Tag: Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk leads shortlist for Independent foreign fiction prize

Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s story of forbidden love in Istanbul heads a star-studded list of global authors shortlisted for the Independent foreign fiction prize today.

Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, the Turkish author’s first novel since winning the Nobel prize for literature in 2006, tells the tale of rich Kemal’s love for his poor relation, the shopgirl Fusun. It is shortlisted for the £10,000 Independent prize alongside a host of other award-winning books. The nominees range from Red April, Santiago Roncagliolo’s story of a brutal murder in a small Latin American town, which won the Peruvian writer Spain’s Alfaguara prize, to The Sickness, the debut offering from the Venezuelan author and poet Alberto Barrera Tyszka, which scooped the Herralde award.

Per Petterson, a former winner of the Independent prize, makes the line-up for his Norwegian novel I Curse the River of Time. The book is set in 1989, as communism crumbles and Arvid Jansen seeks to make sense of his life while he struggles with a divorce and his mother’s cancer diagnosis.

The shortlist is completed by German author Jenny Erpenbeck’s bestseller, Visitation – the story of a house built on land with a dark history – and Kamchatka, by the Argentinian writer, film-maker and journalist Marcelo Figueras, which is about a 10-year-old boy whose parents go into hiding after the junta take control of 1970s Buenos Aires.

Judge and literary editor of the Independent Boyd Tonkin said the shortlist combined “a supremely high standard of imagination and expression with a sweeping variety of forms and settings”.

“From Orhan Pamuk’s romantic epic of love and change in Istanbul to Santiago Roncagliolo’s thrilling, chilling novel of Peru in conflict; from Per Petterson’s wistful and touching account of a troubled youth in Norway to Jenny Erpenbeck’s lyrical vision of German history via a single house and its inhabitants, the selection will move, inspire and enlighten,” said Tonkin. He is joined on the judging panel by novelists MJ Hyland and Neel Mukherjee, writer, academic and broadcaster Harriett Gilbert, and writer and professor of Russian Catriona Kelly.

With past winners including Milan Kundera and Paul Verhaegan as well as Pamuk and Petterson, the award goes to the best work of contemporary fiction in translation and is split equally between writer and translator. This year’s winner will be announced on 26 May.

via Orhan Pamuk leads shortlist for Independent foreign fiction prize | Books | guardian.co.uk.

April 12, 2011
Free speech: V.S. Naipaul, Hari Kunzru and WikiLeaks

After protests from some Turkish authors, Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul decided against giving the opening speech at the inaugural European Writers’ Parliament last week. The European Writers’ Parliament was conceived by two other Nobel laureates — Jose Saramago and Orhan Pamuk — and was held in Pamuk’s home city, Istanbul.

The protests came from some authors who were uneasy about comments Naipaul has made about Islam. “The disgust he feels for Muslims in his books is appalling. I cannot attend the event given all of this,” Cihan Aktas told the media. Naipaul has both a history of being critical of religion, particularly Islam, and of speaking his mind.

Turkey has an uneasy relationship with free speech; in 2005, it implemented a new penal code making it illegal to insult Turkey and its institutions. For telling a Swiss magazine that Armenians and Kurds had been killed in Turkey, Pamuk himself faced trial. After much international attention, the charges against him were dismissed.

Was it frustrating for Pamuk that his effort to bring authors together for an open discussion wound up with a kind of self-censorship? If it did, the author who stepped in for Naipaul may have been the best alternative.

While our Turkey Day was dawning in the United States, British writer Hari Kunzru gave the opening speech in Istanbul. “I feel we would be stronger and more credible if we were to deal with divergent views within this meeting rather than a priori excluding someone because of fear that offence might be given,” he said. Kunzru has posted his speech on his website:

You have accepted this invitation, presumably because like me, and you have a particular sense of the role of the writer. I don’t believe the writer is merely an entertainer, though we certainly shouldn’t be above entertainment, above giving pleasure. Nor are we just journalists, recorders of the doings of the world, or apolitical bohemians, dedicated to aesthetic shock. We may be any of these things, but this is not all we are. As lovers of language, as people who are dedicated to it and who value it very highly, we are -– whether we like it or not –- always already engaged in the political struggles of our day, many of which take place on the terrain of language — its use to produce social and national identity, its use to frame laws and norms, its use to define what it means to be a human, to lead a good or just or valuable life.

There’s a saying that culture is something that is done to us, but art is something we do to culture. …

I believe that the right to freedom of speech trumps any right to protection from offense, and that it underlies all the other issues I’ve been speaking about. Without freedom of speech, we, as writers, can have very little impact on culture. In saying this, I’m aware that this is a prime example of a concept which has been degraded by the war on terror -– that many European Muslims misidentify it as a tool of Anglo-Saxon interests, a license to insult them, rather than the sole guarantee of their right to be heard.

“Our kind Turkish hosts have invited us here, as an international group, to air our views, and so it is my belief that we must not shy away from recognizing the situation here, where we are speaking,” Kunzru continued. “I know by doing so, as a guest, I risk giving offense, but it would be absurd to assert freedom of speech in the abstract without exercising it in concrete terms.”

Free speech in the abstract is easy to embrace; exercising it in concrete terms can be uncomfortable. Take WikiLeaks, whose Sunday releases of U.S. embassy cables have sent the State Department and contractors scrambling. The Los Angeles Times reports that the cables “show that diplomats have been asked to gather counterparts’ credit card and frequent flier numbers, iris scans, as well as information on their Internet identities and the telecommunications networks they use.” Wayne E. White, a former senior official with the State Department’s intelligence arm, told The Times that the news that diplomats were gathering such information “could upset a number of foreign governments.”

Are these documents enlightening? Should they be seen? U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder says that the Justice Department will prosecute if violations of U.S. law are uncovered, condemning the disclosures as having put the nation’s security at risk.

— Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: V.S. Naipaul at home in 2001. Credit: Chris Ison / AFP

via Free speech: V.S. Naipaul, Hari Kunzru and WikiLeaks | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times.

November 30, 2010
How I got lost in translation and found my true calling

Translation can be an underpaid, anonymous job. Yet it is crucial for the cross-fertilisation of literature and for Maureen Freely, it has become a deeply satisfying life’s work

Maureen Freely
The Observer, Sunday 28 November 2010

Outside the Anglophone world, it is not unusual for novelists and poets to work at some point in their lives as translators. Though most will say that they did so mainly to subsidise their own writing, it is often clear, when you look at that writing, that it has been enriched by the imaginary conversations they’ve had with the poets and novelists whose words they have translated.

Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

If there is such a thing as world literature, it is because today’s most interesting writers are also well‑travelled readers and a lot of what they read is in translation. An up-and-coming Colombian novelist might be inspired not just by Borges, Conrad and Faulkner, but by contemporary novelists from Asia, Africa and Europe; his literary response to their work will go on to influence what his contemporaries on the other side of the world write next. These complex patterns of cross-fertilisation would end overnight if it were not for literary translators and the publishers who support them. So you’d think people would thank us, wouldn’t you?

via How I got lost in translation and found my true calling | feature | Books | The Observer.

November 29, 2010
Melancholy man: On Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk

BY RICHARD HELM, POSTMEDIA NEWS NOVEMBER 20, 2010

Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk insists he’s not the sad soul his writings would have us assume, despite considerable regretful evidence to the contrary.

Pamuk was in Edmonton this weekend as part of the University of Alberta’s Festival of Ideas, a congress of notable writers and thinkers brought together to speak on the general theme of “truth and lies.” Pamuk was one of three Nobel laureates on the festival’s guest list, having secured that literary honour back in 2006. He is the author of such books as My Name is Red, Snow, Istanbul: Memories and the City, and The Museum of Innocence, his latest novel, recently released in paperback.

Pamuk, 58, once wrote that except for those hours he spends writing, life to him seems “flawed, deficient and senseless.” So it was with little surprise that I found him a somewhat distant conversationalist during a brief telephone interview the other day.

Readers can get their best grasp of Pamuk from his 2005 memoir, Istanbul, which recounts his upbringing in a city of ruins and end-of-empire melancholy – a city where Pamuk still spends much of his time. The epigraph Pamuk chose to open the book is by Turkish writer Ahmet Rasim: “The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy.” It is this preoccupation with the melancholy Turkish soul, this sense that they’re a nation and a people that’s been left out of history, that is most often associated with Pamuk’s writings.

“Look, I grew up exposed to the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey then, in the 1950s and ’60s, was extremely poor compared to what it is today,” Pamuk said, speaking from his office at Columbia University in New York, where he lectures on literature for one semester each year.

“So that of course lends itself to feelings of sadness, melancholy, textures of decay. But Istanbul ends in 1970, almost 40 years past. The country has got richer and it is not that melancholy now. It is now, especially as a tourist destination, a colourful, interesting place. But then I’m not only writing for the tourists, I’m writing for the poor Istanbul, the historical Istanbul. There’s not only the touristy Turkey, there is also the real Turkey.”

The real Turkey recently approved via referendum a series of amendments to the country’s constitution to bring it more in line with European Union standards. Pamuk, who was charged but never prosecuted in 2005 for having “publicly denigrated Turkish identity” for public comments regarding the 1915 Armenian genocide, said he welcomes the slow transition to a more liberal and open Turkish society.

“I don’t think the European Union wants to see Turkey getting more Islamist, so I’m happy with the results of the referendum.”

But he was obviously less inclined to talk politics than literature, specifically his newest projects. The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, just out this month, collects the Norton Lectures Pamuk gave at Harvard late last year, in which he sets out his thoughts about writing and the wisdom imparted by the “secret centre” buried in literary works.

Pamuk says he’s currently working on an epic novel of “the big Istanbul” of today, the one with a population that has ballooned by 11 million since the author’s birth.

“I’m trying to capture the feelings, lives, chronicles of all these peoples who moved from the poorer parts of Turkey to Istanbul, the cultural, industrial centre. How they lived there, how they survived, how they built up their shantytowns, how they got to be rich, how some failed, the kind of novel that has ambitions of being epic, describing the rule of urban change in Turkey.”

It has been said that Pamuk’s latest novel, The Museum of Innocence, is his most accessible work. It tells the story of a tragic, obsessive love between the scion of a bourgeois Istanbul family and a poorer distant relation. Accessible, perhaps, but not really upbeat, I suggest to Pamuk.

“It’s not melancholy. It’s about love. There is a sadness there too, but it’s the sadness of a love story, not of cultural decay, of the failure of empire.”

Pamuk has said he plans to open a real-life Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, which will display the same keepsakes – salt shakers, door knobs, porcelain figurines – that his fictional protagonist Kemal collects over the years in pursuit of his unattainable love.

Nothing remotely melancholy there.

It seemed like the sort of oddball venture worth asking about. Is it true the ephemera will include 4,214 cigarette butts and 237 hair barrettes?

Pamuk didn’t want to talk about it.

Edmonton Journal

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November 21, 2010