Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk

"Orhan Pamuk is one of the best things that Turkey has managed to produce in recent decades. He’s a symbol of someone who has managed to escape from the Turkish context, where there’s an ingrained tendency for emotions to rule the intellect, to be unclear in order to protect your own sloppiness. Orhan Pamuk is very different from this. I remember even back in the early 80s, he was clearly set on winning the Nobel Prize for literature. He did everything possible to make his Turkish experience into something that would be universally recognised as a high point of literature and worthy of a great prize. I think he got it earlier than he expected, possibly because of a political accident, but he managed it. He still sells quite a lot in Turkey, but among the intellectual elite there’s a great jealousy towards him, and petty comments. The reason I am recommending a book not by him, but about him, is that it’s the first book one should read. My criticism of Orhan Pamuk is that he has become so grand that no one edits his books anymore. A book like Snow , which I enjoyed, could have been cut by 20 per cent. He even repeats lines – something a good editor would have caught. OK, he’s very fussy about not being cut, but it’s all a bit wordy. Snow was accessible, but some of his other books, which are deliberately highly intellectual, are too difficult for me. I want a good, quickly digested read. But once I’d read Michael McGaha’s Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk and he’d pointed out what these books are actually about and how you should read them, I wanted to go back and have another go. Translations also make an amazing difference. For instance, the Dutch translation of My Name is Red made it into a bestseller because it was so well done. The same is true with the English translation of Istanbul by Maureen Freely. This is the sort of thing you learn from the McGaha book. Maureen Freely’s translations won the best translation prize in Britain, while her rival, who was the old translator, was panned. But she won a prize for translating another book of Pamuk’s because their intentions were different. The old translator was very American, very precise. She wanted to get everything right and exactly deliver Orhan Pamuk’s words. Maureen Freely, on the other hand, was very intent on making it easy to read. Also, the political context of Orhan Pamuk is very important. You have to understand what a child of privilege he is in Turkey, and what that means about the way he writes. He’s very different from the Nobel Prize winner in Egypt [Naguib Mahfouz], who is very much a man of the people. Yes. He really breaks it down and shows how Orhan Pamuk was bravely speaking out about the issue in a way that was quite edgy for Turkey. On the other hand, Pamuk didn’t say anything deliberately so that he could become a death-threat target and therefore win the Nobel Prize. This is the narrative in conspiracy-minded circles of the Turkish literary elite – that Orhan Pamuk deliberately set out to win the favour of the West by admitting the genocide in order to win the Nobel Prize. Which is clearly not the case. You can tell that from this really good book."