Turkish Nobel laureate opens up at Sharjah Book Fair
Chiranjib Sengupta, Assistant Editor
Sharjah: A steady barrage of misinformation and Turkish government propaganda in the media is turning more Turks to fiction and the novel, according to the country’s first Nobel laureate and author Orhan Pamuk.
“People are reading more novels in Turkey today because newspapers and the TV are full of Turkish government propaganda. This is the joke among writers in Istanbul today,” Pamuk said with his trademark humour at a session discussing his life and works at the 38th Sharjah International Book Fair on Wednesday night, which was attended by His Highness Dr Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Member of the Supreme Council and Ruler of Sharjah.
Why Pamuk calls himself a happy writer
Describing himself as a “happy writer,” Pamuk said: “Initially I used to be very upset with any discussion [about my writings]. Now I’m a happy writer… There are so many of my friend writers who are in jail in Turkey – so I’m happy that I’m still writing. I feel embarrassed to talk about my problems,” Pamuk said to loud applause from the packed auditorium at the Expo Centre in Sharjah.
But Pamuk – who has faced criminal charges and even death threats in Turkey – said he would not be drawn to speculation about the country’s future. In 2005, criminal charges were brought against Pamuk – the country’s best-selling author – for having “publicly denigrated Turkish identity” for raising the issue of the ‘Armenian genocide’ of 1915–17 to a Swiss publication. The charges were dropped in 2006, though only after a virulent hate campaign against him by ultra-nationalist voices.
When Pamuk received his Nobel Prize for literature in 2006, he was praised for making Istanbul “an indispensable literary territory, equal to Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg, James Joyce’s Dublin or Marcel Proust’s Paris”. Yet, according to Pamuk, when he decided to be a novelist and started writing in 1974, there were hardly any novels around “because we didn’t have the same individuality as Europeans”.
Who has Pamuk been compared to?
“What the West discovered through Renaissance was the gazers eye of a human being, and how the world seemed to a human being. They discovered the problem of human individuality. Some cultures celebrate individuality while some ask for conformity and a communal purpose. We Turks sit between the East and West. So individuality is inevitable – but what matters is every human being. That’s what I’ve been preoccupied with for the last 40 years,” he told the session moderator Omar Ghobash, Assistant Minister for Cultural Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
Pamuk’s fascination with the wonders of Ottoman, Arab and Islamic culture is tempered by the post-modern archetypes that he deploys in his novels – with the result that his work is imbued with the unique experience of, say, Ottoman art with a Borges or Italo Calvino twist. Critics and fellow novelists such as John Updike have also compared the prodigious literary contributions of Pamuk to Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Franz Kafka.
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