Orhan Pamuk talks about this novel in his book "Other Colors".

"The thing I remember most vividly from the black book is the last days I spent working on it. In 1988, after three years of work, when the end was in sight, I shut myself away for a short time in an empty apartment on the seventeenth floor of a new building in Erenköy, where I did nothing but write..... I lost touch with the outside world, but sitting in my corner, I still hadn't finished the novel." He added later, "There were times when I was afraid that the book was going nowhere, that all the pages I had written would lead me and the reader nowhere, but to a state of confusion and chaos."

When I read this quote from Orhan Pamuk's talk about the novel, I felt that he was speaking on my behalf. That state of doubt and uncertainty had reached me as I was reading that novel, especially in the last third of it.

But in the last two chapters, those fears and doubts went away and it was as if I had returned to that wonderful feeling at the beginning of my reading of this book.

The novel has many themes. It deals with the subject of the lawyer Galip's search for his missing wife Ruya and his half-brother Celal, the controversial journalist whose ideas and directions are always contrary to what most people are used to. He is also the nephew of the lawyer. It also deals with the subject of a famous group of intellectuals and its history and origin in Anatolia, which is one of the Sufi orders. It is widely believed that Celal belongs to it after he delves into its world through his sister and the newspaper where he works. This novel also deals with the person's assimilation of another person's life, which means that you are not yourself, a mirror of another person, which is also a type of Sufi philosophy, which is clearly demonstrated in Galip's assimilation of Celal's personality, so that he becomes himself, sending articles to the newspaper without arousing any suspicion from anyone, and his meeting with a foreign work team that comes to investigate the issue of freedom of writing in Turkey and many other things, all against the backdrop of the military coup that took place in 1980.

The brilliance of Pamuk's pen is evident in his intense portrayal of the characters and the environment, mentioning all the details without leaving a single clue or incident unmentioned, leaving a great opportunity for the reader to experience it and become deeply involved with it. I always say that anyone who reads Orhan Pamuk's novels will notice his great attachment to the names of the streets, squares, neighborhoods, those narrow alleys and small cafes in his city Istanbul. The reader will feel as if he has grown up in those places or at least has seen them.

Certainly a wonderful novel by an author whose pen I really liked.

A post-modern masterpiece in the vein of the best of Calvino or Borges, ‘The Black Book’ is a novel that catapulted Pamuk's literary star. In it, he crafted a work of art whose luminosity blazed forth, heralding a new star in Turkish literature. While Kemal had poetry, Pamuk has something even more crucial - originality.

The dominant themes in the novel, which often recur in Pamuk's works, are identity, Westernisation, and Istanbul, combined with a sense of playfulness and erudition. Let's begin with Istanbul. Few other novelists have赋予 the cities in which their stories are set with such significance. In ‘The Black Book’, Pamuk描绘 Istanbul as a dull, dolorous monochrome, a city of constant snowfalls, darkness, and deceit, a city entangled in a web of conspiracies and conflagrations. This stands in stark contrast to the通常depiction of Istanbul in bright incandescence, but it is vital in establishing the mental state of the narrator, Galip.

Galip endures a series of identity crises throughout the novel. He spends most of his time searching for his cousin, the newspaper journalist Celal, who he suspects may (or may not have) run away with his wife, Rüya. Pamuk references Proust - specifically Marcel's obsession with Albertine - on several occasions. Galip's search for Rüya, his fixation with her perceived unfaithfulness, and the unreliable portrayal of her character all parody Marcel's search for Albertine following her death. Another source of parody for Pamuk is the genre of detective fiction. As the narrator states, “Galip had once told Rüya that the only detective book he’d ever want to read would be the one in which not even the author knew the murderer’s identity.”

Clues constantly serve as red herrings, and inconsequential events or people suddenly become vitally important - or not important at all - instead of adhering to the conventions of detective fiction. The femme fatale and the cuckolded husband are turned on their heads. The reader is unsure whether it is Galip searching for Celal or Celal searching for Galip, or how much of the novel is a figment of Galip's imagination, or more importantly, how aware Galip is that he is just a figment of another's imagination, the author, who makes a late appearance (or does he?) in the novel. Is it the realisation of this that lies at the core of Galip's struggle with his identity, or is it the gradual coalescence of Galip with Celal, until Galip begins writing Celal's stories and having conversations with malevolent mad-men as Celal? This uncertainty creates a sense of unreliability throughout the narration, as reality and fantasy merge to become virtually indistinguishable. In fact, given that the whole thing is a work of fiction, is what is real even relevant?

Pamuk further explores post-modern concepts and techniques via Celal's newspaper articles, which are interspersed throughout the novel. At times, it feels like the articles are long-drawn-out clues that will allow Galip to find Celal. However, this may be more a product of Galip's warped mindset and self-obsession. The articles themselves are the high-points of the novel. Celal rails against plagiarism, yet many of his articles are plagiarised from other novels - for example, the pastiche of the ‘Grand Inquisitor’ chapter from ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. He is critical of imperialism, yet his articles perpetuate negative Western attitudes towards the orient. Like the narrator Galip, Celal's articles are unreliable and duplicitous, yet they are offset with a lyrical verve that draws the reader in as they are gradually ensconced within the wonderful web of deceit and uncertainty that Pamuk weaves across the novel.

This book, which I got from the municipal library when I was in the first year of high school, waiting in line and reading it. Years later, I read it again. I'm not going to talk about it. After all, there are theses and books written about it. But when I read it, I felt this, that is, how different the things that people/authors thought about in the recent past were. I feel as if we have always been spoiled because of social media, become lonely, and are living in the struggle of survival and in the quagmire of political Islam. This book took me a little away from these. Thank you very much, Orhan.

The Black Book is a remarkable work that challenges the traditional notion of a novel.

«Think of when all the wells dug in the city gardens over hundreds of thousands of years were filled with cement and stone to build the foundations of skyscrapers, for scorpions, frogs, grasshoppers, all kinds of splendid gold coins, Ligurian, Phrygian, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman, as well as rubies, diamonds, crosses, figurative paintings and forbidden icons, maps of buried treasures and the skulls of unhappy assassinated people whose assassins will remain unknown, to the reinforced concrete that supports them, to the steel, to all the apartments, to the doors, to the elderly doormen, to the parquet whose joints become black like dirty nails, to the mothers in anguish, to the angry fathers, to the refrigerator doors that won't stay closed, to the sisters, to the stepsisters, to the cousin who married the stepsister, to the hydraulic elevator and, in the elevator, to the mirror, to the secret corners that children discover while playing, to the bedspreads set aside for the trousseau, to the piece of silk that the grandfather bought from a Chinese merchant when he was the governor of Damascus and that no one has ever been able to decide to cut, think of the true mystery of our lives.»

This passage from the book sets the tone for the complex and multi-layered narrative that follows. The protagonist wanders through a dark, dirty, cold and gloomy Istanbul, getting lost in a labyrinth of memories, dreams, hallucinations, myths and ghosts.

The story is a sort of thread that connects disparate and, if desired, independent writings with great finesse. There are strange stories told in the middle of the night, fairy tales and legends of Turkish history, Fellini-esque apparitions, bizarre dreamlike mechanisms and phone calls with mysterious characters who are not who they say they are.

Some of these writings are rather heavy, while others are historical digressions that I'm not very interested in and I admit to having skipped a few pages. However, there are also passages of absolute beauty and heart-rending poetry that should be read carefully and then reread.

Overall, The Black Book is a work that is rich in ideas and emotions, and it requires the reader to approach it with an open mind and a willingness to explore its many layers. It is an opera-mondo that combines different genres and styles, much like Moby Dick, Ulysses, Rayuela and 2666.

In the end, Pamuk manages to gather all the loose threads, find the ball of yarn, and conclude the story in the best possible way. While other books by Pamuk may be more accessible and easier to read, The Black Book is a masterpiece that stands on its own and does not need any cuts. It is a work that will stay with the reader long after the last page has been turned.

The big issue explored in Orhan Pamuk's novel, a Nobel Prize-winning writer, is identity.

Who are we? The story is set in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city, straddling the bright blue waters of the narrow and rather shallow, yet still crucial Bosphorus Strait, on both the continents of Asia and Europe.

This is the ultimate problem for its divided people. Do they become westernized or remain with traditional, old customs?

They go to see ancient Hollywood films, some 20 years old, at the movie theaters (no television then), enamored by the stars, copying everything shown - clothes, manners, language, and values from the past are no more.

Galip Bey, a mid-thirty, uninspired lawyer (unhappy in his occupation) in his native, fast-growing town, is married to the beauty Ruya, a woman of the same age he has known since childhood. Intelligent and with a propensity for reading detective books one after another, he is not interested in work lately.

His famous older cousin by more than twenty years, Celal Bey, a newspaper writer with a column that all the city reads, in fact the whole nation and beyond the borders, is the most read in the Middle East.

Galip is a big admirer of his relative's sophisticated writing. However, Celal has many enemies, dabbles in dangerous politics, and he is also Ruya's half-brother.

Turmoil consumes the people's daily lives there, with political violence and killings in the streets. Many urge a military coup to cleanse the atmosphere and bring unity and calm back, circa 1960.

Mysteriously, Ruya leaves Galip, and later Celal cannot be found either. Have they run off together? Then begins the long search by the husband to discover where they are hiding.

It's a "Heart of Darkness" voyage on land as he walks through ominously deserted streets, lights fade in sunless places, and shadows fall on filthy, evil-smelling slums.

He observes apartments that are ready to collapse, citizens struggling to survive in the ever-expanding, chaotic megalopolis, its rapidly changing environment, the poor begging and stealing, and death lurking nearby, but nobody cares.

Galip has a strange, disturbing belief that he is not alone, someone is following, an evil eye, yet the threat is dismissed. He must go on, whatever occurs, good or bad. The dispirited man has to know the truth.

He continues the seemingly fruitless odyssey, a strange trip into Turkish history and the crisis in that magnificent country. What is its destiny?

This book both entertains and causes boredom to the reader. If a person wants to find the real Turkey, this is the book, but be patient. The story will delight and frustrate, as the plot is not really important - the philosophy is. The author's love-hate relationship with the city he was born in is apparent.

Ruya, the wife and niece of Galib, leaves him. Galib chases after his wife and realizes that he cannot find his nephew Jalal either. As a result, he guesses that Ruya and Jalal, who are sister and brother, are together wherever they are.

Jalal is a journalist. The book is structured in such a way that in one chapter we read an article by Jalal and in the next chapter we follow Galib's search, and this order is mostly maintained until the end of the book. The book has a lot of political content. People in society, instead of being themselves, try to be like someone else and think like that person, and in fact, everyone is imitating. Of course, this is only one of the points that the author pays attention to.

The book is beautiful in terms of content and subject matter. For me, the parts related to Jalal's articles are very interesting and engaging, but the parts related to Galib's search are sometimes repetitive, which causes the appeal of the story to decrease.

A part of the book: "In the opinion of Prince Osman Jalal al-Din Effendi, the greatest obstacle for any person to reach himself is other people, whether they are conscious or unconscious. The greatest desire of every person is to make other people like himself." Page 591.

The novel that we are talking about and the book written in the language we read can bring the highest level of pleasure. This novel will never give this taste in another language.

Reading a book in the language we are familiar with allows us to fully immerse ourselves in the story, understand the nuances, and feel the emotions of the characters. The words seem to come alive on the page and transport us to another world.

However, when a book is translated into another language, something is always lost in the process. The beauty of the original language, the unique expressions, and the cultural references may not be accurately conveyed. As a result, the reading experience may not be as fulfilling as it would be in the original language.

Therefore, if you truly want to experience the full charm of a novel, it is best to read it in the language in which it was written.

Life is truly an amazing thing. It is full of surprises and unexpected turns. However, for some, there is something else that holds an equal, if not greater, sense of wonder and solace - writing. Writing has the power to transport us to different worlds, to express our deepest thoughts and emotions, and to connect with others on a profound level. It is a creative outlet that allows us to explore our imagination and bring our ideas to life. Whether it is through poetry, prose, or journalism, writing has the ability to touch hearts and change lives. It is no wonder that so many people find writing to be their one true passion and source of comfort in a sometimes chaotic and unpredictable world.

**Another Black Book**

This is not the one by Papini, so called because it was written in a time that Papini himself qualified as black; that of World War II. This second Black Book is written by Orhan Pamuk and is over 600 pages of challenging reading full of sadness and solitude. Its darkness is that of the author's pain at losing his wife. It is constructed around this fact, the disappearance, flight, departure or loss of the woman, unexplained, in a letter she leaves to her husband.

The protagonist is a lawyer who detests detective novels, contrary to his beloved wife who adores them. He believes that in those artificial worlds, everything is exaggerated and forced. The problem with such a novel, as his wife points out, is setting a limit to the accumulation of details. Pamuk then delves into a detective novel with practically infinite details, limited only by the space and time of writing. Everything becomes a clue: the articles of his uncle Cellal Bey, the star columnist of the Milliyet newspaper, who has many reasons to be assassinated; the items in Aladino's shop; the faces of people; the letters of the alphabet; the phrases on the bags; and much more.

The first epigraph challenges epigraphs and mysteries. These overwhelming clues or details lead us through a mass of erudition in oriental literature, making us doubt, in our ignorance, if such books and authors exist. We wonder about the reality of the books and authors mentioned, like Cartas a un joven periodista, Balamir, and many others. Just as Cervantes created Don Quixote from the satire of chivalric novels, Pamuk perhaps wanted to build his novel from the criticism of detective novels. He starts with a police case - the disappearance of the wife - and weaves in other stories, sometimes reminiscent of One Thousand and One Nights.

The novel also contains reflections on literature and the meaning of life. A central theme is the impossibility of being oneself and original. The mention of disguises and governors using them to know their subjects better is recurrent. The protagonist narrator even mimics his uncle the journalist. The novel is written between 1985 and 1989, and at that time, the alternation of the narrative text with other sources was perhaps more novel. It describes Istanbul with a mix of bitterness and nostalgia. At the end of the book, the explanation of the title and why it is written is given: "Nothing can be as surprising as life. Except writing. Yes, of course, except writing, the only consolation."

A note written with a green indelible pen (an exception)

The terrifying mannequins in the showcases (life is an illusion)

When the waters of the throat recede (our fears are so great)

Because nothing is as astonishing as life, except for writing, yes, definitely except for writing.

Writing has the power to capture the essence of our thoughts, emotions, and experiences. It can transport us to different worlds, make us feel things we never thought possible, and connect us with people we may never meet.

It is a medium that allows us to express ourselves freely and without limitations. Through writing, we can create our own realities and share them with the world.

So, the next time you pick up a pen or sit down at a keyboard, remember the power of writing and let your creativity flow.

YouTube kanalımda Kara Kitap'ı önerip postmodern romanı anlattım.

The link to the video is https://youtu.be/5NOJQ_1hmps.

The poem "You are in sleep now, in sleep without us
You are still in Istanbul, but there is no sea in the waves" by YYK sets the tone.

Istanbul is a collective entity that has witnessed countless cultures, sultans, jazz festivals, architectural and artistic movements, white-collar workers, Syrians, and those without a Syrian background. It has been the theme of books, the inspiration for songs, with mosques, churches, and the human proportions that fit the Renaissance. Later, it brought a baroque anger as a reaction to itself. It has seen military coups, spiritual decays, neighborhood feuds, and couplings that are even more passionate than feuds. It has known pain, happiness, torture, orgasm, gloom, and utopia. It is like a salad of collective existence that tries to dress itself in the guise of other cities, as seen in Proust's search for what was lost in "In Search of Lost Time" and Paulo Coelho's story of Takkeci Ibrahim Efendi when writing "The Alchemist." It is a garden of memories that tries to move the reader with a vivid image, telling us that the answer to the mystery lies within us: ISTANBUL.

For a large part of my life, I have lived within the spiritual pressure aura of Istanbul, both physically and spiritually. I have been subject to the Istanbul pull, which is like the magnetism of Turkey, just as the Earth cannot remain indifferent to the pull of the Sun, planets, and satellites around it. "It" was the most colorful tree in our garden of memories. "It" was the memory that, as Pessoa said, meant the destruction of thought, allowing us to perceive the parts - the neighborhoods - of a city before thinking about the whole in a metropolitan synthesis. Because according to Pessoa, the thinking process is to divide the thing being thought into parts.

In the song "We Talk at the Turn of the Century, Sandal," Orhan Pamuk imagined an Istanbul where Galip, in the endless cycle of time, in the search for the lost time, in the frenzy of likening the waves in Istanbul to the sea, dreams his colorful "Dreams" hotel, just like in the same way Orhan Pamuk intended.

Currently, Batman, where my body is located, and the perception of the city that my mind tries to explore in its crooked streets, the city that death row inmates try to think about desperately and with great desire in their last seconds, is an Istanbul that I have made it my military duty to present to my mind as an abstract image with a broader perception. And for years, I have had an Izmit thought that I cannot reach the level of realizing it at the top of Maslow's pyramid, and I wanted to establish a spiritogeometric relationship between Orhan Pamuk's Galip, Celal, and Rüya triangle.

The main character, Galip, with the doppelgänger effect, tries to discover Istanbul, which a Tourette syndrome sufferer suddenly goes crazy and shouts and calls for. In Istanbul, where his lover, his uncle's daughter, and himself - no matter what you say - are now physically very far from himself, like the Stockholm syndrome of a citizen, he loves and tries to find himself again. In the mysterious search for reality that the young people who are on fire with the idea of becoming Napoleon like Raskolnikov, Mao during the Chinese Revolution, or Castro during the Cuban Revolution, he shoots an arrow between the axon and dendrite distances. He chases the queue for tickets to make his images take their place at the awaited concert of Kara Kitap in the most mysterious corners of Istanbul, in the synesthetic amusement parks of emotions such as love, hate, sadness, love, surprise, lust, and anger. Some people think it has the quality of a world classic, while others think it is like Alaaddin's Shop, waiting for Alaaddin to change the only objective realities that are not in his hands, leading a crowd of an army. Istanbul was like such a sentence.

Architects like Mimar Sinan, Yavuz Çetin, Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Gaye Su Akyol, Münir Özkul, Vedat Türkali, Fatih Sultan Mehmet, Ete Kurttekin, Flört, Atatürk, YYK, Vedat Milör, Nusret, Peyk, Ara Güler, Sabahattin Ali, Birsen Tezer, Orhan Veli Kanık, and Sezen Aksu have made their walks in this city, just like Galip wants to solve the mysteries of hundreds, history, books, and neighborhoods in the streets of Istanbul.

Knowing that the sea can be seen from every street in the Yeldeğirmeni neighborhood of Kadıköy, predicting that you cannot encounter a straight street while walking in Kuledibi, and taking pictures that are both picturesque and grotesque like a tourist who is passionate about it, imagining 500T dreams with a citizen of Istanbul who knows that you cannot go from Kartal to Silivri by metrobus, and fitting its interpretation into a 400-page book with the universal traveler terminology that foreigners use to touristically rant about the Old Town, if Orhan Pamuk has spent all this effort, then the circulation corridors are the waters of the Bosphorus, the entrance gates are the neighbors in terms of the borders in the geography textbooks where the strategic and geopolitical importance is dictated, the living room, the salon is Beşiktaş, Kuzguncuk, Sarıyer, Üsküdar, Eminönü, Kadıköy, the kitchen is Karaköy, Beyoğlu, the landlords who can never be loved are Bağcılar, Esenler, Başakşehir, the figure is masturbating the Russians' descent into the warm seas, the foundation is a unique history, the walls are in a way that Darwin would not envy at all, and when they are asked about themselves in the eyes of Medusa's gaze, they want to turn to stone with an envy that grows with time. It is an artistic, historical, and architectural excavation truck that will probably burden the least fortunate landlords on it after billions of years. It would be impossible for us to think about it outside of the orderly gates of our minds, Mr. Pamuk, and you are right.

Fortunately, like Galip, Hey Douglas was also born. He said, "Is it the hand that is bad, or is it Beyoğlu?" It was not in vain that the cracks in Light in Babylon were compared with the religious sound from the mosques and the tremors rising from the houses - the uncertainty of putting a c or t in front of the word "secular" when it comes out of a person's mouth. It was not in vain that on a summer day when I remembered my teacher who said, "No detail in architecture is in vain, children," Orhan Pamuk, who has the ability to tell the sociological architectural infrastructure of Istanbul with a detail that can play with the concept of this historical time in an attempt to reach the pre-eternal level, and who left ITU architecture in the 3rd grade, has made all this effort.

The first book I read by Orhan Pamuk was The Black Book. However, I'm not entirely sure whether it was a good or bad choice as a starting book. Because it wasn't a book where I could say "the pages flew by and I didn't even understand how I read it". In fact, I felt like I was reading and reading but couldn't progress at all.

But despite feeling like I couldn't progress, did I get bored? Interestingly, no.