The New York Public Library



Orhan Pamuk | Mona Eltahawy

October 21, 2015

LIVE from the New York Public Library

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Celeste Bartos Forum

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening. Good evening. My name is Paul Holdengräber. I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library, known as LIVE from the New York Public Library. As all of you know, my goal here at the library is to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and when successful to make it levitate. Thank you. Thank you. (laughter/applause) Here goes for levitation. I’ve actually always wondered how much this library weighs. If any of you know, please let me know.

We can really speak about passion tonight, because when I let Mona Eltahawy know that there was an opportunity of speaking with Orhan Pamuk, she said, “Well, you know, I will be in Derry the day before, and I could fly through Belfast and I would arrive in the afternoon. Would that work for you?” And I said, “Yes,” and so Mona Eltahawy has just arrived from Derry County, from Belfast, filled with, perhaps, jetlag, but so, so excited.

I want to tell you about some of the events that are coming up. In October, still, we have Gloria Steinem and Roberta Kaplan next week and Simon Winchester at the end of that week. In November, a special edition of Ira Glass’s This American Life, which will be about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and why it still divides Israelis today, twenty years later. An evening with Mary-Louise Parker and Mary Karr and an evening I will be having with Edmund de Waal. In December, Helen Vendler will deliver the Robert Silvers annual lecture.

After the event tonight, both Orhan Pamuk and Mona Eltahawy will sign books after their conversation. I would like to say a big thank-you to the Ford Foundation for their fantastic support of LIVE from the New York Public Library’s tenth anniversary. We’re ten years old. About ten years ago I in fact interviewed on this very stage Orhan Pamuk. To celebrate, the Ford Foundation will match your contribution to LIVE dollar for dollar. When you give you’ll help make sure we can continue to engage New Yorkers in conversation that contribute to and enrich the cultural discourse. Please consider giving with the pledge cards placed on your seats and leave them filled out with your pledge in the container before leaving tonight. Additionally I want to thank the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos and Mahnaz and Adam Bartos.

Now, many of you know that for the last seven years or more I’ve asked my guests to provide me with a biography of themselves in seven words, seven words that will or won’t define them. Joan Didion famously said, “Seven words will not define me.” (laughter) Some people resist and will not tell me who they are in seven words. Of course you know one thing about Orhan Pamuk is that he’s just published a novel called A Strangeness in My Mind, that could nearly be seven words. But in fact I did ask them each for seven words and, like bad children, one gave me six and another gave me ten. So on average, we have eight.

Mona prefaced this by saying, “Paul, this is my motto, my campaign platform for when I run for president of the world, and my revolutionary manifesto.” That’s many more than ten words, but here are her ten words. I must say that some of the words in these ten words I have never pronounced from this stage: “Stay outta my vagina unless I want you in there.” (laughter/applause) Thank you, thank you very much. (laughter) And she added, “It’s ten words but several are very small.” Anyway, Orhan Pamuk gave me six words. Here are my six words; I asked for seven. “I am coming from Old Istanbul.” Please welcome them.

(applause)

MONA ELTAHAWY: Good evening, everyone. It’s such a great pleasure to be here with Orhan because I’m such a big fan of his work, so of course when Paul asked me if I could make it, I was happy to turn my schedule upside down, and I am here. And without further ado, we’re going to start with a brief reading by Orhan and then begin our conversation.

ORHAN PAMUK: Thank you, you see we are all set and we are very organized. I said, Mona, can I read a little bit at the beginning? Maybe I’ll do an introduction. I wrote a book published in Turkey one year ago, and now it’s translated, I checked the translation. Wonderful by Ekin Oklap. And this is a book just published yesterday I guess. And then I also teach fiction at Columbia University on fall semesters and we read the best books, best novels. We read Anna Karenina, we read Dostoevsky’s Demons, Stendhal, The Red and the Black, and then some students in the class say, “Oh, Professor,” sometimes a book, depending on the length of the book, sometimes we discuss a book for three weeks, Anna Karenina, or two weeks, sometimes my novels. And sometimes when I say, “As you know, in the end, Anna Karenina commits suicide.” Some students say, “Oh, no, no, spoiler, don’t tell the ending.” (laughter) And I say, “No, this is not a book club, this is a university.”

And also argue that a novel, yes, is not a plot. It’s something else. A plot is something that holds thousands and thousands of details together. Imagine a novel as a galaxy of nerve endings. Nerve endings is Nabokov’s, no are Nabokov’s words. Think of a novel as billions or tens of thousands or maybe thousands of little points, little nerve endings, little focal points that an author wants to talk about. Then he invents a plot, a story, that will go over all these points. Then the novel is not a plot but the plot helps, sustains, makes these little shiny points live a life, be alive, be strong. So I thought when I was writing this, why don’t I tell the story at the beginning, the whole plot that holds all the little details, because perhaps implying to the reader that the novel, yes, in six hundred pages, will cover this, but it is also something else. Let’s see what it covers. This is the first paragraph of A Strangeness in My Mind.

“This is the story of the life and daydreams of Mevlut Karatas, a seller of boza and yogurt. Born in 1957 on the western edge of Asia, in a poor village overlooking a hazy lake in Central Anatolia, he came to Istanbul at the age of twelve, living there, in the capital of the world, for the rest of his life.”

Now, I said, I wrote, living there, “came to Istanbul at the age of twelve, living there, in the capital of the world, for the rest of his life.” Now, don’t think that the novels are written very easily. This capital of the world, we talked so much with my editors, some of them in Istanbul, of course, this is first written in Turkish, they say, “Oh, please delete this. This is too much.” (laughter) Some editors said. This is what Flaubert when he came to Istanbul believed in 1850s and wrote back a postcard to a friend saying, “It will be the capital of the world in hundred years.” And hundred years later after Flaubert wrote that letter, I was born, and before that Ottoman Empire disintegrated and nothing of the sort happened in fact. It was the most provincial town in the world in a way. (laughter)

“When he was twenty-five, our character, Mevlut Karatas, he returned to the province of his birth, where he eloped with a village girl, a rather strange affair that determined the rest of his days: returning with her to Istanbul, he got married,” more or less a hundred pages, “and had two daughters,” another hundred pages; “he took a number of jobs without pause,” another hundred and fifty pages, “selling his yogurt, ice cream, and rice in the streets and waiting tables.” I’m not telling the ending. “But every evening, without fail, he would wander the streets of Istanbul, selling boza and dreaming strange dreams.”

More or less this is what the novel is about, but then novels are about other things, too. We’ll talk about that.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Can I have the book now?

ORHAN PAMUK: Yes, I’m sorry.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Now I get to ask him questions.

(applause)

MONA ELTAHAWY: Thank you for that, Orhan. Before we go into the book, which as you see I’ve got all these boarding passes in there.

ORHAN PAMUK: Thank you.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Because all I’ve been doing is traveling, so I’ve marked my pages with boarding passes.

ORHAN PAMUK: Thank you for being with us tonight, really, Mona, I’m very happy.

MONA ELTAHAWY: It’s an incredible pleasure. Thank you. I would actually like to start with the cover, because I discovered in reading your book that you drew this. Orhan drew the cover.

ORHAN PAMUK: Oh, well, you’re telling all the secrets.

MONA ELTAHAWY: I’m not giving away the ending, and it’s not just the cover that you remove, but also inside here as well. And it’s beautiful.

ORHAN PAMUK: Now I feel embarrassed.

MONA ELTAHAWY: No, don’t be, don’t be humble. Could you tell me why you decided to illustrate the cover?

ORHAN PAMUK: Okay, it’s not that I decided to illustrate the cover. It’s a long story but more or less, I am a failed artist. Between the ages of seven and twenty-two, I wanted to be a painter and some of my readers are saying “don’t say that sentence again.” I wanted to be a painter then a screw was loose in my head then I switched to writing novels at the age of twenty-three. In fact, I wrote all about mysteries of this in my autobiographical book, essay book, Istanbul, which is half my autobiography until the age of twenty-three and half a sort of essay about the nature of Istanbul. Now, in order to be a writer, I, in a way, in a determined way, killed the artist in me, then, “shut up, quiet, I’ll write the novels.” But after fifty-five, sixties, I began to draw again. I did a museum related to the novel Museum of Innocence, so forth and so on.

And then since I’m with Knopf almost now twenty years I am friendly with the perhaps the world’s greatest cover maker. Chip Kidd is, I’m proud to say, is my friend and then each time I finish a book, I give the book, the translation to Chip, and he says, “Let’s have some dinner, Orhan,” and again we went this time we went to a Japanese restaurant and Chip Kidd, this time he said, “Shall I see some of your drawings?” And I was a bit shy, then he was pushy, then I was of course very happy, (laughter) then I showed them in a very amateurish way. And then he also demanded, “Why don’t you do this?” He managed me, he edited me, he asked me to do things. It’s a combination with all sorts of from my notebooks. I gave him a lot of material. This is Chip Kidd’s cover, with my naïve drawings a bit also, not very shy, as you see, because I’m exhibiting them.

(laughter)

MONA ELTAHAWY: So clearly the painter is not dead, the painter inside you.

ORHAN PAMUK: Yes, but in the end, painter is dead because I’m a visual writer, in the end, I asked this to many people, like people asking to shrinks, “I actually want to be a painter, unfortunately I end up being a writer, what’s this?” And they say, “Yeah, it’s okay, you’re doing fine.” But one thing is this, that I think I’ve paid a lot of energy to it, I told the class at Columbia University about the relationship between painting and literature, popularly known among the students as words and images or words and pictures, in which I follow how we think, what’s the relationship between visual writing and writing in images, famously known as sister arts, what is the relationship, so forth and so on.

And there I can say that I am a visual writer. Many writers are visual in the sense that when we write a novel we aim to trigger in readers’ imagination something. What is that something? Is that a picture or is the content of that thing more visual or more verbal. With that in mind we can make an abstract distinction between authors. Of course we authors both address both our readers’ verbal imagination and readers’ visual imagination. But some authors like Tolstoy, Proust, Nabokov, they address their readers’ visual imagination. If you read a scene by Tolstoy or Proust, then you would remember, say, the colors of the sunlight coming, some technical detail, some objects in the room. Tolstoy, Nabokov, Proust, many visual writers—and I also consider myself a visual writer—will make that scene, that dramatical turning point effective in readers’ imagination through pictures.

While some writers, and the greatest one and the most mysterious and greatest one is Dostoevsky will never evoke any picture in our imagination, but they go deeper by only talking about drama by words, by not describing the room, very little description, very little evocation or attempt to picture, if the word picture is right here. Henry James once said, was preparing for a novel, I forget which one, but he wrote a letter to a friend saying, “I want to see the story, the picture through,” meaning a character will tell the story, he was referring in fact—he was also a visual writer—he was referring to the story he is about to write as a picture.

So the fact that there is a dead artist or I wanted and aspired also, encouraged by my family to be a painter, that its residue is that I really evoke a scene by visual aspects of it. Some writers are self-conscious. All writers do it. I am self-conscious. Many writers do it, this is what is left in the end being an artist is a professional thing. It also means going to galleries, having a career. You can be the greatest painter in the world, but then, being a painter is also just like being a writer, a social thing, having a career. I am in that sense extremely amateurish.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Well, I love the cover, and I’m sure other readers will as well. One of the most provocative images, and for me, because I’m from Cairo and you’re from Istanbul, and I love your writing and especially the writing in this book, because I can see my own family in many of the scenes that you draw, so you talk about—you describe families gathering together over dinner or for Eid, the festival. But, you know, one of my favorite things that you do in the book when you evoke Istanbul very soon after Mevlut arrives is that image of the basket that people send down, because we have this in Cairo, and I remember when I would go and visit my grandparents, so the image is, and this isn’t any spoiler, but when Mevlut first arrives in Istanbul—

ORHAN PAMUK: This is not a book club too, we can give them a spoiler.

(laughter)

MONA ELTAHAWY: They’re adults, you’re absolutely right, and I shouldn’t coddle them. But there are beautiful scenes where Mevlut the boza seller is going round peddling his wares and then a basket will come down from the third-story balcony, for whatever reason, either because the woman or the man upstairs is too busy to come down, they have guests, whatever it is. So this basket is kind of roped all the way down, the boza is put inside, and then it’s roped up again, and for me this is my grandparents’ home, because I’d be visiting my grandparents in Cairo and there would be a vegetable seller going by and my grandmother would say, “Quick, quick, quick, go out and ask him to put carrots and tomatoes and cucumbers.”

ORHAN PAMUK: And then we’ll drop the basket.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Exactly, and as a child I would get the basket and drop it down. I used to be so happy doing that. So I really do appreciate the visual images.

ORHAN PAMUK: This is, Mona, is related to the fact that in towns like Cairo and also Istanbul, probably between 1910s and 1960s there were very few elevators but too many floors.

(laughter)

MONA ELTAHAWY: Exactly. But not enough floors that you couldn’t get it down, because one of the things that you do with the basket thing too is to show how difficult Mevlut’s job becomes when the high story apartment buildings go up. Because there’s also a scene towards the beginning where you get the sense of the vastness between buildings. And I have also a memory from childhood where my father would stand on the second story, we lived in an apartment in a two-story villa. He would stand on a balcony and my uncle would stand on a balcony I don’t know, maybe a mile away, two miles away, and they would whistle to each other because there were no buildings in between.

ORHAN PAMUK: I see.

MONA ELTAHAWY: This is in Nazra City, and now it’s all high-rise buildings. So I feel that the way you painted this change through these incredibly beautiful images, for me as an Egyptian really spoke to me, so I would like to talk about the big, beautiful cities from which we come, Cairo and Istanbul. And I would actually like to ask you something that I often think about. I think of cities like lovers. I have loved some cities more than lovers. How do you feel towards Istanbul?

ORHAN PAMUK: Really, it’s a tough question because I have to talk a lot about it. First, writers write about the subjects they know about, and the first impulse is to write about human beings. Like a normal person, at the age of twenty-three to twenty-four, I decided to be a novelist. There was an expectation that I be an artist, because as I told you, I wanted to be a painter. I said, “Forget about painting, I’ll be a novelist,” but once I made that decision, then of course, like all authors, I wrote about the things and human beings I know about. Until, I mean, I was twenty-three, twenty-two, a lot of struggle getting my first books published in Turkey.

But then I was mid-forties almost twenty years later, I was slightly internationally begin to be known and then there my international readers begin to call me, “Oh! Istanbul writer,” which never occurred to me because I was writing about Istanbul, yes, I mean, most of Turkish writers in early sixties, seventies, were not writing about Istanbul, they were writing about poor peasants in rural Anatolia and their political and social problems, while I am a relatively speaking more upper-class person writing about Istanbul, do not have experience of these rural Anatolian landlords, and so forth and so on. I wrote my novels.

I was self-conscious about being an Istanbul writer after I was forty-five and even the Turkish critics, my Turkish reviewers and Turkish literary critics began to call me an “Istanbul writer” after I was internationally known as a Turkish writer. And my first impulse, now I’m forty-five, getting fifty, everyone is calling me an Istanbul writer, I did not want to glorify it, I did not want to sugarize it because everyone I thought, “Oh, I love Istanbul, what a beautiful thing,” and all these people would set out to me in a very sweet way, very well-meaning and well-meaning intentions, “Mr. Pamuk, I was in Istanbul last summer, it was so beautiful.” (laughter)

Well, in this novel I wrote about the very poor people, the slums, I did a lot of research, and I know the intentions when they say, “I like it so much.” Perhaps they are saying, “We break the prejudices, we are coming, we like your culture,” they are so well-meaning, but then, but then, there is the touristic Istanbul, there is the real Istanbul. In my first books I wrote about as I said, my family, my grandfather built railroads, they were well-to-do people, my grandfather made a lot of money and in fact the joke in the family, my grandfather made a lot of money, my uncle and my father—my uncles and my father—spent a lot of money, wasting that money, (laughter) so I started with zero. But my father had a good library, that was what is left of my grandfather’s efforts.

But in the end, I come from a middle- or upper-middle-class secular, Westernized family who had nothing to do with my—for example, the character in this book, Mevlut Karatas, who is a street vendor. So in order to be able to write that book, I did a lot of research, but let’s talk about Istanbul as you suggested. Mona, my point is, yes, but I don’t want to sugarize it, I don’t want to dramatize it, I don’t want to say, “I love Istanbul.”

MONA ELTAHAWY: Well, you know, I didn’t sugarize all my lovers, either. Some of my lovers I despised. You can despise and love someone too.

ORHAN PAMUK: And I don’t want to despise it in a self-conscious way, too. It’s just like my body, it’s just like my family. Sometimes I’m extremely happy with it, sometimes I’m extremely angry to it, and my moods may change, but I don’t want anyone to say to me how I should like it or how I should not like it, how I should glorify it. It’s just it is, it’s a fate, I’m happy. The more important thing about Istanbul and me are these two things: that I lived there all my life. Someplace I read that Isaac Asimov is a Manhattan writer, and he never left Manhattan for thirty years. I like that. There were times in my life too that I didn’t leave Istanbul for ten years if you count the little Prince’s Islands, which is one hour away, spending the summers there, it was all okay. This is one thing. It’s also, the city is your fate, you know, you cannot criticize, it’s silly as picking a fight with your family. I lived there all my life.

The important second thing about me and my writings is that I feel very privileged because when I was born into it, it was a city of a million, now they say fifteen, sixteen, let’s say sixteen million, and this all happened in sixty-three, in sixty years, and I was there all the time. How many writers had this privilege of seeing their town grow from one million to sixteen million in their sixty-three years of their lives? I feel, “My God, God has granted me such a unique experience, why don’t I mine about that?” In that sense I am now even more self-conscious Istanbul writer than anyone else. I am privileged to get an access to this information, I’ll write about this, because this happened in Paris or London in 250 years; it happened in Istanbul in sixty years, I always tell this and crack a joke after that, it happens in China, in Shanghai, in twenty years by the way.

(laughter)

MONA ELTAHAWY: Is that one of the reasons that your protagonist is not the usual upper-middle-class Westernized protagonist that you wrote about, because Mevlut, his lifespan, he’s just a few years younger than you.

ORHAN PAMUK: Five years younger than me.

MONA ELTAHAWY: His lifespan also illustrates that very incredibly fast change.

ORHAN PAMUK: Probably, but another thing is that I had a self-imposed moral program that I want to write—see Istanbul through lower-class, a street vendor’s point of view.

MONA ELTAHAWY: A moral program?

ORHAN PAMUK: Yes, it’s a moral program, really, but I also enjoyed this aesthetically, writing a novel is such a joy. I’m saying moral program in the sense that writing novels, I argue, has an important moral aspect. It’s not showing our ideological, political programs. This we should do as citizens. Say, I like this party, I think this is this party or that program or this manifesto, or this feministic program, is good for my country, I believe it, we shout, we fight. This is—I agree, this is what we do as a citizen.

But as novelists, we also have a moral obligation just because—it’s not a self-imposed morality outside of literature, just because we are writing novels, we are doing a sort of a moral act. I will explain. Novels work in two ways. First, like all art and literature, they are self-expression. Most simplified form is autobiography or autobiographical fantasies, romances, allegories, so forth and so on. This is one muscle we have in our minds. Then the second energy, second motivation to write a novel, and also the same motivation the readers have the same motivation, sometimes even more radically, is to see the world through someone else point of view, someone else eyes, and that person has perhaps by gender, by culture, by religion, by economics, by class, is slightly different. Not totally—not very radically, it’s almost impossible. The limits of that difference also is the end of the place where you can securely write a novel.

But an act of novelistic imagination is twofold in a way, that of self-expression and that of representing others’ points of view. I care about that, and in that sense the art of the novel is based on this human strength, that is strength of identifying with others, with others’ point of view. This novel, A Strangeness in My Mind, which tells you in forty years the personal story of a street vendor who comes to Istanbul in 1969 or ’70 and who stays there for forty years, and his cousins, his friends, also, his big family is such an attempt because as a middle-class, upper-middle-class, Istanbul secular Westernized family, I did not know all these details though I knew all the shanty houses, because Istanbul’s shanty developments are not at the outer edge, outer periphery, but it’s interdistributed evenly in the town, so I used to see all these houses, shanty, in the neighborhoods.

So I wanted to identify with a person like that, first. But what is identify? I begin doing talking to street vendors, boza sellers, that I begin to learn things, shall I tell, then I begin to learn that boza sellers, boza is a slightly fermented Asian Turkish drink that is now disappearing because it was popular because it legitimized to enjoy a little bit of an alcohol in Ottoman times when alcohol was forbidden. After Kemal Ataturk’s secular republic, alcohol was, you can enjoy alcohol, so you don’t need boza, which is also related to the English word booze, slightly alcoholic. While it continued to be sold and enjoyed perhaps because it is related to five hundred years of Ottoman Empire, it has connotations of romantic imagination about good old Ottoman days, so it was perfect for my subject.

MONA ELTAHAWY: We have it in Egypt, too. We have boza in Egypt, too, fermented yeast and millet.

ORHAN PAMUK: It’s very popular in North Africa, in Balkans, and also south Russia or Northern Black Sea, people enjoy boza. The book will be understood. I will say that you don’t need to drink and enjoy boza to enjoy the book.

(laughter)

MONA ELTAHAWY: Apparently it doesn’t taste very good, so I’m not sure enjoyment is the word.

ORHAN PAMUK: Don’t tell anyone that it’s not very enjoyable to drink.

MONA ELTAHAWY: So we’ll just read.

ORHAN PAMUK: Boza was in my childhood was very interesting, sexy, whatever, because it’s eleven o’clock at night, or ten o’clock at night, you’re supposed to sleep, your grandma, you’re still around! And then suddenly it’s snowing in Istanbul and you say boza and then a boza seller will run to the window, stop, stop, sixth floor, come up! And then the guy—definitely you are an urban person because it’s a winter night, you have your radiator working, which is not everyone had a radiator in fifties in Istanbul and not everyone has an elevator, so the guy comes up, he looks very poor and scary in the sense that he’s a peasant, poor, so you exchange money and boza, and that stayed with me. But I argue and this in my interviews with street sellers in Istanbul that in fact it’s operating not because it’s a tasty thing and everyone enjoys it, but in the end you buy the ritual that is related to tradition.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Continuity.

ORHAN PAMUK: Ottoman times, romanticizing of Ottoman times. Also, slightly intertwined with again middle-class and upper-middle-class people are the buyers who are living in apartment buildings, who can afford to buy some fancy thing for the fun of it. They are, they were also, they were mostly secular and upper-class people who were interested that there was once upon a time Ottoman Empire which is extinct that people used to drink a liquid like this. It’s not the taste, really, and just because the content, more than the content, the ritual is more important, I liked it. My characters in the book are discussing is it the alcohol content or is it the tradition content that counts in boza?

MONA ELTAHAWY: There’s a wonderful moment too when he does go up to an apartment with people who are already slightly drunk and he refuses to play along. And I love because this as we were talking earlier is one of your first characters, one of the first protagonists who isn’t from an upper-middle-class Westernized background. And there’s a moment where Mevlut goes up and he realizes they’re asking him all the questions they usually ask him, “Are you religious?” He realizes they’re testing him and he says, or the author’s voice says, he used to play along with this role of being kind of like the naïve backward village man but at that particular moment he refused to do that.

ORHAN PAMUK: He is now getting old. He is fed up.

MONA ELTAHAWY: But I think what I love what you did with him and this is where I want to enter love now, I want to talk about romance because I think romance is very important in this book, and this again is not to spoil anything, but they’re adults and it’s not a book club, but Mevlut, he marries the wrong woman because he sees a beautiful young girl, he falls in love with her eyes specifically and he sends her letters for years and years and decides to elope with her and at the moment of elopement realizes that he’s eloped with her older, less hot sister, (laughter) but he accepts it as his fate, and you never patronize him, you never condescend to him, you never make fun of the fact that he’s made this mistake, this awful mistake, you never hold him up as someone, as a figure of ridicule, you really love him, and your love for him comes across.

ORHAN PAMUK: Thank you for saying so. I agree.

MONA ELTAHAWY: You’re welcome, my pleasure. You often talk about the relationship between fathers and sons, and I know he’s only just five years older than you right, so you’re obviously not his father, but in a sense you are a father figure in that you’re guiding him through the city. But I want to connect that with the romance and the various characters in there and how you bring about their love in kind of parallel and tandem with your romance, as difficult as it is, with Istanbul.

ORHAN PAMUK: Now that you said the story, so many things to talk about that, that first my character Mevlut, yes, as we read in the first pages, and it’s also in the first nine pages that he writes love letters to a girl and then it’s fixed by the family, slightly arranged—

MONA ELTAHAWY: Something happened there.

ORHAN PAMUK: Slightly arranged marriage that looks like running away with a girl and that’s the most prestigious and everyone wants that, family controls, it’s normal, no one will be cheated. Then you elope, you have the prestige of being modern, we don’t listen to our family, we’re romantics, we run away, we didn’t care about the money. Mevlut has the best of both worlds, but then unfortunately he realizes that it’s the wrong girl, this is not the one he wrote the letters for.

And then, this is the beginning of the novel, with then I tell this anecdote and then it’s hard to explain, these are the moments in fiction you all have, you don’t communicate with the reader, you don’t write about these facts, you hope that the reader will read in between lines and neither Mevlut or the narrative voice in the story says, “This is the wrong girl, what are you, an idiot? What are you doing?” There is a silence about that in the book. Yes, the book makes it clear that the readers understand and Mevlut understood that this is the wrong girl but he doesn’t do anything, and it’s not explained in the book, you have to read six hundred pages why he does it or this is his character, or we don’t know. I have many excuses for Mevlut for doing that, maybe I will tell some of them to those of you who have already read the novel first. He discovers the sweetness of sex, how can he say, “Well, this is not the right one.” It all is happy.

MONA ELTAHAWY: This is why my quote was vaginas. You see, we always get round to sex. Go on, Orhan, go ahead.

ORHAN PAMUK: I know that you would like this.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Yeah, go ahead.

ORHAN PAMUK: And they are overwhelmed, and this is also during Ramadan, fasting time, well, during the Ramadan you’re not supposed to—only fast, no sex. But then they’re also making this case that in Turkey and I’m sure in all Muslim countries they make you marry just before the Ramadan, right?

MONA ELTAHAWY: You’re like, “Damn!”

ORHAN PAMUK: And then they’re tortured, and they break the laws, enjoy their sex, they go to the local preacher, get permission, discuss this or that. But you know when I was doing all that first, I have heard this so much and there are so many, all my childhood I read newspapers. I’m a newspaper addict. I used to go to my maternal grandmother, who used to collect, never throw any newspaper away, this happens in third world all the time. Never throw away any plastic bottles, never throw away any glass bottles, never throw away—and then I used to read my brother all the old newspapers, and there were a lot of columns about religion, sex, what to do, how to have sex. “I’m fasting in Ramadan, what if I suddenly by mistake kiss my girlfriend,” or not girlfriend, no girlfriends, my wife.

MONA ELTAHAWY: To this day in Egypt we have call-in shows, this now happens on television, where someone calls the cleric. “I kissed my husband good-bye before I went to work. Is my fast still okay?” Same problem.

ORHAN PAMUK: And when you read these columns you immediately realize all religion and sex is intertwined by one single subject feeling of guilt. (laughter) Mevlut also has that, and we more or less in those pages we read the Islamic popular version of doing something that you don’t know much about religion actually. You do something you heard that maybe it’s wrong, you go to hell, you immediately call a preacher, am I going to go to hell, that kind of thing, Mevlut also does that. But that it is encyclopedic, the novel, of everything of a street vendor’s life. I started this novel as not a short story but a little novella about a street vendor who loses his job. That is, this was happening a lot in my life. Say in 1950s, as I wrote in this book, until early or late sixties, or early seventies, yogurt was not a bottled product, but you could—can I show you—but it was sold by on a pole by the street vendors who would carry two or three trays of yogurt on each end of the pole and say “yogurt” and then your mother would open the—

MONA ELTAHAWY: And there’s a wonderful photograph at the back of the book as well that everyone should check out.

ORHAN PAMUK: At the end of this book I put a photograph by a great Turkish photographer, Ara Güler. I used a lot of his photographs in my autobiographical essay book Istanbul and Ara Güler is a generation older than me. He always tells me, “You like my photos because I began photographing Istanbul when you were born, and all your childhood, all your life is in my archive.” He’s a great photographer but it’s partly perhaps true. But the details of a photograph give so much message and here was a real person, a real photo like my character selling yogurt and boza with a pole on his shoulder, so I said, “at the end of the book I will publish that.”

MONA ELTAHAWY: It’s wonderful. There are two things you do at the back of the book that I found fascinating, because I’ve found them in very few books. One is an index of characters, because it really is an amazing spectrum of characters. So you really do, you have an index. At the beginning of the book there is a family tree, which you will need. But there’s also an index of characters and then there’s also a chronology of events, and the chronology of events has things like Mevlut’s birth, the birth of other characters, and also real-life events. So I’m going to split them into two. First of all, let’s talk about the chronology of characters. Because there was this one incredible scene, which I will bring in now as a feminist. I’m exercising feminist privilege.

ORHAN PAMUK: I’m scared now.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Don’t be. I won’t hurt you. I promise.

ORHAN PAMUK: Thank you.

MONA ELTAHAWY: No, there was this incredible soliloquy, and I forgot where it was but I remembered the name of the character, so all I had to do was go to the index of characters, look up Vediha—

ORHAN PAMUK: Oh yes.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Yeah, and then look up “is it right” and it’s on page 466 to 69.

ORHAN PAMUK: That’s the darling of Turkish feminists, and all my friends like that.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Of course. All feminists absolutely. This is the feminist rallying cry. I talk about the sexual revolution in my book, Orhan, you have it right here, and I’m not going to read all of it, but I’m just going to read a few lines and then I’ll ask you.

ORHAN PAMUK: Sure, I’ll be so happy. You’ll see my book is also feminist.

MONA ELTAHAWY: It’s wonderful! So Vediha is the older sister. We’re going to start the sexual revolution together, clearly. Vediha is the older sister of the woman that Mevlut elopes with mistakenly.

ORHAN PAMUK: And he marries to a right-wing bad guy, also we have to tell that.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Yes, she’s married to yes—

ORHAN PAMUK: Repressive.

MONA ELTAHAWY: A misogynist bastard, in other words. And it’s this wonderful soliloquy where she says—she complains about what she has to put up with from her husband, her sons, her mother-in-law, you know, and prefaces everything with “Is it right? Is it right?” So for example she says things like, “My sons will be sitting there watching a soccer match and they’ll just yell at me things like, ‘Mom, Mom, I need a snack,’ or her husband will chastise her for something or he will press her wrists really hard until they hurt. So this woman is basically saying, you know, “I’m holding this household up on my shoulders and everybody treats me like shit. Is it right?” And I love the scene not only because you’re able to get across the complaints of a very ordinary woman.

But also you gave an interview to I think it was Hürriyet newspaper, a Turkish newspaper last year in which very soon after your book came out in Turkish and they asked you about the possible reaction around the world to the book and I think you said something like, “What the outside world can criticize Turkey about is the condition of women and how women are treated in Turkey.” Now, on a very personal note, the only Middle Eastern country that will publish my book so far is Turkey, it’s coming out in Turkish. So I’m very excited. So I love that you did that but also those comments, were those the comments that got you into trouble. The Turkish government very soon after called you and the Turkish author Elif Şafak, who’s a friend of mine, I love Elif, they claimed, or they accused you of belonging to the international literature lobby, (laughter) which, you know, the powers that be use against Turkey, and we’re not going to talk about Turkey and politics that much because I want to focus on your writing but I would love to connect those two, the fact that you have this wonderful soliloquy the fact that you said in the interview when the outside world reads this book one of the things that it will really draw their attention to is the misogyny in Turkey and how women are treated and how the increasingly paranoid Erdoğan regime picked that and said you are being used by the outside world. Let’s talk about that.

ORHAN PAMUK: Yeah, I’ll talk about that. But on the other hand, unfortunately, the people who attack Elif Şafak or me or there are so many also outspoken, brave, liberal democrats in Turkey, the people who attack us don’t read our books, they won’t read a six hundred page book by me or by anyone else.

MONA ELTAHAWY: They’re too busy being paranoid.

ORHAN PAMUK: But they will read some critical remarks about government, this or that. Most of the time those attacks come from that, but that happens all the time in fact. And those attacks came last spring. I didn’t lose sleep really in the end. It happens all the time. I’m used to it. I’m not crying. There were worse times. I always make the same joke about Turkey and free speech. Don’t forget Mona that in 2008 and ’9, I had three bodyguards in Istanbul, now I have only one.

MONA ELTAHAWY: We’re making progress.

(laughter)

ORHAN PAMUK: We are improving.

MONA ELTAHAWY: That’s incredible, Orhan.

ORHAN PAMUK: So don’t pressure me on that too much. We are improving and we’re doing fine.

MONA ELTAHAWY: I think I’m going to create a feminist army for you. The feminist army will protect you, don’t worry.

ORHAN PAMUK: Thank you. I hope they read that part at least.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Yeah, but you see, I think the important point about the feminism. Because I get this all the time. When we talk about women’s issues, is that women’s issues are supposed to be whispered about, said in our language, and not said internationally. So a lot of people attack me for my work, because I expose the misogyny and so they claim that I’m making us look bad.

ORHAN PAMUK: It’s not only a women’s issue, for example, I remember in seventies, eighties, Kurdish issue was also like that. Kurdish issue, we are treating Kurds so bad, but don’t tell this internationally kind of thing. Again, the same thing about the way they treat women, the same thing about military coups, so forth and so on. National identity especially are troubled especially when we aspire to be global, Westernized, civilized, and we also some part of our brains that we are not, the country is not doing its homework that well and we are troubled by these issues, while Mevlut is not unfortunately in this lofty level.

He is my character in this book, is down to earth, is trying to make ends meet, and so relatively speaking, he is compared to other bad guys in the novel is treating his wife, again, relatively speaking, better. What makes Mevlut shine and gives him his popularity up to now he is popular among the Turkish readers is that he has I don’t know a sort of a morality of his own, I didn’t write it down the rules of his ethics. In the end he is a happy person, but his cousins, people from his village that he came to Istanbul with, together with, they are successful and rich, Mevlut cannot make it, while in six hundred pages we see in the novel the change of daily life, whatever, how selling things in the streets changed, how living, habits of buying things, navigating in the streets, eating things, noticing things, and architecture of the town Istanbul changed in this last forty years.

MONA ELTAHAWY: And was it important for you to portray the change between men and women, was it important for you to bring Vediha’s voice across?

ORHAN PAMUK: Did you say men and women or everything?

MONA ELTAHAWY: Men and women specifically.

ORHAN PAMUK: Men and women didn’t in fact change, it’s not that visible. Of course, there are middle classes who are secular who have their parties, etcetera, as I wrote in my Museum of Innocence and other novels. While here, just two months before I came here, two months ago, Turkish Statistics Institute published that fifty-two seconds, fifty-two percent of Turkish people still marry with arranged marriages. I argue probably more than sixty percent of humanity, no I’ll change, more than sixty percent of non-Western world also marry by arranged marriages. Arranged marriage is both a very useful thing and very embarrassing thing. So everyone makes an arranged marriage, but they go to a movie or a pastry shop, and they say, no, no, no, we went out together with your mother and your father before, no, no, we are not like that.

But the attempt in this novel which I began as a short novel and which I realized if my character will be a street vendor and if he’s going to be a special character, then I have to tell how he came to Istanbul, how he made his own shanty house, so to speak, by his own hand, how he made a living, how he had children, how they all lived in one single room for twenty-five years, there the challenge was the most important thing really in the art of the novel that my book confronted is to write about a lower-class character without falling into traps of melodrama. I love Dickens, this novel has Dickensian side, but I don’t like Dickens’s melodrama.

I gave a lot of effort to write, to create a character. I’m leaving aside talking, talking, talking, talking to people. In the end, all the stories are more or less the same, but to make this novel humorous, to make the novel engaging, the energy or sentimental energy the reader would be giving to the pages of the book should not be about pitying the character, but seeing the character’s world clearly in an objective way, in a humorous way. Humor I may have exaggerated, but who wouldn’t exaggerate humor if it’s coming, because I did not want the reader to shed tears about the poverty of my character. In the end, my character is not self-pitying.

MONA ELTAHAWY: No, he’s a happy person.

ORHAN PAMUK: He’s a happy person but then you may say, “What is happy? If you have money, you are happy.”

MONA ELTAHAWY: But he doesn’t have money.

ORHAN PAMUK: Or am I arguing that money—I’m not arguing that money is not important. So as I wrote the book, which started as a short novel which end up being six hundred pages, which is my take on the development of Istanbul by the newcomers to the town, really I think a very universal story. Cities are growing and growing and growing and our humanity will be, will be living in big cities so much. And one thing that I learned writing this book which cost me some six years doing interviews with people, imagining their lives and also don’t forget that after the middle of the book, say Vediha’s monologue, it’s not based on me interviewing old ladies, I saw that.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Yeah.

ORHAN PAMUK: Okay? Because now they are middle class, right? This is we are at the middle of the novel. The characters in this novel come to Istanbul in early—or late sixties and early seventies. At the end of the book, 2014, some of them are—even by American standards, are rich. Because—they have a decree on and they illegally recover that land and after a political struggle get the title then there are high-rises, and I met many people like that, who came from the village, they have a house in a village, they have three floors in a high rise and they were street vendors forty years ago. This is also a tough sort of a testimony on immense economical growth.

But the book is not essentially busy about that growth, it’s also busy about the texture of daily life, how the street scenes, how the street was, as you mentioned, in my childhood there were no elevators so if you’re a street vendor, they say, they’ll call, “Street vendor! Yogurt! Okay? Is it fresh?” Also a bit condescending and the guy, the street vendors, all my childhood, upper classes treated them as all those cheats, you’re cheating, okay, just give me back the money, that kind of thing. Or there were also very kind people, “Oh, poor boza seller, here’s some napkin for you, some stocking, maybe you need a coat.”

MONA ELTAHAWY: A tip or something.

ORHAN PAMUK: Or something like that, yes.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Yeah. One more question about feminism because I have to because I’m a feminist.

ORHAN PAMUK: Yeah, sure.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Before we move on to chronology and the news in the chronology. There have been many statements by Turkish officials, including Erdoğan and others, like his prime minister, I think it was the prime minister, very famously last year said something like Turkish woman shouldn’t laugh in public.

ORHAN PAMUK: That guy is not a member of the parliament anymore. He is kicked out.

MONA ELTAHAWY: That’s a big relief. And Erdoğan himself earlier this year said something like men and women can never be equal because it’s not in the nature of women to be strong like men, and he’s made all these outrageous statements, and you know to tie that in and make it—put it in tandem with this incredible economic development, which the AKP party is known for because it’s one of the things that Erdoğan boasts about. It’s interesting for me that you emphasize that even though Vediha’s family—

ORHAN PAMUK: They’re saying these things because they don’t read my books, Mona.

MONA ELTAHAWY: No, no, no, I’m not talking about them. No, this is between you and me now, this is not about the accusation of you belonging to the lobby. No, I want to talk about how even though the family has done that social climb and now is middle class, essentially the problems of women are the same.

ORHAN PAMUK: Even worse, they have more power.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Right, right, so why was that important for you to put in there? Is it important for you to look at the position of women in society and ask how in many of the countries in the region for example, the richer they become the more conservative they become about covering women’s bodies, especially, as that power is challenged.

ORHAN PAMUK: I don’t know whether that’s happening in Turkey. In the end, I’m a novelist, I see, it’s all about seeing the pain of others, really. That it’s not—women are extremely repressed in Turkey. Again, now I’m a good follower of Turkish Statistics Institute, in fact Turkish Statistic Institute appears in my novel Snow, where someone there in Ankara that was also real discovers that in the small town of Kars, rate of suicide is slightly above the average in Turkey and that’s how it triggers the events which were also based in real events in Snow.

Here, I just mentioned another statistic that more than fifty-two arranged marriage, another statistic, 66 or 65 percentage of property in Turkey is are registered on men and as you go to the eastern Turkey this percentage goes up and if you go to the western Turkey, this percentage and secular world goes up and down as you say, so it’s also secularism and the way they treat the women is also who owns everything in the end.

But of course my novels are not making these big statements, but I like that way to show they may have the register, they bully the woman, but she has the most imaginative tongue and mind and fights back. In—at least in this novel I managed to represent women who are fighting back. I’m also happy, I think I also like these three sisters in this novel. Of course, they are—they start as lower-class peasant sisters, but the beautiful thing about being a novelist is my mother has one elder and one younger sister, of course they were not like Vediha, Samiha, Rayiha but the way they compared notes about their husbands, needled them and make fun of them when they were alone and I was silently watching them gave all the energy to write about Vediha, Samiha, Rayiha, who are totally different, also giving a glimpse of the spirit of the writer. You see your mother, your uncle, this is sort of a relationship also. All these fathers and sons in my novels. Right? The son always being suspicious of not getting enough recognition from the father. The father being a bit frustrated because he had big dreams. They are eternally Turkey, they are all my family, everyone was like that.

MONA ELTAHAWY: I don’t know how big your family is, but my mum is one of eleven and my dad is one of eight, so I know that kind of panoply of characters, you know. So and you know I was listening earlier today to several of your interviews. I had you in my ears as I was walking through Heathrow praying that I wouldn’t miss the connection to New York.

ORHAN PAMUK: Thank you.

MONA ELTAHAWY: It was a pleasure. I would hear man after man interviewing you or man after man review your book and none of the men picked up on the Vediha’s soliloquy, it was a woman who picked up on Vediha’s soliloquy so as I said, as a feminist, I was pressed to represent womanhood.

ORHAN PAMUK: Or maybe we’ll throw in other statistics, Mona, don’t worry. Seventy percent of the people who read novels are women.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Exactly, we spend a lot of money on books.

ORHAN PAMUK: So, no worries, they’ll understand us.

MONA ELTAHAWY: We appreciate you, Orhan. Okay, so now we’re going to move on to the news, basically, chronology.

ORHAN PAMUK: Yes.

MONA ELTAHAWY: And I’m not going to ask you about Turkish politics, but I do want to ask you about how the characters interact with news, because as I said, you weave in and out real-life events. For example, in December 2010, the Tunisians rising up against their dictator, Ben Ali, as part of the Arab Spring.

ORHAN PAMUK: The important point is there a street vendor triggers all that.

MONA ELTAHAWY: That’s right, the street vendor who sets himself on fire, Mohamed Bouazizi. Your street vendor, thankfully he survived, but yes, the street vendor who triggered the revolution.

ORHAN PAMUK: As for this, that’s the point about the novel. My character is not heavily and dramatically involved in this big historical event such as military coups or this or that. He is a voyeur, for him—

MONA ELTAHAWY: Yes, he watches.

ORHAN PAMUK: Yes, he watches. Passively, everything is a side view for him, Mevlut is not egoist, but if there is a military coup, he would think that, aw, they would treat the street vendors like this or they would treat the previous—

MONA ELTAHAWY: How would it affect me? Yeah. If I can I’m going to read this very brief paragraph here, on because it does connect to the U.S. and New York and it’s on—about September 11th, and that’s one of the events that are listed on this chronology. And the chapter is Fevziye Runs Away. “On September 11th, Mevlut and Fevziye spent the day watching TV footage of the planes crashing into those skyscrapers in America and the buildings collapsing in a cloud of fire and smoke like something out of the movies. Except for a quiet comment from Mevlut, ‘The Americans will want their revenge now,’ they never mention these events again.” So except for that quote, basically 9/11 was something that they watched on television.

ORHAN PAMUK: It’s beyond my characters—

MONA ELTAHAWY: And I think it’s important, because you know and this is again why I appreciate your writing a lot. I mean, I speak as someone from the Middle East and I speak as someone whose part of the world, including my own country, has been impacted a lot through geopolitics and I think it’s very difficult sometimes for Americans to realize that America is not the center of the world. You know, Istanbul is the center of your world and Cairo is the center of my world.

ORHAN PAMUK: I agree with my editors, I don’t want to exaggerate, but—

MONA ELTAHAWY: But this is the truth—this is how—because you know here in the U.S. when we talk about 9/11 changed everything, it changed everything for the U.S. and for the countries that were invaded as a result.

ORHAN PAMUK: It also changed everything for the Muslims, too. Normal Muslims were also traumatized.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Of course, Islamophobia, xenophobia, all of that. But for a lot of people, like street vendors who have to make a living, it was something in Turkey now that wasn’t invaded by the U.S. but had other connections with the U.S. regarding the invasion of Iraq, etcetera, it’s important to show that a lot of the people in the region were watching these events as people who consume the news, who watch the news.

ORHAN PAMUK: We all consume news. I don’t judge Mevlut for his political ideas. In fact, Mevlut, my character, doesn’t have strong political ideas, I like it, I take it as his decency. But more important in the novel is Mevlut has leftist friends. Turkish Shi’ites are more comparatively more liberal and lefty. Mevlut has socialist, leftist, secular friends, and Mevlut has also cousins who are extreme—not extreme, right wings, very stereotype little fascist boys. He is also keeping in touch with them so that he has connections and survives in the city.

Mona, do you think we should take some questions?

MONA ELTAHAWY: Sure, if you would like to take questions. I think Orhan’s telling me, “I’m done with your questions, Mona, let the audience speak.” All right. Yeah? Okay, before we take the questions could I please remind you that Orhan is not running for president of Turkey. So you can ask about Turkey but he’s just going to answer your questions very quickly. Let’s talk about literature, and let’s talk about his books, and let’s talk about what you want to know about his literature and writing.

ORHAN PAMUK: Yes, please come here and ask your question. We’ll be happy if you’re in line so that others don’t wait, yes.

Q: I’ve always been very fascinated with your obsession with objects and museums, especially because they’re really not an Eastern—you know, it’s a very Western kind of a concept. Thank you.

ORHAN PAMUK: Thank you.

Q: Hi, how are you doing? I wanted to ask if you if the predominance of melancholia in your book Istanbul spilled over to this one.

ORHAN PAMUK: No. I wrote a book, Istanbul. That is my autobiography, and chronologically it ends in 1975, probably, when I was twenty-three. Then I wrote about Istanbul had changed. I had never argued that Istanbul will always be a melancholic city. I never said that. In fact, the new generation of Turkish readers of that book criticized me saying, maybe that your Istanbul that you chronicled between 1952 to 1974 was melancholic, maybe poor, maybe black and white because of the ruins of Ottoman Empire was everywhere in abundance and the country was extremely poor at the edge of Europe. Maybe we agree with all that, but the city is not like that when I published the book in 2003, they said that and they were right.

I never argued that cities have common, never-changing, essential attributes. If Istanbul has an attribute like that, that’s geographical and Bosporus or also historical, it’s many, many layers of history, but that city is not poor, not provincial, not melancholic as it used to be. Now, that was one book, this is another book. Maybe we get another question, maybe you ask.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Well, a lot of reviewers I’ve noticed keep bringing back that word huzun, which is melancholia, right, from the Arabic word huzun, and I think they just want to keep bringing it up again and again.

ORHAN PAMUK: It’s partly about this maybe, I have many books, it’s like whenever they see Nietzsche, they say “Oh, superman,” oh, they all see that. Cities change. In fact, that for me now I lived in Istanbul for sixty-three years and there is as I told you many times, immense change, but the change in the last thirteen years is bigger than the change I saw in the first fifty years. The mood in first fifty years is perhaps close to melancholy, it’s not getting rich, it’s very black and white, the texture of Ottoman decay, decay of Ottoman modernity was everyplace around. Maybe like Muhammad Ali’s decay in Cairo while the city grow and it’s now a different city, happy city in the sense that lots of tourism at its center, but this book is not only about its center. Maybe we have new questions. I’m sorry, yes.

Q: Thank you for your talk. I’m actually a Columbia student, but I’m from Bangladesh and I want to be a writer someday, so I find it really interesting what you said while at the beginning or at some point when you were around forty-five you were being identified more as an Istanbul writer. So my reaction—like my question to that is how did you think, how did you respond to being niched and like in your place like that and being someone from another country and wanting to write in English and wanting to write for—

ORHAN PAMUK: I’m not writing in English.

Q: You’re not—I know that. I’m just saying that wanting to write for an audience which reads in English, let’s say. I’m curious as to what your thoughts are on the reactions that are engendered—

ORHAN PAMUK: Yes, I understand. Being a writer is managing all that. They’ll say all sorts of things about you. They will pigeonhole in such different and undesired ways. Then you have to change gear and continue on talking and talking before picking up too many clarifications. “No, I’m not like that. I’m not like that.” Just continue doing what you want. I especially in my thirties and forties when my first books were getting translated and published internationally especially in English-speaking languages, I was very upset about this and I made a remark, that was the most upsetting. Say I write about a person in love. They didn’t say that about say Museum of Innocence. I was already internationally known writer, they were not saying that anymore.

But when I started in when my books begin to get published, especially in 1990s, when my books were coming out, everything said, my character falls in love, strange love, this love, that love, this happens, that happens. And then they would say, “This is Turkish love.” (laughter) I was upset about that, and once wrote about when Proust writes about love, it’s eternal, general, platonic, I mean the idea of love, he is addressing love in all its aspects. When I write in as much and more details, I’m only writing about Turkish love, but that has changed, too. That is also about the visibility of Turkey or the fame of the author or the globalization of the world, it’s also not politically correct to look at Afghanistan—a writer from Bangladesh and say, Oh, she is writing about a Bangladeshi love. We will not say that now. People would be more scared to say it’s a Bengali love, it’s not universal love. The world has also changed. At the beginning, the world was narrow, my Turkishness were much more visible, and they didn’t know what to do with it, but now the world is also aware of each other more, also literary communication is getting faster now.

I know when I write a book that I’m not addressing the whole world, I’m only addressing people who read my books in Turkey, people who read my book in New York, people who read my book in Buenos Aires, people who read my books in Beijing, but not all of the population, so and the development of Internet, communications, business along with it, publication business developed so fast that these people are found much, much faster way and much more efficient way so there is a communication and this kind of dismissive, “oh, writing about Bengali love,” or this or that, or Turkish love is not around as it used to be thirty years ago.

Q: Thank you very much, both. Some of the things that your character Mevlut does in the book brought to my mind the English saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” He is a man of good intentions and a number of misfortunes befall him and there’s a character in your book that differentiates between what the heart intends and what is voiced and maybe even acted upon. Are you in this book making a moral statement on coming out—

ORHAN PAMUK: The novel started as a simple story. In the end it’s as simple as I have read. The boy writes letters to a girl for three years. It’s all related to the fact that in Islamic countries especially but I would generally say in non-Western world, men and women don’t get easy known to each other before marriage, and that’s why we have arranged marriages. In fact, maybe the most important problem humanity has, men and—girls and boys don’t get together outside of the marriage, more important before the marriage. That’s why sexual activity like you said is maybe revolutionary but so how to address these issues, how to write about—these were my problems. But I may have forgotten your question. What was it?

(laughter)

Q: In distinguishing between sort of intention of the heart versus what the actions—

ORHAN PAMUK: The novel started as a parable kind of simple story but developed to six hundred page which all of its details that I like, while I did not lose the story, it begins with that, six hundred pages later we’re still following that story but on the other hand, allegories have an intention that represents this, this represent that, in an allegory they clash, and we have a result, that result is also allegorical. We also analyze and show that.

My novel is not like that. There’s a story and there’s a vast billions of sea of details. What I cared about, making the story real, sustaining truth content and accuracy of the detail which is based on a lot of labor. But what comes from combining all this? Making characters live. That is, you should feel that the characters are three-dimensional, they are humanity, I don’t know whether I succeed or not, but I want this novel to be character-driven novel you will read whether Mevlut’s character satisfies you, you want to hear how some one of the girls runs away with her would-be husband and her reaction to this, or what happens to this in the end, I don’t imply a moral judgments on that level.

I also try to do if unless a person is a murderer, if a person is a very bad person in real life my inclination is to represent him as a good person in the novel. My moral duty or in fact artistic, literary duty as a novelist is to write about a guy or a person who I would not be happy to handshake in such a way that the reader may like that person, seeing that this person has also has his or her reasons to behave like that. For me, passing moral judgments in a novel is the worst thing that a novelist can do. Let the reader judge, or I don’t even give tips to the readers, implications to the reader, how to pass judgment. I make my moral judgments outside of my books, that’s why I am politically in trouble sometimes, not now.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Only one bodyguard now.

ORHAN PAMUK: Only one bodyguard now. Happy period. When I make political comments, journalistic comments, elections, this or that. Thank you, maybe we’ll take one or two questions more. Are we taking too much time? Yes.

Q: Hello. You mentioned you’re a visual writer. Are there any directors you would want to work with to adopt your works to film and if yes would they be black or white or color?

MONA ELTAHAWY: Orhan, how about we take the three questions and then you answer them all together?

Q: Hi. Earlier in the conversation you mentioned that you struggled to get your first books published. Even though the publishing world changed a lot, it’s still the case unpublished authors are struggling. How do you recommend that unpublished young authors fight their feelings of self-doubt and rejection?

MONA ELTAHAWY: One more and then you answer.

Q: I know you said no politics but—

ORHAN PAMUK: Yes.

Q: But I was just wondering how your interactions with the Turkish government affected what you felt comfortable putting in your books if it did.

ORHAN PAMUK: I’ll start with this. Me or many other people, brave people in Turkey, they have their problem not because of novels. That rarely happens. Political Islamists only care about if there’s sex in a book and that’s all. They don’t read books. They don’t even read if there is sex, some father knows it, “oh my daughter is reading”—maybe they ban books, yes. Free speech is curtailed in Turkey. Turkey is an electoral democracy but not a full democracy because newspapers where politics are done, and that’s 90 percent, 95 percent newspapers, are pressured and pressured and pressured by many, many, by jailing, by beating, by calling the owner and saying, “Fire this person or we will put you more tax.”

Newspapers are—what makes free speech is all about newspapers, it’s not about my drawing about butterflies, not free they’re censoring, that never happens, rarely happens, that’s not the point. In newspapers, I mean political pages, political columnists are pressured horribly in Turkey and minorities are not respected that much too. And there’s not a full democracy without full speech. Yes, we are a democracy, but an electoral democracy, where at least election results are respected, that I’m sure about, but then a democracy is a full democracy when you have full speech, when you don’t worry about if I write that in the newspaper tomorrow, everyone is worried about that because either you’re fired or they beat you or put you to trial or send you to jail. What was the other question.

MONA ELTAHAWY: One question about what director you would like to work with and advice to young writers.

ORHAN PAMUK: All the great directors, of course.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Where’s Scorsese? Someone bring Martin.

ORHAN PAMUK: Okay and what was the other one?

MONA ELTAHAWY: What advice would you give to young writers who are struggling with self-confidence?

ORHAN PAMUK: I don’t want to be, you know, I always make that joke, but also warning that this happens to all young authors, that this has nothing to do with Turkey, that I had hard time publishing my first book, but that happens to many, many, many authors, then I begin writing my second novel, not successful in getting the first one, then I begin writing third novel. Suddenly they all begin to publish all three of them. In the end, they do, if you insist and persist. Writing fiction, writing novels are great things. I enjoy doing that, I was here with Paul ten years ago, you see? Now that I’m writing more books, I’m still here with again, thank you very much, Mona. Am I finishing too early?

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thank you very much, Orhan, Mona, thank you very much!

(applause)

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