orhan pamuk istanbul memories and the city

Two months earlier, in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Der Tages-Anzeiger, he had said of Turkey, “thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” This remark set off a relentless campaign against Pamuk in the Turkish nationalist press. At first he seemed quite strained, and with reason. In April of 2005 Pamuk returned to London for the publication of Istanbul and we settled into the same corner of the hotel lobby to speak for two hours. Pamuk arrived, wearing a black corduroy jacket over a light-blue shirt and dark slacks, and observed, “We could die here and nobody would ever find us.” We retreated to a plush, quiet corner of the hotel lobby where we spoke for three hours, pausing only for coffee and a chicken sandwich.

A special room had been booked for the meeting-a fluorescent-lit, noisily air-conditioned corporate space in the hotel basement. The first conversation occurred in May of 2004 at the time of the British publication of Snow. This interview with Orhan Pamuk was conducted in two sustained sessions in London and by correspondence. Pamuk’s most recent book is Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003/2005), a double portrait of himself-in childhood and youth-and of the place he comes from. Snow (2002/2004), which focuses on religious and political radicalism, was the first of his novels to confront political extremism in contemporary Turkey and it confirmed his standing abroad even as it divided opinion at home. The novel explores themes central to his fiction: the intricacies of identity in a country that straddles East and West, sibling rivalry, the existence of doubles, the value of beauty and originality, and the anxiety of cultural influence. In 2003 Pamuk received the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for My Name Is Red (1998/2001), a murder mystery set in sixteenth-century Istanbul and narrated by multiple voices. His first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, was published in 1982 and was followed by The Silent House (1983), The White Castle (1985/1991 in English translation), The Black Book(1990/1994), and The New Life (1994/1997). He is now Turkey’s most widely read author. Early in life he developed a passion for the visual arts, but after enrolling in college to study architecture he decided he wanted to write. His family had made a fortune in railroad construction during the early days of the Turkish Republic and Pamuk attended Robert College, where the children of the city’s privileged elite received a secular, Western-style education. Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in Istanbul, where he continues to live.

Interviewed by Ángel Gurría-Quintana Issue 175, Fall/Winter 2005

Orhan pamuk istanbul memories and the city