Pamuk

The art of the novel is based on the craft of telling our own stories as if they belonged to others, and of telling other people's stories as if they were our own. 

--Orhan Pamuk, Nights of Plague

Orhan Pamuk is my latest addiction. I have always had a way of coming upon an author I like and then proceeding to read the better part of what he has written. Just a while back I was onto Thomas Hardy, and read his four major novels. Now I am onto Pamuk. I have finished The Museum of Innocence, I am currently wading through the Indonesian language version of a novel called Snow, and I have just begun on Nights of Plague, a novel that is about the size of a phone book (although I guess I am dating myself with the phone book reference. What's a phone book? you say). Anyway, it is long. 

Pamuk it is not the most quotable writer in the world, and I think that is because he does not intrude himself into the story he is telling. Or so it is in the work I have read so far. Instead, he himself is to be found only in the telling of the story, as suggested in the quote above. 

Interestingly, the narrator of the Museum of Innocence hands over the conclusion of his long story about love and obsession to the writer Orhan Pamuk by name. The protagonist hands over the book to the writer of the book, leaving judgment, evaluation to him. It's an interesting little trick, and a stunning one as well. Suddenly we are standing outside of the story, soberly looking in. Obsession fades like fog in the sunlight, the mystery, the aura, the veil falls away. 

The fixation of the lead character, Kemal, on the young and lovely Fusun is extreme (extreme in the extreme, one might say), and yet I think that everyone can identify to some degree with what Kemal is going through, or rather putting himself through. Anyone who has ever had a crush cannot help but experience a pang of memory, and probably a wince of embarrassment as well. I was obsessed once with a certain woman when I was younger. Yes, I would have to say obsessed. Like Kemal, I would collect things that she had left behind after a visit - - some strands of hair, for example, or something she had written on a scrap of paper, or the pen she had used to write it. These things were a bit of her, they were things I could hold when she was away, each having a magical significance, just as the woman herself possessed a magical significance, though wholly conferred by my own imagination. She was, the best of her anyway, an invention of my own, just as Fusun was Kemal's invention. 

 

And that's it from Bali tonight, folks. It's my bedtime now and I am sleepy. The other night I had a dream of this same woman. In the dream there was some kind of problem. We had argued and there was tension in the air, a certain painfulness. We separated and I headed for home, ending up in an apartment building and standing before a room numbered 222. I was searching in my pocket for the key, and suddenly realized that this was not my home at all. I then pictured my home in Bali, from above as in a certain photograph I have that was taken by a drone. Now I am curious about the number 222. What does it mean? Perhaps I will find out in tonight's dream.