr. Pamuk’s next
book, “My Name Is Red,” added magic realism. This 2001
novel is a long and sprawling murder mystery set in
the late 16th century and told by 12 different
narrators, including a dog, a tree, a gold coin,
several dead people and even the color crimson, which
gives the book its title. But “My Name Is Red,” Mr.
Pamuk’s masterpiece in the opinion of many critics, is
also his richest expression of the doubleness of
Turkey, torn between past and present, European
modernity and Islamic traditionalism.

At its heart is a clash between styles of artistic
representation — traditional Persian miniature
painting and Western realism, in particular Italian
Renaissance painting, which the sultan has secretly
encouraged some artists to imitate — and each side is
so eloquently defended that the inevitable victory of
the West comes at a huge price.

“Snow,” Mr. Pamuk’s latest novel, by no means divests
itself of modernist special effects. It owes something
to Proust, even more to Kafka, and includes a
Borgesian moment in which events begin to take place
precisely because they have been written down first.
But the conflict at the heart of the book is a
particularly timely one: the question of whether young
girls should wear head scarves in school.

The protagonist, a failed poet and secular Turk named
Ka, who has been living in exile, returns to Turkey
and, posing as a journalist, investigates a rumor
about a remote village where some girls have killed
themselves rather then remove their scarves, as
Turkish laws requires. Ka quickly finds himself in a
fierce blizzard and, wandering from encounter to
encounter, finds all his certainties challenged; he
flirts with the idea of returning for good, not just
to Turkey but to the fold of Islam.

In the end, it almost goes without saying, he fits in
nowhere, and the snowstorm — blinding,
shape-distorting, but also beautiful and seductive —
proves to be metaphorical as well as literal. It is in
the very nature of being Turkish, Mr. Pamuk seems to
be saying, to find yourself caught in drifts of
contradiction. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/books/13pamu.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1160755493-L4NiVMT+e5OtgAKkXvTUzw

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