Memory is like a beautiful garden, filled with the fragrance of the past. The rain in his dream was the deepest blue, as if it could wash away all the troubles and sorrows. In life, nothing can ever be as shocking as writing, which has the power to touch our hearts and souls. I remember, I remember so as not to forget! These are the immortal tales that I've always longed to tell.

Rüya seemed haunted by the joys and pleasures that had slipped beyond her grasp. Galip still felt the terrible eye gazing down at him, as if it could see through his soul. Sighs rose and trembled through the timeless air, carrying with them the weight of unspoken emotions. The life we live is someone else's dream, a dream that we are constantly trying to make come true.

There were young people who at certain times in their lives fell in love simply because of a word, a story, or a book they'd both read. Everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life. Dreams were conjured up by words, and words had the power to create a world of their own.
Those who have not cracked the secret locked inside our history and our cemeteries cannot presume to speak about us. We must go out into the street and look at people's faces, for it is in their expressions that we can see the true essence of life. A song floated across the station, or perhaps from inside the restaurant, a song that spoke of love and grief and the emptiness of life. Sometimes snow fell, and sometimes darkness prevailed, but through it all, we must keep moving forward.
Galip thought how much better it would be if he could leave this world behind forever and live in Celâl's world instead. He had the same sort of life, the same sort of past, and the same sort of memories. Adorn your stories with bittersweet recollections, for they are the essence of our lives. Celâl was hiding somewhere inside them, using his column to send messages to people, all sorts of people - small private messages that only those who knew how to read between the lines could understand.
Life was an endless string of miseries, but if one came to an end, there was another waiting around the corner. This all-knowing, all-seeing eye was gazing down at me now without even trying to conceal itself. The eye knew me, and I knew the eye. It was I who created the eye, so that it could see me. If the eye didn't see me, I would cease to exist at all. We all have a second person buried inside us, a dear friend to whom we whisper to our heart's content.
All these buildings, streets, and parks, all these houses laden with a lifetime of memories, were reduced to a system of lines and points. It was a crowded collage of people, places, and images from my past. I saw myself and my entire life through His eyes, and it was both terrifying and enlightening. Everything that reminded me of you made me unbearably sad, but at the same time, it also gave me the strength to keep going.
The only way forward was to rip away our memories, our past, and our history. We should have met long ago, but fate had other plans. I am crazy about mysterious things, and it is this mystery that keeps me going. Instead of bringing them hope, you've fed them lies. You yourself are Deccal, a master of deception. His dreams flowed into the stories, and everything became a copy of something else.
The writer spent his nights roaming the city's dark alleys, searching for inspiration. The melancholy of the rainy streets of Istanbul was palpable, as if it could soak into one's soul. I must be myself, I must be myself, I must be myself. All the people I'd had to see that day were still buzzing inside my head, their words, their little noises, and their endless stream of demands had blended into a single sound.
So that midnight, I finally came to see how glad I was to live apart from that madding crowd, from the vile and muddy chaos into which everyone is always commanding me, commanding us all, to immerse ourselves. For once I was myself! I must be myself, because if I failed to be myself, I became the person they wanted me to be. I was imitating the man who was nothing more than the sum total of all those people I was imitating.
I look back on those days in search of solace, but I am left only with the vague impression of a crowd moving through darkness. Our history could only survive underground, hidden from the prying eyes of the world. The underground city was ultimately wreaking revenge on the overground city, a silent rebellion against the forces that sought to suppress it.
How short our lives are, how little we see, how little we know; so let us dream, at least. The words lost their meaning and turned into shapes, and I found myself迷失 in a world of my own creation. He wished he could remember her with another face, in another story, but it was too late. It was perhaps possible to look into the faces of his fellow citizens and see in them the city's long history - its misfortunes, its lost magnificence, its melancholy and pain.
They came from a shared defeat, a shared history, and a shared shame. If he read Celâl's columns over and over, he would gain access to Celâl's memory, and once he had infiltrated Celâl's memory, he would know where he was hiding. These people had been able to forget their own sadness by immersing themselves in a story, a story that gave meaning to their memories and their melancholy. Their sad dreams and sadder memories were fast fading from their minds, replaced by the hope and promise of a new beginning.
All murders are copies of other murders, just as all books are copies of other books. Creativity rises out of anger, the kind of anger that erases all memory. I think of a troubled man pacing up and down the platform of a desolate station in the dead of night, waiting for a train that never comes. I shall roam about the city, searching for my beloved, searching for my very past behind every door I open.
Every object, word, and meaning was now in its proper place, but the deeper truth that held them all together was still beyond his reach. Somewhere between the lines, he had retreated into the shadows without anyone's noticing and exchanged his identity. The moment arrived when the search itself became more important than the answer he'd come to seek. The searcher and the object of his desire changed places, and it was less important to reach a goal than to keep walking toward it.
Celâl was obsessed with the little tricks, ambiguities, and fictions that allowed him to manipulate others from a distance. From now on I shall devote myself utterly to the hidden poetry of our faces, the terrifying secret that lurks inside our human gaze. This was a dangerous game he'd been dragged into, a deadly trap. Books were always telling us that everything was connected to everything else, and it was up to us to discover the hidden links.
These faces Celâl had been collecting for thirty years might offer him glimpses of this other realm to which he longed to escape. Faces that might once have spoken of pain, misery, and melancholy now said nothing. He began to think there might be a link between the mystery of letters and the meanings in faces. Every object that surrounds you is hiding a secret, and it is up to us to uncover it.
Everyone was impersonating someone else, and everything was a replica of an absent original. Behind every tree were letters, gruesome, bloodcurdling letters. Our faces had emptied of all meaning, and with it, the art of reading faces. Our eyebrows, our eyes, our noses, our gazes, our expressions, our faces were blank. There were an infinite number of possible interpretations of any given text, and it was up to us to choose the one that spoke to us the most.
It was like an unending maze of city streets, with each street leading to another: maps resembling human faces. The more he discovers, the more the mystery spreads, and the deeper he becomes lost in its web. The smell brought back memories of the days he and Rüya had spent in this apartment. They were all made from this smell, a smell that was both comforting and bittersweet.
I gazed into the mirror and read my face. I dreamed that I had at last become the person I've always longed to become. He felt like a detective who had just found the key to a mystery, who would now be using the same key to open new doors. If you want to turn your world upside down, all you have to do is somehow convince yourself you might be someone else. You're a flower in the garden of my memory, a beautiful and precious bloom that will always be there.
Istanbul nights are endless, a ghost with a guilty conscience cannot sleep. I believed in a world without heroes, a world where everyone was equal. I could never convince you to be content with an ordinary life, for you were always striving for something more. It was he who had changed and not the city, for the city remained the same, a constant reminder of our past and our future.
Istanbul was an open book to him now, it harbored no secrets. Was this life repeating itself? First voice is the simple persona, the voice you'll use with anyone. Second voice belongs to the man you'd like to be, the mask you've stolen from those you most admire. Third voice is the dark self, the dark style. That cities are made from addresses, addresses from letters, and letters from faces. To read was to gaze into a mirror, and those who know the secret behind the looking glass are able to travel to the other side.
You are possessed of a mighty pen, a pen that can realize all these dreams and astonishing memories. At least once in his life, a writer should have a chance to meet his perfect reader. We do not have private lives in this country, for everything we do is under the watchful eye of others. Mystery is sovereign, so treat it with respect. You love me. You loved me with all your heart. Everything you wrote, you wrote to me.
You talked about my cherry lips and my crescent eyebrows, all this time I've been the one inspiring you. The line between us faded into the mists of my imagination, and I could no longer see where you ended and I began. No one can ever be himself, for we are all a combination of different selves. I am both myself and someone else, a walking contradiction. I followed him all over Istanbul like a shadow, always there but never seen.
To live in an oppressed, defeated country is to be someone else, a victim of circumstance. I am someone else, therefore I am. But what if this person I want to become is himself someone else? This is the crux, the heart of the deception. The stories seem to write themselves. They flow by their own logic, taking on a life of their own. For the pages that follow - the black pages - are the memoirs of a sleepwalker, a journey into the unknown. Tears. Silence. The noises of a strange house. Because nothing is as surprising as life - Except for writing. Except for writing, the only consolation.

This is the finest Pamuk novel that I have ever perused. It is the very one that catapulted his reputation in Turkey. However, due to a more arduous translation that was published in 1995, it was not as widely renowned among English-language readers as two of his subsequent novels, namely "My Name Is Red" and "Snow".

This newer translation, which was accomplished by Pamuk's close English-language collaborator Maureen Freely, was published in 2006, shortly before Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize.

The setting of the novel is Istanbul, shortly prior to the military coup of 1980. Nevertheless, the political situation serves merely as a backdrop for an intensely personal narrative. (In fact, if one is seeking any political excitement, it will not be forthcoming, as in "Snow", Pamuk's characters are, at best, disaffected and disheartened ex-leftists.)

There are multiple layers of captivating stories about Istanbul within these pages that are best experienced directly rather than being described.

“Because what else was reading but slowly taking possession of someone else's memory?”

As someone else, a person himself. With excitement, despite all the tiredness of the book, just like the Prince, I start to tell the book with this sentence that I repeat again and again. Pamuk is once again pulling him into something that fascinates him. Each reading turns into an experience fixed with different traces. This book, the Black Book, has long been a witness to the most awakened form of being in oneself and being on the way. Moments of going out of oneself and escaping. Galip, after Rüya. Galip, after a strange dream. We are in Istanbul, in the winter month. We are reading the story of Garip, whose wife has left home with a nineteen-word note. It is hard to say that what he is looking for is Rüya. The story that he repeats to himself many times, after himself. The book, whose main theme is “being someone else, being oneself, constructing oneself as someone else”, builds its story on this. In a surprising and “obsessive” way, words, sentences, and stories are intertwined, to the extent of losing time and place. Although everything is very well-known and very close, many times it is “fascinating” just like what the words and faces contain within themselves. The reading moment calls for other touches and memories. Celal's marginal writings are constructing a separate story. While feeling all the seeds he has sown in the memory gardens of the text, it ends here.

“It was evoking not the objects of a city where people had lived for thousands of years, resembling themselves, but the terrifying signs of an incomprehensible country where millions of people had been temporarily exiled.” (p. 305)

“One must know how to look at the world with someone else's eyes from time to time.” (p. 297)

#orhanpamuk #karakitap #book

A man embarks on a desperate search for his wife and her journalist ex-husband. Little does he know that this pursuit will become hopelessly intertwined with the latter's extremely bizarre articles and columns. As a result, this book transforms into a truly bewildering hall of mirrors. It is filled with Dostoevsky styled feverish monologues that draw the reader in and keep them on the edge of their seats. There are also storytelling sessions that are reminiscent of a Dinesen or Potocki tale, adding an air of mystery and charm.

Furthermore, the book is like a Borgesian labyrinth of history and literature, as well as a fake detective tale. Each chapter functions as its own self-contained unit, whether it be a short story, a mock essay, or a captivating monologue. At different points, this book is exasperating, annoying, thrilling, and provocative all at once. The landscape of Pamuk's Istanbul that is描绘 in the book is a world full of threatening phone calls, dangerous gangsters, wise journalists, eschatological hints, melancholy, shadowy doubles and disguises, an underground chamber filled with mannequins, crows, and a flickering sense of identity. It is a gothic and alluring epic labyrinth or inferno that will leave readers spellbound.

Once again, it is reminded to us that nothing in this life is as amazing as writing. Yes, writing! Writing is the only comforting phenomenon in this life with all its manifestations.

Writing has the power to transport us to different worlds, to express our deepest emotions, and to share our thoughts and ideas with others. It allows us to create something out of nothing, to give life to our imagination.

Whether it is a novel, a poem, an article, or a journal entry, writing has the ability to touch the hearts and minds of people. It can inspire, educate, and entertain.

So, let us embrace the beauty of writing and use it as a means to explore our inner selves and connect with the world around us. Let us continue to write and share our stories, for in doing so, we are creating a legacy that will live on long after we are gone.

Biraz konuşalım.

Orhan Pamuk's adventure began seven years ago with the New Life that I took from my family's library on the balcony of the house where I was born. It was an old book with a navy blue cover. I never thought I would experience the first sentence myself, but I did.

Before going deeper, I want to state that I love this platform and the people here. I attach importance to comments and review articles. I want this place to be full of literature. I also know that it is difficult to keep writers separate from the comments they make other than their literary personalities and their lives. No matter how difficult it is - and in this case it does not seem difficult to me - I will do this. If the writer's literary personality, books, and the Black Book are anything other than what you want to read; you will not find this in these lines.

Pamuk's journey with the Black Book begins in the fall of 1985. Just as those who visit the Museum of Innocence have the opportunity to review (oh please, if you are in Istanbul, go, go, go!); the writer prefers to write his books by hand in notebooks. Later, this difficult-to-read writing goes to typesetting and is paginated. Pamuk usually classifies these notebooks as Month/Year when writing his books, and in his own words, he also makes drawings when 'he cannot advance his thoughts, when he gets stuck'. You can access these drawings with the book called The Secrets of the Black Book.

The Black Book is completed in February 1990.

What is the Black Book, which is the work of O. Pamuk that has lectures given on it at Columbia University, has caused a great stir, has been the subject of many positive and negative criticisms, and has had the greatest influence on the Nobel jury? What does it do, what does it make one think?

The novel begins with a description of a family. As can be followed from Pamuk's own explanations, his greatest source of inspiration is the crowded family in which he grew up. Because he wrote the character of Uncle Melih inspired by his own uncle. It would be wrong to say that the Black Book is just a love story. The Black Book does not only focus on the characters of Galip-Rüya-Celal or Galip's search for Rüya after she leaves, or Celal's marginal writings. The Black Book tells about Istanbul and invites the city to the story as a hero. For this reason, they say, 'What James Joyce did for Dublin, Orhan Pamuk did for Istanbul'.

As we approach the end, one of the points that caught my attention was that the first parts of the novel were key to the whole story. The sections 'When the Waters of the Bosphorus Were Drawn' and 'Alaaddin's Shop' are within the first fifty pages. While you are still saying 'Well, now I'm reading Orhan Pamuk, right? What about the Nobel and all that??', in fact, the important marginal writings have begun.

In these sections, Rüya leaves a nineteen-word farewell letter, and Galip's search begins with Celal's marginal writings, the streets of Istanbul, and the voices on the phone. You will soon realize that this search is not only for Rüya. Tahsin Yücel, in his article criticizing the Black Book, says, 'Although it is said that Galip is looking for his wife and even misses her, many times he deals with things that have nothing to do with the woman at all.'

Galip's search cannot be limited to Rüya, and 'searching for himself' never ends. Perhaps the hero expresses this as follows: 'On cold winter nights, when I said, 'Finally, I was able to stand up!', I also knew that my inside had emptied.'

Galip's search for his own identity follows you and your thoughts until it becomes the struggle of every person to be someone else, and 'the empty optimism of thinking that after becoming someone else, again and again someone else, we can return to the happiness of our first identity'.

It makes you miss Istanbul - if you have been away for a while.

It allows you to look at World Literature from another window (see page 140), makes you think about your stories, makes you feel that 'you are dwelling more on loneliness than on love, more on telling a story than on the story itself', and finally you look for the answers to the barber's two questions: 'Are you having difficulty being yourself?', 'Is there a way for a person to be only himself?'

Some books create a sense of 'returning home' in me, just like some people do, like books that have their pages mixed up in their memories because they want to forget. But 'after a while, it becomes a more important thing than finding'.

While writing the Black Book, Pamuk stated that he was influenced by more than three works: The Logic of the Birds, the Mesnevi, and Hüsn ü Aşk. In this regard, he again builds bridges between the East and the West. But this sentence must also be engraved in our minds: 'With a Turkish-English dictionary in one hand and a grammar book in the other, my books, especially the Black Book, are completely incomprehensible!'

In one of my updates, I wrote that I didn't sleep at all that night and was only interested in the Black Book. The parts that drew me in the most in my readings were also the sections I read that night. Like 'A ghost who cannot sleep because of the pangs of conscience of his sins...'

When I closed the book and thought about it at certain intervals, I got up and looked in the mirror. 'The strange thing is that after reading the letters on my face, I can no longer optimistically believe that I will be completely myself.'

The section 'The Story That Entered the Mirror' is difficult to tell. I noticed my tears with the handkerchief that the hostess handed me from my shoulder. But I didn't pay attention and let them be.

In our short lives, how many chances do we get to spend such a whole night with a character like Galip, read with him, cry with him, and wake up with him again the next morning and talk about books...

Lately, you also learn the story of the Prince. There is a long and deep silence in your mind. You read the last sentence again and again and again: 'Nothing can be as astonishing as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, the only consolation is except for writing.'

This review is dedicated to the dear Biron Paşa who encouraged me to take the Black Book into my hands and -like me- to all sick minds.

To what degree can we truly be ourselves?

“To be or not to be oneself,” as Pamuk contemplates, is the ultimate question of life. This story, much like a roller-coaster and in many ways similar to a detective novel, is filled with possible answers to this query and explorations of how a man can only truly be himself by telling stories. Through various hypotheses developed in the stories, such as a prince on a quest to find his real self to guide his people if he ascends the throne, an executioner who feels remorse after beheading someone with a different expression of regret for life, an eye that can follow you everywhere, stories about Rumi and Shams of Tabriz and inherently about Sufis, and stories about people who can read letters on faces, Pamuk immerses the reader in a metaphysical journey, charmingly touching on aspects like history, mysticism, the differences between East and West, family relations, and love.

Although I discovered brilliant touches in this book and ideas that made me ponder, I constantly felt that I was missing something. Some meanings eluded me perhaps due to the translation or because I'm not so familiar with Turkish culture. Some things didn't quite add up, and the loose ends made me wonder whether to rate this story 5 stars, 4, or 3. There were paragraphs that really resonated with me, making me feel elated while reading, and others that annoyed me because I couldn't understand their sense. However, maybe this is Pamuk's way of introducing readers to a Turkish atmosphere throughout the book: a blend of historical and cultural influences, either different due to the spatial component (influences from Western cultures adopted from movies, Western writers, singers, and tourists) or the temporal component (every aspect of Turkey's history involved adopting a different influence depending on the countries they conquered or came in contact with, like Istanbul being a blend of civilizations with its various names over time).

I loved the story about Alladdin and his shop and the fragment about Galip's love for Ruya. I loved the ideas in this book but didn't quite like the story. I actually found it a bit absurd, although I'm sure the idea Pamuk wanted to express prevailed and the story was just a means to reveal what he intended. I understood that Galip assumed Celal's identity and embarked on a spiritual quest that helped him find himself rather than his missing wife or uncle. The ending, however, seemed far-fetched and more suitable for a soap-opera. Putting aside the spiritual journey, at a factual level, the pursuit Galip undertakes throughout the novel is to find Celal rather than Ruya. The way she is found and her supposed actions during her absence are secondary compared to Celal's, while Pamuk wants us to believe his hero is looking for her. A flawed novel, I would say, but an enticing one. Plus, I can't help but wonder if these flaws were deliberately used by Pamuk for a certain effect, as the fragment below seems to suggest.

“If every letter in every face had a hidden meaning and if each signified a concept, it followed that every word composed of those letters must also carry a second hidden meaning (…). The same could be said of sentences and paragraphs – in short all written text carried second, hidden meanings. But if one bore in mind that these meanings could be expressed in other sentences or other words…, one could, through interpretation, glean a third meaning from the second, and a fourth from the third, ad infinitum – so there were, in fact, an infinite numbers of possible interpretations to any given text. It was like an unending maze of city streets, with each street leading to another: maps resembling human faces. So a reader who set out to solve the mystery in his own way, following his own logic, was no different from a traveler who finds the mystery of a city slowly unfurling before him as he wanders through streets on that map: The more he discovers, the more the mystery spreads; the more the mystery spreads, the more is revealed and the more clearly he sees the mystery in the streets he himself has chosen, the roads he’s walked down and the alleys he’s walked up; for the mystery resides in his own journey, his own life.”

Masal, dağları aşan, zorlu patikalardan geçen, tek gözlü devlerle boğuşan Galip’in öyküsü. Beyoğlu uzak dağlar, Rüya’nın olabileceği her yer ve ona giden yollar, zorlu patikalar, Galip’in hüzünle ve gizlice nefret ettiği aile büyükleri tek gözlü devler.

Aynı zamanda, Kara Kitap hem bir kurmacanın yanında hem de başarılı bir ders kitabıdır. Edebiyat teorisine dair sayfalarca anlatılacak kuru bilginin kurmacaya dökülmüş halidır. Bana kalırsa başarısı biraz da burdan kaynaklanmaktadır. Mümkün mertebe spoiler vermekten kaçınarak şunu söyleyebilirim: Kitap evvela, orijinal metin ve yaratıcı yazar yoktur, insanlığın tarih boyunca tekrarlayadurduğu hikayeler vardır savı üzerine kurulmuştur. Celâl Salik’i bu kadar iyi tanıyan, okuma yazması olmayan hayranı Karslı attarın da tanıdığı Celâl değil, yüzyıllardır duyduğu, dinlediği ve şahit olduğu ve hatta belki de dahil olduğu öyküleri onun tekrar tekrar anlatması bu tanıdıklığı veren. Kitabın epigraflarından biri gibi: Aslolan, “Hikayeci değil, hikaye”. Tam da bu yüzden, Kara Kitap öğretici bir kitaptır. Edebiyatın tek başına müthiş bir öğretmen ve kurmacanın hakikati izhar ettiğini sanan diğer disiplinlere kıyasla, bana kalırsa, hakikate olmasa bile ona yaklaşmaya en muktedir alan olduğuna bir delildir. Kara Kitap’ın güzelliği, her saniye okuruna bir kurmaca olduğunu hatırlatmasından geliyor, gerçekliğini, yalanını açık ettiği yerden kazanıyor. Saim’in dediği gibi: "Hiçbir şey hayat kadar şaşırtıcı olamaz! Yazı hariç." Kitabın ikinci savıysa, ben aslında bir başkasıdır üzerine. Bu kısım okurken aklıma, Descartes’ın meditasyonlarına B. Russell’ın (o olmayabilir emin değilim) yönelttiği eleştiriyi getirdi, düşünmekle vardığımız yer, düşünen şeyin olduğudur, bunun “ben” olduğu da nereden çıktı? Galip’in düşüncelerinin gerçeği var ettiği, hakikati taşımadığını kabul ettiği -bence bu hakikate teslim olunan anlardan biridir- yerde, en azından enformasyon anlamında gerçeğe sahip olduğu andır, onun deyişiyle, “…gerçeği bildiğimi bilmiyordum.”

Kitabın sonunda, modernist yazında sıkça kullanılan bir teknikle karşılaşıyoruz, conclusion değil de closure: Tıpkı bir hikayenin ortasından, dank diye başlar gibi (in medias res), aceleye getirilmiş, bilhassa bağlanmamış ve yazarın bizle artık nihayet, “okuyucum” diyerek rabıta kurduğu bir son. Bitmemiş aslında daha doğrusu, tükenmemiş, tüketilmemiş, tıpkı Şeyh Galip’in Hüsn-ü Aşk’ının Kara Kitap’ta yeniden üretilmesi gibi, yeniden okunmaya, yeniden yazılmaya, yeniden yaratılmaya hep açık bir hikaye Kara Kitap.

Orhan Pamuk’tan ne zaman bir roman okusam, onun kurmaca olduğunu okurun kafasına vura vura anlatmasına rağmen sahiciliğine inanasım tutuyor. Esasen buna rağmen değil de, tam da bu yüzden. Masumiyet Müzesi’ni okurken, romandaki mağazanın Bebek’teki bir apartmanın giriş katı olduğunu hayal edip, Füsun’un ve Kemal Basmacı’nın nasıl göründüklerini, gerçekten de yaşamışlardır belki, deyip merak edip duruyordum. Ya da Sessiz Evde huysuz ihtiyarın ansiklopedisinin bir cildine ulaşıvermek ihtimali beni cezbediyordu. Şimdi, Celâl Salik’in köşe yazılarını gazeteden okuyabilmenin küçük de olsa bir ihtimal olduğunu aklımdan geçirmeden edemiyorum. Pamuk’u bu yüzden, okuyucularını yalanlarıyla kendine birer mürit kılan Celâl gibi (tabi o kadar olmasa da, olmasın da (gülücük) ) bir anlığına da olsa, sahici ve inandırıcı buluyorum.

Kara Kitap’ı okuyana kadar, Pamuk iyi bir yazar ama büyük bir yazar değil diyordum. Artık Pamuk’la aynı çağda yaşadığım için mutluyum.

This might be the best Turkish novel I have read so far. After reading it, I definitely decided that Orhan Pamuk is not an ordinary person. The story in this book is so captivating and engaging that it keeps you hooked from the very beginning until the end. The characters are well-developed and their emotions are vividly portrayed. Pamuk's writing style is unique and his use of language is simply beautiful. He has a way of describing things that makes you feel as if you are actually there, experiencing everything along with the characters. This novel is not just a work of fiction, but it also offers deep insights into Turkish culture, history, and society. It makes you think and reflect on various aspects of life. Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves reading good literature.

Una explosión narrativa que resulta perturbadora y, en ocasiones, confusa. Hay historias dentro de historias, similares a infinitas mamushkas, y lecturas complementarias que modifican la historia como extraños espejos. Los abruptos cambios de narrador y la escritura laberíntica de Pamuk hacen de esta lectura una experiencia estimulante y, al mismo tiempo, agotadora.

Es una experiencia que podría alejar a algunos lectores de otras obras del autor. Sin embargo, espero que no sea así. (Y, de paso, recomiendo "Me llamo Rojo". Uno de mis libros favoritos de Pamuk. Uno de mis libros favoritos, simplemente).

Con la identidad como tema principal, el autor explora una amplia gama de tópicos exuberantes: la maravilla del lenguaje, la memoria, el amor, el amor no correspondido, el desamparo, el doble, el impostor, la frustración y el desencanto con la propia existencia. Y todos parecen finitos y pasajeros, excepto la escritura.

"Si, por supuesto, excepto la escritura, el único consuelo". Esta idea subraya la importancia que el autor otorga a la escritura en medio de todos estos temas complejos y variados. La escritura se presenta como un elemento constante y fundamental en la búsqueda de sentido y consuelo en la existencia humana.

This book just narrowly squeezed five stars from me. It is not without its flaws, but it is an interesting and well-written piece of work.

What is it about? Well, there is a surface-level story that you can simply read for its own sake - the mystery that Galip attempts to solve when he wants to discover where his missing wife and older cousin have gone. It does manage to intrigue and at times, it is a real page-turner. However, it is also rather odd at times, making it difficult to read solely for that story. Beneath this, it seems to me to be about many things - about writing and being a writer, about love and family, about Turkey's struggle to balance between being an Eastern and a Western country, about memory, and about personality - who we truly are. I'm certain you can find even more aspects to review in this book.

It is not an easy read from the outset. It is worthwhile reading the translator's note to understand the complexity of translating from Turkish into English. No "literal" translation will suffice; it always requires interpretation. The translator has done an excellent job, as you are never overly aware that you are reading a translation. But Turkish is a complex language, and this means that the first 50 pages will likely deter many people from continuing further. I found that once I got past these initial pages, I became accustomed to the style of the book, and it became a relatively straightforward read - even if, like a book by an esoteric sect, you can uncover layers of meaning within it.

За goodreads, I just want to insert something outside my review for the site. "The Black Book" was my first battle with Orhan Pamuk in 2010; I started it 6 or 8 times, liked the beginning, and read individual chapters over the course of 2 years. My conclusion is that for every book, there is its time, especially for an author with the qualities of Pamuk. Wrong! Orhan Pamuk is not just an author but a born Writer.

With his fourth novel "The Black Book", Orhan Pamuk takes his first major steps towards serious literature, setting the task of answering one of the most existential questions through the book: "Is it possible to remain true to ourselves?" Is life a life lived in the pursuit of resembling others, and can we ever have our own pure and original essence, or is our existence always someone else's borrowed imitation? Translated by Gülçin Çeşmeci, "The Black Book" is part of the catalog of "Unicorn" Publishing House.

In trying to find the answer to the question of whether it is possible to be true to ourselves, Orhan Pamuk blends reality and imagination, leading readers to the life of the main hero in the book - Galip, who is searching for his missing beloved wife Rüya. Galip is sure that his wife has fled with his cousin - the famous journalist and columnist Celal from the newspaper "Milliyet". At one point, Galip seems to stop searching for his missing wife and starts searching for Celal, hoping that by finding him, he will also find Rüya. Parallel to this, however, Galip steps into the shoes of the missing journalist and even pretends to be him in front of his long-time fans, readers, colleagues, and publishers.

Galip turns his back on work, relatives, and friends, devoting his daily life to the search for Rüya, Celal, and himself. He lives in the empty apartment of the journalist and, by reading his articles and folders of materials, tries to appropriate his memories; because what else is reading, says Pamuk, if not the acquisition of someone else's memory? "Reading means looking into the mirror; he who knows the 'secret' behind the mirror passes through there, and he who is not aware of the secret of the letters finds nothing there but his own wandering face. Read little, but with love, then you will look more read than the one who reads a lot but forces himself."

"The Black Book" is constructed as a story within a story and a history within a history, born of the effect obtained from two opposite mirrors. In his narration, Orhan Pamuk arranges the wanderings of Galip with forgotten legends and stories, not accidentally because of which "The New York Times" later writes that Pamuk tells stories like Scheherazade.

In his fourth novel, Pamuk begins to weave a thread that those who follow his entire oeuvre will follow until his last book, reminding of his heroes from previous works. In "The Black Book", he mentions the already famous Istanbul millionaire Djevdet Bey from his first novel, here is also included the encyclopedist Selahattin, as well as the mysterious house of the judge in Üsküdar from "The Silent House". Here is also the pavilion of Alaaddin, which for 30 years Pamuk does not tire of describing more and more colorfully and finding new and new details in it.

Pamuk examines the disintegration of personality and identity first from the desire of people to physically resemble others, and then the acquisition of their behavior, mentality, and vocabulary. Orhan condemns the fools who follow the fashion, who do not buy clothes for comfort or need, but only with the desire to acquire someone else's personality. Through a fine irony, he describes the difficult and seemingly impossible escape of the Turks from orientalism to Western orders, pushed by consumerist motives and turning their backs on the traditions of their lands. Pamuk considers a large part of people as beings who are not sure of themselves, confused by the environment around them, and always dissatisfied with themselves, who are satisfied only if they resemble someone else - who has already succeeded.

"The client does not want to wear a coat that he sees daily on the backs of thousands of mustached, hunchbacked, black, and dried compatriots in Turkey; he wants to wear a suit like the one worn by a beautiful and unknown person, arriving from a distant and unknown country, so that he can believe that with the suit he has also changed and become someone else."

Another strongly touched theme in "The Black Book" is the author's handwriting in art, which Pamuk examines on a much larger scale in "My Name Is Red". In "The Black Book", the Nobel laureate puts forward his thesis that "The only true art is the art of creating imitations." Through his hero Celal, whose essays and articles in the newspaper are borrowed ideas and imitations, Orhan stands behind the thought of Tahir-ul Mevlevi that writing undoubtedly begins with the imitation of what has already been written. This is quite natural. Don't even children speak by imitating adults?

Inevitably, when writing about a journalist who often uses ideas from other works, "The Black Book" overflows with references both to ancient classics and to contemporary Europeans. Of course, Mevlana with his "Masnavi" is also inevitably present here - obviously one of the most inspiring books for Orhan Pamuk, who uses its quotes in several of his works, and in my opinion, it is also the basis of "My Name Is Red".

"In the fourth volume of the 'Masnavi', Mevlana tells about the ant crawling on the drafts. The insect first sees the Arabic letters, the flowers formed by them, then the garden created by the ink, after that it sees that the hand moves the ink, and the hand is moved by the mind. And then it notices that the mind is also moved by someone else's mind."

The most frequently asked question in the book and its essence appears a little after the second half of it, and Orhan is categorical that "A person can never be himself." The biggest obstacle for a person to be true to himself is the other people around him. The Turk gives examples to show that the greatest pleasure for people is to force others to resemble them.

"In these damned lands, the most important question is for a person to be true to himself, and until this question is resolved in a suitable way, we are all condemned to destruction, defeat, slavery. All those who have failed to find a way to be true to themselves are condemned to slavery, all races - to racelessness, all nations - to disappearance, annihilation."

Pamuk's journalistic career surely gives him a serious basis for "The Black Book", making it bright, colorful, and frank, revealing to readers the struggles of every journalist who daily searches for topics to engage the readers' attention. In the Turkish newspaper "Milliyet", Celal writes the column "If you believe, if you will - no", where over the years he often returns to the same topics, sometimes illogical, but writes hard under the pressure to fill his rubric.

"Celal, you are forced to give the readers the desired miracles. Write to them that the day of salvation is approaching; write to them that the days when they line up in front of the public faucet with plastic buckets in their hands and wait for water to flow will soon end; write to them that the high school girls who have run away from home will be able to become movie stars without ending up in the public houses of Galata; write that after a very soon miracle, there will no longer be losing tickets from the state lottery, drunk men will not beat their wives, after the day of the miracle, empty wagons will be attached to the trains to the suburbs, write that one day on all the city squares, as in Europe, there will be classical music playing; write that one day everyone will become famous and a hero and very soon everyone will be able to sleep with any woman he wants, including his mother, and will be able to continue to perceive the woman he has slept with - in a magical way - as an angelic virgin and sister. Write to them that finally the documents have been discovered revealing a historical secret that has been leading us to poverty for centuries. Point out their enemies to them so that they can ease - have they finally found someone to blame for their misfortune and misery."

"The Black Book" is written with Pamuk's characteristic monotony and long descriptions of objects, turning it into a true and valuable literature, whose philosophy, however, is beyond the lines and the meaning is not read but realized. Orhan describes in a brilliant way the loss of a green pen somewhere in the Bosporus. "Do you know where the green pen fell in the Bosporus - it didn't disappear." And what a more beautiful ending for a "Black Book" in which we can read that: "We live little, we see little, we know little; at least let's dream."