Tag: Orhan Pamuk

The Success of Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence

A Kaleidoscope of Charms

By ANDREW FINKEL

Orhan Pamuk reflected in a display at the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul on April 27.Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesOrhan Pamuk reflected in a display at the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul on April 27.

ISTANBUL — “We are all diminished by the success of our friends” is a saying that lies at the bedrock of the politics of envy. If true, it means that I, along with fellow squad members of my high school junior-varsity basketball team, have every reason to feel just a few centimeters high. Only one of us, Orhan Pamuk, has gone on to win a Nobel Prize.

That I manage to keep my own envy under control is the result of having watched Orhan swim in a sea of resentment far deeper than I could possibly imagine.

In December 2005, I used those long-dormant basketball skills to elbow my way through the crush of an Istanbul courtroom to watch him answer charges of “publicly denigrating Turkish identity.” The trial was like an absurd scene from one of his novels, the result of an off-the-cuff remark to a Swiss reporter that no one in Turkey spoke of the deaths of a million Armenians or of 30,000 Kurds.

This was enough to turn him into a hated figure for the Turkish right and a pawn in the ultranationalist game to alienate Turkey from Europe. Yet in many ways far more shocking than this mob fury was the assumption that made the rounds at polite dinner parties that Orhan was a rebel with only one cause: that all the fuss, even the death threats, was being stage-managed to impress his foreign critics.

Last week I braved another crowd on Orhan Pamuk’s behalf. This time it was to attend the opening of a museum he sponsored and curated. It bears the name of his novel “The Museum of Innocence,’’ a tale of tragic and obsessive love.

The book was originally conceived as a museum compendium of everyday objects —mementos that the narrator purloins from his former mistress over a series of years, from an earring to the charred ends of the cigarettes she smokes. Though the finished novel took a different form, its author set about collecting the endless bric-a-brac of which he writes, plundering flea markets around the Cukurcuma, a neighborhood of Istanbul where he had bought a small house.

He became determined to tell the story twice, first with words, then with objects.

Alongside the publication of the book, he set out to create an actual museum very different from the ones with columned porticos that narrate the history of nations. This one would be located in the backstreets of the human psyche, tease our memories and test, as Orhan put it at the press conference opening the museum, “our reactions to reality.”

The narrative begins in the 1970s, and the objects, lovingly and thematically arranged in display cabinets for each of the book’s 83 chapters, are a catalogue of the kaleidoscopic charms of Istanbul’s bourgeoisie: soda bottles, newspaper photos of “shamed” women who defied the strict sexual mores of the time, with a black line to conceal their eyes, toiletries that adorn a wet sink. Near the entrance is a stunning tableau of 4,213 cigarette butts pinned like butterflies to a board, the legend of each one annotated by hand.

It is manic, an example of art imitating art, but at the same time it is breathtaking, perplexing, thought-provoking and everything that conceptual art aspires to but so rarely succeeds at.

“It is the first museum based on a novel,” Orhan said at the press conference. It is not intended as a tribute to his book but meant to work independently. Being a first, he added, is not enough. “Like literature, art should make the familiar look strange, the ordinary look beautiful.” Packing this all into a small house was no less complex than “designing a submarine.”

It took years and cost the $1.5 million winnings of a Nobel Prize. So why did he do it?

“It makes me happy,” he said. And I know what he means. It made me feel happy, too, and happier still to discover you can’t feel happy and envious at the same time.

Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. He is the author of the book “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

via The Success of Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence – NYTimes.com.

May 5, 2012
Celebrating ordinary life

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk realizes a long-held dream.

ISTANBUL: Nobel prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk realized a long-nurtured dream yesterday with the opening of an actual “Museum of Innocence”— a collection of relics of a half-century of ordinary life as depicted in his 2008 novel of the same name.

Pamuk set out “not to do a spectacular or monumental museum but something in the backstreets, something that represents the daily life of the city,” he told a news conference after a press preview.

Situated in a bright, wine-red building in the district of Cukurcuma, the Museum of Innocence houses real and fabricated artifacts from everyday Turkish life between 1950 and 2000, in an homage both to the novel and to Pamuk’s Istanbul.

“Our daily lives are honorable, and their objects should be preserved. It’s not all about the glories of the past,” he said. “It’s the people and their objects that count.”

He conceived of the museum more than a decade ago, at the same time he came up with the idea for the novel. A New York Times bestseller, “The Museum of Innocence” was his first book after winning the 2006 Nobel prize for literature.

The book tells the story of Kemal, who hoards ordinary items to recapture the happiness he felt during a passionate but ill-fated love affair.

The real life museum contains odds and ends that Pamuk collected from junk shops, family and other donors. There are china dog figurines, old shaving kits and a wind-up film projector. A toothbrush collection, which features in the novel, was contributed by its real-life owner.

Pride of place goes to Kemal’s mistress’ 4,213 cigarette butts, lovingly dated, archived and gently pinned to a canvas that occupies a full wall. Pamuk described the painstaking process of vacuuming out the tobacco to prevent worms.

The space was originally meant to open with the book’s publication, but was beset with delays. It took Pamuk—working closely with a team of architects, artists and product designers—another four years to complete the project.

He declined to specify the exact cost of the museum. Royalties from the book will go towards upkeep.

While the project is distinctly personal, Pamuk insisted it is not autobiographical.

Obsessed with love

His protagonist Kemal is far too obsessed with his love and his compulsive hoarding to pay much attention to the social and political upheaval around him. His story takes place in Istanbul in the 1970s, a decade bookended with coups.

Pamuk, 59, is among Turkey’s best selling writers. His work, including “My Name Is Red,” “The Black Book” and the memoir “Istanbul,” has been translated into some 60 languages.

He was charged with “insulting Turkishness” in 2005 for remarks he made about the World War One massacre of Armenians and the state’s fight against Kurdish separatism since 1984. He was acquitted.

Pamuk is now at work on a new book told from the view of a street vendor eking out a living in one of sprawling Istanbul’s shantytowns. His first book, 1982′s “Cevdet Bey and His Sons,” is now being made into a serial for television.—Reuters

via Celebrating ordinary life | Free Malaysia Today.

April 29, 2012
Words behind the glass

On an edifying visit to the museum of literature tucked away in the garden of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.

By Benny Ziffer Tags: Israel Turkey

ISTANBUL – The guards at Topkapi Palace looked at me in surprise when I asked them the whereabouts of the Alay Kosku – the exhibition pavilion where, according to what I had read in the newspaper Zaman, a museum named for the Turkish writer Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar had recently opened. Eventually, it was one of the clerks in the palace museum shop who directed me to the fancy building with the rounded-pointed roof in the back of the Topkapi garden, with a steep mound leading to its entrance. Only there, after the strenuous climb, was it possible to read clearly the sign stating that this was indeed the museum designed to celebrate Turkish writers in general, and hallow the name of Tanpinar specifically, a writer who died in 1962 and whose standing in the history of Turkish literature is akin to that of Agnon’s in Hebrew literature. Except that Tanpinar did not win a Nobel Prize.

It was Tanpinar’s misfortune to be a writer in a language that has always had bad PR outside its own country. Precious few can appreciate the subtlety of the Turkish poetry written in the courts of the sultans during the same era as that of European Baroque poetry. Even fewer know that a national-romantic genre of poetry developed in Turkey concurrent with the national-romantic poetry of the Continent, and that it also had elements of symbolism and Dadaism and surrealism. And that, along with the emergence of realistic fiction in Europe, Turkey had its own Chekhov in the guise of short-story writer Sait Faik Abasiyanik, whose house on the little island of Burgaz in the Sea of Marmara serves today as a museum in his memory. And so on.

The Alay Kosku.

Truth be told, until writer Orhan Pamuk came along, and until the Nobel in literature that he received a half-dozen years ago brought Turkish literature into global awareness – Tanpinar’s name would also not have stood a chance of being known beyond the borders of his country. For Pamuk declared on every occasion that his spiritual father, and the person to whom he owed his talent, was Tanpinar, the father of modernism in the Turkish novel – the writer who combined in his great novel, “A Mind at Peace,” the emotional storminess of Dostoevsky with the refined artificiality and cruel psychological analysis of Marcel Proust.

The protagonists of Tanpinar’s books wage a daily war on time, in the sense that they are incapable of adjusting to modernity and are frozen in molds that prevent them from being free. This is indeed the subject of Tanpinar’s other famous book, “The Time Regulation Institute,” a revered work in Turkey, a book of many riddles. As one reads it, one sees that while the novel mocks bureaucracy, it also tells the tragic story of Turkey, a land that has never managed to keep up with global times, and either falls behind or runs after them breathlessly.

Glasses and pens

What could a museum of literature possibly have to show? Literature, after all, is not something that can be locked up behind the panes of a display case. What can be displayed – and indeed this is precisely what you see – are literary “fetishes”: Tanpinar’s top hat, his glasses, his pens and his manuscripts in Ottoman Turkish – for he lived much of his life before the Arabic alphabet in Turkey was replaced by Latin characters. Each of the decorative, high-ceilinged halls in this museum, covered in wood paneling, are devoted to another canonical writer, including of course Pamuk, who has been honored with an impressive bust installed beside the display case that holds all of his books in their various translations (although I did not see Hebrew there ).

It was moving to see the respect accorded here to the German-Jewish scholar Erich Auerbach, in the form of a glass cabinet full of manuscripts. Auerbach was the author of the seminal book of literary theory “Mimesis,” which he wrote in exile in Istanbul in the 1930s. He was one among an entire community of Nazi-persecuted scholars whom Turkey welcomed with open arms in those years. It is doubtful whether there are many in Israel today who know anything about Turkey’s contribution to saving Jewish intellectuals in those terrible times.

In the basement are displayed original copies of the early works of the great communist poet Nazim Hikmet, and copies of the journals he published with his comrades in the anti-fascist underground in Turkey. These underground editions were printed on cheap paper, which has now yellowed. As the Germans advanced toward Turkey and the country’s relations with the Third Reich warmed up, Hikmet raised his voice in protest – and was thrown in jail; his leftist friends were sentenced to forced labor in Turkey’s hinterland. Hikmet himself was ultimately banished from his country and his writings banned there. He died brokenhearted in Moscow, in 1963, after writing beautiful homesick poems about the beloved Istanbul he was never to see again.

Between the pages of these journals are hidden some of the things Hikmet and his friends wrote, from the depths of their hearts and souls, in condemnation of Turkey’s anti-Semitic and racist policies at the time. Those were indeed dark days, in which a property tax was levied on Jews and others “who are not Turks” at an impossible rate that was designed to bankrupt them. Whoever could not afford to pay was sent to perform forced labor in country’s east. So this, too, is a little-known fact: that there were those who put themselves and their freedom at risk to protest this discriminatory policy.

Since I was the sole visitor to the museum, the docents swooped down on me. When I told one of them that I was from Israel, she passed the rumor along from hall to hall and from floor to floor. In my honor they called in the guy who is in charge of the cafeteria. He opened it up for me, and there they sat me down and served me tea.

December 31, 2011
The Lost Word by Oya Baydar

A welcome spotlight shone on Turkey’s Kurdish war

Maya Jaggi

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 December 2011 22.55 GMT

Kurdistan Workers Party members silhouetted on a hillside in southeast Turkey

Kurdish insurgents belonging to the PKK. Photograph: Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty Images

Snow, the 2002 novel by Turkey’s Nobel literature laureate Orhan Pamuk, was set in north-eastern Anatolia in the 1990s, as war with secessionist Kurds raged in the wings. Oya Baydar’s fine novel – her seventh, and the first to appear in English – brings that conflict to the fore. Published in Turkish in 2007, it is set in the recent past, as a war fought with Kurdish separatists since 1984 intensifies in the mountains and spills across borders, while tourists are targeted by seaside bombings.

The protagonists are an Istanbul couple in their 50s: Ömer Eren, a celebrity writer who drinks as his inspiration dries up, and his wife Elif, a genetics professor whose ambition has stilled her unease at experimenting on small mammals. When Ömer, waiting for a bus home from Ankara, sees a pregnant Kurdish woman wounded by a stray bullet, he decides to visit her and her husband’s relatives in the south-east. His own wife’s journey west, to a conference in Copenhagen, heightens their sense of estrangement.

A source of grief is their “lost” son Deniz, born while his father was in jail for writing in a leftwing magazine during the 1980 military coup. Ömer and Elif met as teenagers building a bridge (with obvious symbolism) in the Kurdish region. But their son failed to match up to their ideals. After his Norwegian wife was killed in a terrorist bombing near the Blue Mosque – not by separatists, but a far-left group – Deniz retired with his young son to a tiny Norwegian island. As Ömer revisits the Kurdish east, his wife visits the son she scorns for living the “happiness of swine” among “Nordic peasants”.

After a bus journey punctuated by road blocks, Ömer enters a scorched landscape, where a banner proclaims, “one country, one flag, one language”, but a bust of Ataturk, founder of the republic, is swathed in barbed wire. A boy tells him that this is “my land and your colony”, while a hotelier warns of the special team in black snow masks: “If they take you in, they will question you like there’s no law or constitution – or even God.”

Children who have Turkish beaten into them grow ashamed of their mothers’ tongue, then of their shame. Many join the mountain rebels, finding that “the sword is more powerful than the pen”. As the widowed Jiyan, with whom Ömer has an affair, tells him, “One cannot become an artist here … one becomes a guerrilla, a terrorist, a traitor, a separatist, a collaborator, a martyr or an informer. Or you are captured dead.” Kurds are caught between army and guerrillas, often conscripted to kill brethren. Her husband’s resolute non-violence made him a target for all sides.

In a compelling, polyphonic structure, the alternating journeys of Ömer and Elif are interspersed with the story of the Kurdish couple, Zelal and Mahmut. Zelal’s pregnancy followed rape – whether by soldiers or rebels – and she is fleeing the logic of “honour” that would see her killed by her brother. Mahmut is a deserting guerrilla whose wounds she nursed, in a novel filled with fugitives seeking sanctuary from violence. He is pressured to take one last job for terrorists who threaten Zelal, since, for the rebels: “Entrance is free, but the exit costs.”

Baydar (who spent 12 years in exile after the 1980 coup, and is an advocate of Kurdish rights and peace) has little time for intellectuals’ complacency. Ömer has spoken out for Kurds on TV, but lapses into peevish “white Turkish” condescension: “All that trouble he faced to protect their rights, being denounced as a traitor, tried under this or that article … none of it is appreciated. They neither trust nor thank you.” Turkey’s east of “harsh accents”, spicy food and bootleg raki is, the novel suggests, as exotic to most Turks as any orient. For Elif, Turks are “Aegean, Mediterranean people”, who “feel closer to Europe”. Yet Turkish prejudices against Kurds are shown up by Scandinavian skinheads’ feelings about Turks. There are other shifts, as Elif comes to see the expectations imposed on her son as a form of violence, and Mahmut’s father rebukes Ömer: “Our children are not our mirrors that they should reflect our values … You haven’t lost your son unless he is actually dead.”

Although Baydar’s compulsion to flag her characters’ shortcomings signals their development too early, the changes of heart are subtly drawn. The translation improves after an unfortunate opening that makes heavy going of Ömer’s writer’s block. That this welcome arrival in English of an important Turkish novelist coincides with a major resurgence in the Kurdish war makes it even more timely.

via The Lost Word by Oya Baydar – review | Books | The Guardian.

December 17, 2011
Orhan Pamuk in love with an Armenian?

PanARMENIAN.Net – Famous Turkish writer, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk was seen in New York while taking a stroll with an Istanbul-based Armenian artist Karolin Fisekci.

“What can I say? What you see in the photos is true. I’ve known Pamuk for a long time,” Fisekci told reporters in Istanbul.

Karolin Fisekci, 32 is a graduate of a reputed Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts.

via Orhan Pamuk in love with an Armenian? – PanARMENIAN.Net.

December 11, 2011
Orhan Pamuk and Istanbul

Given the personal conviction of Orhan Pamuk, based on his first-hand experiences as an Istanbul-born, that the feeling that best serves to describe Istanbul in the last one hundred and fifty years, and notably from the disappearance of the Otoman Empire, is of bitterness, which has a lot of melancholy, or rather an essentially bitter melancholy. And the fact that this statement, in no way exclusive in relation to the unconditional love that Pamuk feels for the city, a true protagonist of some of his most important books, is not easy to digest for a number of his co-citizens, the Turkish writer has confessed to feel some sort of undeniable happiness every time that he reads of listens other say that melancholy is the most identifying attributes of old Byzantium, like it happens for example in the books of French writers who visited it in the 19th century most notably Gérard de Nerval, from who it can be said that he carried his ‘black sun of melancholy’ wherever he went. And, on his tail and always following his footsteps, his friend Théophile Gautier, author of a splendid book of articles titled ‘Constantinople’. They both contributed to make Pamuk feel vindicated for having wanted to speak so much about the feeling that this city produces to him, where he’s spend his entire life voluntarily.

Curiously, Nerval never piled on the agony when he talked about Istanbul in his ‘Voyage en Orient’. It’s just that the melancholy was stuck to his skin and his soul and, despite his attempts to distance himself from them, it was impossible to do so. When he arrived to Istanbul, at the age of 35, it hadn’t been long that his heart was a multicolour mosaic broken into a thousand pieces of sharp and cutting tiles. The actress Jenny Colon, the great love of his life which was never corresponded, had abandoned this world six months before and he already knew what it was like to live in a mental hospital. His periplus around the East, animated by the images put into movement by the romantic impulse of figures such as Hugo and Delacroix, it was a desperate attempt to forget, or to pretend he could forget, his precarious state. Hence he half invented a touristic and dreamy istanbul, and great part of the stories that he tells came out straight from his head, despite presenting them as real, debtor of the imaginary Thousand and One Nights.

Funnily enough, Gautier went a lot further and, disobeying the advice of his friend (who considered that it wasn’t necessary to go any further than the exterior façade of the city “which offered the most beautiful landscapes in the world”), he decided to use the same words as Nerval “go behind the scenes” thus accessing the heart of which, for Pamuk, makes Istanbul such an unbeatable melancholic city and, which has been so since then, making the reader feel with his admirable and seductive picturesque style (however, Gautier dreamt about being a painter until, at the age of 19, he read the ‘Orientals’ of Hugo) that at least half of the treasure of the city on the Bosphorus resides in that other non-touristic Istanbul.

Paul Oilzum Only-apartments AuthorPaul Oilzum

When you rent apartments in Istanbul you might want to take these books with you. Like all art which tells, they educate sight, allowing us to see and look with our own eyes.

via Orhan Pamuk Istanbul.

October 19, 2011