Orhan Pamuk, The Art of Fiction Essay

Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in Istanbul, where he continues to live. His family had made a fortune in railroad social system during the early days of the Turkish Republic and Pamuk attended Robert College, where the tiddlerren of the citys privileged elect received a secular, horse opera-style education. Early in life he developed a passion for the visual arts, but after enrolling in college to study architecture he decided he wanted to relieve. He is instantaneously Turkeys most widely read author. His first novel, CevdetBey and His Sons, was create in 1982 and was followed by The Silent House (1983), The White Castle (1985/1991 in side of meat translation), The Black Book(1990/1994), and The New Life (1994/1997). In 2003 Pamuk received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for My Name Is Red (1998/2001), a murder mystery enclothe in sixteenth-century Istanbul and narrated by multiple voices.The novel explores themes central to his fiction the intricacies of identi ty in a country that str loanles East and West, sibling rivalry, the existence of doubles, the value of mantrap and originality, and the anxiety of cultural influence. S direct (2002/2004), which focuses on religious and policy-making radicalism, was the first of his novels to confront political extremism in contemporary Turkey and it confirmed his standing overseas even as it divided opinion at home. Pamuks most recent book is Istanbul Memories and the City (2003/2005), a double portrait of himselfin childishness and youthand of the repose he comes from. This interview with OrhanPamuk was conducted in two sustained sessions in London and by correspondence. The first conversation occurred in May of 2004 at the time of the British publication of Snow. A special room had been booked for the meetinga fluorescentlit, noisily air-conditi sensationd corporate space in the hotel basement.Pamuk arrived, wearable a black corduroy jacket over a light-blue shirt and dark slacks, and obs erved, We could die here and nobody would ever find us. We go to a plush, quiet corner of the hotel lobby where we spoke for terce hours, pausing only for coffee and a chicken sandwich. In April of 2005 Pamuk returned to London for the publication of Istanbul and we settled into the identical corner of the hotel lobby to speak for two hours. At first he seemed quite strained, and with reason. Two months earlier, in an interview with the Swiss theme Der Tages-Anzeiger, he had verbalize of Turkey, thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were butchered in these lands and nobody but me d ares to talk nearly it. This remark set off a relentless tally against Pamuk in the Turkish nationalist jam.After all, the Turkish governing persists in denying the 1915 genocidal slaughter of Armenians in Turkey and has imposed laws severely restricting wrangleion of the ongoing Kurdish conflict. Pamuk declined to discuss the controversy for the public record in the hope that it would soon fade. In August, however, Pamuks remarks in the Swiss paper resulted in his being charged under(a) Article 301/1 of the Turkish Penal Code with public denigration of Turkish identitya crime punishable by up to three years in prison.Despite outraged international press coverage of his case, as tumefy as vigorous protest to the Turkish government by members of the European Parliament and by International PEN, when this magazine went to press in midNovember Pamuk was still slated to stand trial on December 16, 2005. INTERVIEWER How do you feel almost giving interviews? ORHAN PAMUK I just close totimes feel nervous because I puddle stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid clips. IOrhanPamuk, Interviewed by ngelGurra-Quintana carry been attacked in Turkey much for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do non read novels on that point. INTERVIEWER Youve g enerally received a positive response to your books in Europe and the United States. What is your critical reception in Turkey? PAMUK The good years are over now. When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author. INTERVIEWER When you say the previous generation, whom do you brace in pass? PAMUK The authors who felt a social responsibility, authors who felt that literature serves morality and politics. They were flat realists, not experimental. Like authors in so many poor countries, they wasted their talent on exhausting to serve their nation. I did not want to be the ex potpourriables of them, because even in my youth I had enjoyed Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, ProustI had never aspired to the social-realist model of Steinbeck and Gorky.The literature produced in the sixties and heptadties was comely outmoded, so I was welcomed as an author of the new generation. After the mid-nineties, when my books began to sell in amounts that no maven in Turkey had ever dreamed of, my h bingleymoon years with the Turkish press and in rangeectuals were over. From then on, critical reception was mostly a reaction to the publicity and sales, rather than the content of my books. Now, unfortunately, I am notorious for my political commentsmost of which are picked up from international interviews and shamelessly manipulated by some Turkish nationalist journalists to make me look more than radical and politically foolish than I rightfully am. INTERVIEWER So there is a hostile reaction to your popularity? PAMUK My operose opinion is that its a sort of punishment for my sales figures and political comments. only when I dont want to continue saying this, because I sound defensive. I whitethorn be misrepresenting the whole picture.INTERVIEWER Where do you write? PAMUK I take evermore thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me. The domestic, tame daily routine makes the longing for the new(prenominal) world, which the imagination needs to operate, fade away. So for years I constantly had an office or a little place outside the house to work in. I always had different flats.But once I exhausted half(prenominal) a semester in the U.S. while my ex- wife was taking her Ph.D. at Columbia University. We were living in an apartment for married students and didnt welcome any space, so I had to sleep and write in the same place. Reminders of family life were all somewhat. This upset me. In the mornings I used to say goodbye to my wife like someone going to work. Id leave the house, flip around a few blocks, and come back like a person arriving at the office. Ten years ago I frame a flat overlooking the Bosphorus with a view of the old city. It has, perhaps, one of the best views of Istanbul. It is a twenty-five-minute walk from where I live. It is full of books and my desk looks out onto the view. Ein truth day I spend, on average, some ten hours there.OrhanPamuk, Interviewed by ngelGurra-QuintanaINTERVIEWER Ten hours a day? PAMUK Yes, Im a hard worker. I enjoy it. People say Im ambitious, and maybe theres truth in that too. But Im in love with what I do. I enjoy sitting at my desk like a child playing with his toys. Its work, essentially, but its fun and games also. INTERVIEWER Orhan, your namesake and the narrator of Snow, describes himself as a clerk who sits down at the same time every day. Do you have the same discipline for make-up? PAMUK I was underlining the clerical nature of the novelist as opposed to that of the poet, who has an immensely prestigious tradition in Turkey. To be a poet is a popular and respected thing. roughly of the pouf sultans and statesmen were poets. But not in the way we understand poets now. For hundreds of years it was a way of set upi ng yourself as an intellectual. Most of these people used to collect their poems in manuscripts called divans. In fact, whiff court poetry is called divan poetry. Half of the Ottoman statesmen produced divans. It was a sophisticated and educated way of physical composition things, with many rules and rituals.Very conventional and very repetitive.After Western thinkings came to Turkey, this legacy was combined with the romanticistic and modern idea of the poet as a person who burns for truth. It added extra weight to the prestige of the poet. On the an new(prenominal)(prenominal) hand, a novelist is essentially a person who covers duration through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience. INTERVIEWER Have you ever written poetry? PAMUK I am often commanded that. I did when I was eighteen and I make some poems in Turkey, but then I quit. My explanation is that I realized that a poet is someone throu gh whom God is speaking. You have to be possessed by poetry. I tried my hand at poetry, but I realized after some time that God was not speaking to me.I was good-for-nothing about this and then I tried to imagineif God were speaking through me, what would he be saying? I began to write very meticulously, slowly, trying to figure this out. That is prose create verbally, fiction writing. So I worked like a clerk. Some other writers consider this expression to be a bit of an insult. But I accept it I work like a clerk. INTERVIEWER Would you say that writing prose has become easier for you over time? PAMUK Unfortunately not. Sometimes I feel my reference should enter a room and I still dont know how to make him enter. I may have more self-confidence, which sometimes atomic number 50 be un sustainful because then youre not experimenting, you just write what comes to the tip of your pen. Ive been writing fiction for the last thirty years, so I should think that Ive improved a bit.And yet I still sometimes come to a dead end where I thought there never would be one. A character cannot enter a room, and I dont know what to do. Still After thirty years. The division of a book into chapters is very important for my way of thinking. When writing a novel, if I know the whole story line in advanceand most of the time I doI divide it into chapters and think up the details of what Id like to happen in each. I dont necessarily start with the first chapter and write all the others in order. When Im blocked, which is not a grave thing for me, I continue with any(prenominal) takes my fancy. I may write from the first to the fifth chapter, then if Im not enjoying it I skip to number fifteen and continue from there. INTERVIEWER 3OrhanPamuk, Interviewed by ngelGurra-QuintanaDo you mean that you map out the entire book in advance? PAMUK Everything. My Name Is Red, for instance, has many characters, and to each character I delegate a certain number of chapters. When I was writing , sometimes I wanted to continue being one of the characters. So when I finished writing one of Shekures chapters, perhaps chapter seven, I skipped to chapter eleven, which is her again. I liked being Shekure. Skipping from one character or persona to another can be depressing. But the last-place chapter I always write at the end. That is definite. I like to tease myself, ask myself what the ending should be. I can only execute the ending once. Towards the end, to set out with finishing, I stop and rewrite most of the early chapters. INTERVIEWER Do you ever have a reader while you are working? PAMUK I always read my work to the person I share my life with. Im always grateful if that person says, Show me more, or, Show me what you have through today. Not only does that provide a bit of necessary pressure, but its like having a mother or compensate down pat you on the back and say, Well done.Occasionally, the person will say, Sorry, I dont buy this. Which is good. I like that rit ual. Im always reminded of Thomas Mann, one of my role models. He used to bring the whole family together, his six children and his wife. He used to read to all his gathered family. I like that. Daddy obese a story. INTERVIEWER When you were young you wanted to be a painter. When did your love of painting give way to your love of writing? PAMUK At the age of twenty-two. Since I was seven I had wanted to be a painter, and my family had accepted this. They all thought that I would be a famous painter. But then something happened in my addressI realized that a screw was looseand I stopped painting and immediately began writing my first novel. INTERVIEWER A screw was loose? PAMUK I cant say what my reasons were for doing this. I recently published a book calledIstanbul. Half of it is my autobiography until that moment and the other half is an essay about Istanbul, or more precisely, a childs vision of Istanbul.Its a combination of thinking about images and landscapes and the chemistry of a city, and a childs perception of that city, and that childs autobiography. The last sentence of the book reads, I dont want to be an artist, I said. Im going to be a writer. And its not explained. Although reading the whole book may explain something. INTERVIEWER Was your family happy about this decision? PAMUK My mother was upset. My father was somewhat more understanding because in his youth he wanted to be a poet and translated Valry into Turkish, but gave up when he was mocked by the upper-class propagate to which he belonged. INTERVIEWER Your family accepted you being a painter, but not a novelist? PAMUK Yes, because they didnt think I would be a full-time painter. The family tradition was in civil design. My grandfather was a civil engineer who made lots of money building railroads.My uncles and my father lost the money, but they all went to the same engineering school, Istanbul Technical University. I was expected to go there and I said, All right, I will go there. Bu t since I was the artist in the family, the ruling was that I should become an architect. It seemed to be a satisfying solution for everyone. So I went to that university, but in the middle of architectural school I perfectly quit painting and began writing novels. INTERVIEWER Did you already have your first novel in mind when you decided to quit? Is that why you did it? PAMUK As far as I remember, I wanted to be a novelist before I knew what to write. In fact, when I did start writing I had two or three false starts. I still have the notebooks. But after about six months I started a major novel project that ultimately got published as CevdetBey and His Sons. INTERVIEWER That hasnt been translated into English. PAMUK It is essentially a family saga, like the Forsyte Saga or Thomas Manns Buddenbrooks. Not long after I finished it I began to herb of grace having written something so outmoded, a very nineteenth-century novel.I regretted writing it because, around the age of twenty-f ive or twenty-six, I began to impose on myself the idea that I should be a modern author. By the time the novel was finally published, when I was thirty, my writing had become much more experimental. INTERVIEWER When you say you wanted to be more modern, experimental, did you have a model in mind? PAMUK At that time, the great writers for me were no longer Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, or Thomas Mann. My heroes were Virginia Woolf and Faulkner. Now I would add Proust and Nabokov to that list. INTERVIEWER The opening line of The New Life is, I read a book one day and my whole life was changed. Has any book had that issuance on you? PAMUK The Sound and the Fury was very important to me when I was twenty-one or twentytwo. I bought a copy of the Penguin edition.It was hard to understand, especially with my poor English. But there was a wonderful translation of the book into Turkish, so I would to flummox the Turkish and the English together on the table and read half a paragraph fro m one and then go back to the other. That book go forth a mark on me. The residue was the voice that I developed. I soon began to write in the first person singular. Most of the time I feel better when Im impersonating someone else rather than writing in the third person.INTERVIEWER You say it took years to get your first novel published? PAMUK In my twenties I did not have any literary friendships I didnt belong to any literary group in Istanbul. The only way to get my first book published was to submit it to a literary competition for unpublished manuscripts in Turkey. I did that and won the prize, which was to be published by a big, good newspaper publisher. At the time, Turkeys economic system was in a bad state. They said, Yes, well give you a contract, but they delayed the novels publication. INTERVIEWER Did your piece novel go more easilymore quickly? PAMUK The second book was a political book. Not propaganda. I was already writing it while I waited for the first book to a ppear. I had assumption that book some two and a half years. Suddenly, one night there was a military coup. This was in 1980. The next day the would-be publisher of the first book, the CevdetBey book, said he wasnt going to publish it, even though we had a contract. I realized that even if I finished my second bookthe political bookthat day, I would not be able to publish it for five or six years because the military would not tolerate it. So my thoughts ran as follows At the age of twenty-two I said I was going to be a novelist and wrote for seven years hoping to get something published in Turkey...and nothing.Now Im almost thirty and theres no possibility of publishing anything. I still have the two hundred and fifty pages of that unfinished political novel in one of my drawers. Immediately after the military coup, because I didnt want to get depressed, I started a third bookthe book to which you referred, The Silent House. Thats what I was working on in 1982 when the first book was finally published. Cevdet was well received, which meant that I could publish the book I was then writing. So the third book I wrote was the second to be published. INTERVIEWER What made your novel unpublishable under the military regime? PAMUK The characters were young upper-class Marxists. Their fathers and mothers would go to summer resorts, and they had big spacious rich houses and enjoyed being Marxists.They would fight and be jealous of each other and plot to blow up the prime minister. INTERVIEWER Gilded revolutionary circles? PAMUK Upper-class youngsters with rich peoples habits, pretending to be ultraradical. But I was not making a moral judgment about that. Rather, I was romanticizing my youth, in a way. The idea of throwing a bomb at the prime minister would have been enough to get the book banned. So I didnt finish it. And you change as you write books. You cannot assume the same persona again. You cannot continue as before. Each book an author writes represents a p eriod in his development. Ones novels can be seen as the milestones in the development of ones spirit. So you cannot go back. Once the elasticity of fiction is dead, you cannot move it again.INTERVIEWER When youre experimenting with ideas, how do you choose the form of your novels? Do you start with an image, with a first sentence? PAMUK thither is no constant formula. But I make it my business not to write two novels in the same mode. I try to change everything. This is why so many of my readers tell me, I liked this novel of yours, its a shame you didnt write other novels like that, or, I never enjoyed one of your novels until you wrote that oneIve comprehend that especially about The Black Book. In fact I hate to hear this. Its fun, and a challenge, to experiment with form and style, and language and mood and persona, and to think about each book differently. The receptive matter of a book may come to me from assorted sources. With My Name Is Red, I wanted to write about my am bition to become a painter. I had a false start I began to write a monographic book focused on one painter. Then I turned the painter into various painters working together in an atelier. The point of view changed, because now there were other painters talking. At first I was thinking of writing about a contemporary painter, but then I thought this Turkish painter might be too derivative, too influenced by the West, so I went back in time to write about miniaturists.That was how I found my subject. Some subjects also necessitate certain formal innovations or storytelling strategies. Sometimes, for example, youve just seen something, or read something, or been to a movie, or read a newspaper article, and then you think, Ill make a potato speak, or a dog, or a tree. Once you get the idea you start thinking about symmetry and continuity in the novel. And you feel, Wonderful, no ones done this before. Finally, I think of things for years. I may have ideas and then I tell them to my clos e friends. I keep lots of notebooks for possible novels I may write.Sometimes I dont write them, but if I open a notebook and begin taking notes for it, it is likely that I will write that novel. So when Im finishing one novel my heart may be set on one of these projects and two months after finishing one I start writing the other.INTERVIEWER Many novelists will never discuss a work in progress. Do you also keep that a secret? PAMUK I never discuss the story. On formal occasions, when people ask what Im writing, I have a one-sentence stock reply A novel that takes place in contemporary Turkey. I open up to very few people and only when I know they wont hurt me. What I do is talk about the gimmicksIm going to make a cloud speak, for instance. I like to see how people react to them. It is a childish thing. I did this a lot when writing Istanbul. My mind is like that of a little playful child, trying to show his daddy how clever he is. INTERVIEWER The word gimmick has a negative conno tation. PAMUK You begin with a gimmick, but if you believe in its literary and moral monstrousness, in the end it turns into serious literary invention. It becomes a literary statement. INTERVIEWER Critics often characterize your novels as postmodern. It seems to me, however, that you draw your narrative tricks primarily from traditional sources. You quote, for instance, fromTheThousand and One Nights and other classic texts in the Eastern tradition.PAMUK That began with The Black Book, though I had read Borges and Calvino earlier. I went with my wife to the United States in 1985, and there I first encountered the prominence and the immense malodorousness of American culture. As a Turk coming from the Middle East, trying to establish himself as an author, I felt intimidated. So I regressed, went back to my roots. I realized that my generation had to invent a modern national literature. Borges and Calvino liberated me. The connotation of traditional Islamic literature was so reacti onary, so political, and used by conservatives in such old-fashioned and foolish ways, that I never thought I could do anything with that material. But once I was in the United States, I realized I could go back to that material with a Calvinoesque or Borgesian mind frame.I had to begin by making a strong distinction between the religious and literary connotations of Islamic literature, so that I could easily confiscate its wealth of games, gimmicks, and parables. Turkey had a sophisticated tradition of highly refined ornamental literature. But then the socially committed writers emptied our literature of its innovative content. There are lots of allegories that repeat themselves in the various oral storytelling traditionsof China, India, Persia. I decided to use them and set them in contemporary Istanbul. Its an experimentput everything together, like a Dadaist collage The Black Bookhas this quality. Sometimes all these sources are fused together and something new emerges. So I se t all these rewritten stories in Istanbul, added a detective plot, and out came The Black Book. But at its source was the full strength of American culture and my desire to be a serious experimental writer. I could not write a social commentary about Turkeys problemsI was intimidated by them. So I had to try something else. INTERVIEWER Were you ever interested in doing social commentary through literature? PAMUK No. I was reacting to the older generation of novelists, especially in the eighties.I say this with all due respect, but their subject matter was very narrow and parochial. INTERVIEWER Lets go back to before The Black Book. What elysian you to write The White Castle? Its the first book where you employ a theme that recurs throughout the rest of your novelsimpersonation. Why do you think this idea of becoming somebody else crops up so often in your fiction? PAMUK Its a very personal thing. I have a very competitive brother who is only eighteen months older than me. In a way, he was my fathermy Freudian father, so to speak. It was he who became my alter ego, the representation of authority. On the other hand, we also had a competitive and brotherly comradeship. A very complicated relationship. I wrote extensively about this in Istanbul. I was a characteristic Turkish boy, good at soccer and enthusiastic about all sorts of games and competitions. He was very successful in school, better than me.I felt jealousy towards him, and he was jealous of me too. He was the reasonable and responsible person, the one our superiors addressed. While I was paying attention to games, he paid attention to rules. We were competing all the time. And I fancied being him, that kind of thing. It set a model. Envy, jealousythese are heartfelt themes for me. I always worry about how much my brothers strength or his success might have influenced me. This is an essential part of my spirit. I am aware of that, so I put some distance between me and those pure tones. I know they a re bad, so I have a civilized persons determination to fight them. Im not saying Im a victim of jealousy. But this is the galaxy of nerve points that I try to deal with all the time. And of course, in the end, it becomes the subject matter of all my stories. In The White Castle, for instance, the almost sadomasochistic relationship between the two main characters is based on my relationship with my brother. On the other hand, this theme of impersonation is reflected in the fragility Turkey feels when faced with Western culture.After writing The White Castle, I realized that this jealousythe anxiety about being influenced by someone elseresembles Turkeys position when it looks west. You know, aspiring to become Westernized and then being accused of not being authentic enough. attempt to grab the spirit of Europe and then feeling guilty about the imitative drive. The ups and downs of this mood are reminiscent of the relationship between competitive brothers. INTERVIEWER Do you believ e the constant confrontation between Turkeys Eastern and Western impulses will ever be peacefully resolved? PAMUK Im an optimist.Turkey should not worry about having two spirits, belonging to two different cultures, having two souls. Schizophrenia makes you intelligent. You may lose your relation with realityIm a fiction writer, so I dont think thats such a bad thingbut you shouldnt worry about your schizophrenia. If you worry too much about one part of you killing the other, youll be left with a single spirit. That is worse than having the sickness. This is my theory. I try to propagate it in Turkish politics, among Turkish politicians who demand that the country should have one consistent soulthat it should belong to either the East or the West or be nationalistic. Im critical of that monistic outlook.INTERVIEWER How does that go down in Turkey? PAMUK The more the idea of a democratic, gratis(p) Turkey is established, the more my thinking is accepted. Turkey can join the European Union only with this vision. Its a way of fighting against nationalism, of fighting the elaborateness of Us against Them. INTERVIEWER And yet in Istanbul, in the way you romanticize the city, you seem to mourn the loss of the Ottoman Empire. PAMUK Im not mourning the Ottoman Empire. Im a Westernizer. Im pleased that the Westernization process took place. Im just criticizing the limited way in which the ruling elitemeaning both the bureaucracy and the new richhad conceived of Westernization. They lacked the confidence necessary to create a national culture rich in its own symbols and rituals.They did not strive to create an Istanbul culture that would be an organic combination of East and West they just put Western and Eastern things together. There was, of course, a strong local Ottoman culture, but that was fading away little by little. What they had to do, and could not possibly do enough, was invent a strong local culture, which would be a combinationnot an imitationof the East ern past and the Western present. I try to do the same kind of thing in my books. likely new generations will do it, and entering the European Union will not destroy Turkish identity but make it flourish and give us more freedom and self-confidence to invent a new Turkish culture. Slavishly imitating the West or slavishly imitating the old dead Ottoman culture is not the solution. You have to do something with these things and shouldnt have anxiety about belonging to one of them too much. INTERVIEWER In Istanbul, however, you do seem to discover with the foreign, Western gaze over your own city. PAMUK But I also explain why a Westernized Turkish intellectual can identify with the Western gazethe making of Istanbul is a process of identification with the West. There is always this dichotomy, and you can easily identify with the Eastern anger too.Everyone is sometimes a western and sometimes an Easternerin fact a constant combination of the two. I like Edward Saids idea of Orientali sm, but since Turkey was never a colony, the romanticizing of Turkey was never a problem for Turks. Western man did not humiliate the Turk in the same way he humiliated the Arab or Indian. Istanbul was invaded only for two years and the enemy boats left as they came, so this did not leave a deep scar in the spirit of the nation. What left a deep scar was the loss of the Ottoman Empire, so I dont have that anxiety, that feeling that Westerners look down on me.though after the founding of the Republic, there was a sort of intimidation because Turks wanted to Westernize but couldnt go far enough, which left a feeling of cultural inferiority that we have to address and that I occasionally may have. On the other hand, the scars are not as deep as other nations that were occupied for two hundred years, colonized. Turks were never suppressed by Western powers. The suppression that Turks suffered was self-inflicted we erased our own history because it was practical. In that suppression ther e is a sensory faculty of fragility. But that self-imposed Westernization also brought isolation. Indians saw their oppressors face-to-face. Turks were strangely isolated from the Western world they emulated. In the 1950s and even 1960s, when a foreigner came to stay at the Istanbul Hilton it would be noted in all the newspapers.Do you believe that there is a polity or that one should even exist? We have heard of a Western canon, but what about a non-Western canon? PAMUK Yes, there is another canon. It should be explored, developed, shared, criticized, and then accepted. Right now the so-called Eastern canon is in ruins. The glorious texts are all around but there is no will to put them together. From the Persian classics, through to all the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese texts, these things should be assessed critically. As it is now, the canon is in the hands of Western scholars. That is the come to of distribution and communication. INTERVIEWER The novel is a very Western cultu ral form. Does it have any place in the Eastern tradition? PAMUK The modern novel, dissociated from the epic form, is essentially a non-Oriental thing.Because the novelist is a person who does not belong to a community, who does not share the underlying instincts of community, and who is thinking and judging with a different culture than the one he is experiencing. Once his consciousness is different from that of the community he belongs to, he is an outsider, a loner. And the richness of his text comes from that outsiders voyeuristic vision. Once you develop the habit of looking at the world like that and writing about it in this fashion, you have the desire to disassociate from the community. This is the model I was thinking about in Snow. INTERVIEWER Snow is your most political book yet published. How did you conceive of it? PAMUK When I started becoming famous in Turkey in the mid-1990s, at a time when the war against Kurdish guerillas was strong, the old leftist authors and th e new modern liberals wanted me to help them, to sign petitionsthey began to ask me to do political things unrelated to my books. Soon the establishment counterattacked with a campaign of character assassination.They began calling me names. I was very angry. After a while I wondered, What if I wrote a political novel in which I explored my own spiritual dilemmascoming from an uppermiddle-class family and feeling responsible for those who had no political representation? I believed in the art of the novel. It is a strange thing how that makes you an outsider. I told myself then, I will write a political novel. I started to write it as soon as I finished My Name Is Red. INTERVIEWER Why did you set it in the small town of Kars? PAMUK It is notoriously one of the coldest towns in Turkey. And one of the poorest. In the early eighties, the whole front page of one of the major newspapers was about the poverty of Kars. Someone had calculated that you could buy the entire town for around a m illion dollars.The political climate was difficult when I wanted to go there. The vicinity of the town is mostly populated by Kurds, but the center is a combination of Kurds, people from Azerbaijan, Turks, and all other sorts. There used to be Russians and Germans too. There are religious differences as well, Shia and Sunni. The war the Turkish government was waging against the Kurdish guerillas was so fierce that it was impossible to go as a tourist. I knew I could not simply go there as a novelist, so I asked a newspaper editor with whom Id been in touch for a press pass to visit the area. He is potent and he personally called the mayor and the police chief to let them know I was coming.