Who you really are?

On the surface, this seems like a question already posed elsewhere with such banality and tedium that some would be happy to declare that they don’t care about the question, let alone a possible answer. However, you can’t help but to think about your identity while riding the roller-coaster that Pamuk manages to pull-off in The Black Book. Like all great minds, Pamuk knows very well that attempting to answer such a question is quite complicated, though he is committed to taking it seriously. He gives glimpses of different possible routes to tackle the question, including the compassionate view (for someone as lonely as himself) that it is impossible to live - as an individual or as a nation - in a meaningful way without trying to become somebody else.

My grandparents and their families hail from Diyarbakir in present day Turkey. In 1915, they fled their homes and found themselves in Syria due to massive deportation and massacres known collectively as The Armenian Genocide. I was born in Aleppo and hence had a sort of double connection to this book. First, my Armenian background with its extensive affinities and similarities to Turkish culture that goes both ways despite what the two archenemies will want you think. And second, through my childhood that was spent in Aleppo, a city that is to a great extent similar to Istanbul, in that though it has mainly an Islamic heritage, was and is home to people from different faiths and world-views. With its mosques, churches, narrow streets and bustling daily life, I was really thinking the book was talking a great deal about myself and where I come from. Though Aleppo is not torn between east and west like Istanbul, as an Armenian-Syrian reading this book, I couldn’t but see myself in it.

To return to the original question, the novel is constructed loosely as a detective fiction in which Galip, a middle-aged lawyer, sets out on a journey to the streets and veins of Istanbul to find his detective-novel-loving wife, Ruya, who is also his cousin (an arrangement with a long history in Turkish and Islamic societies). One night, Ruya leaves unexpectedly with a small note that doesn't mention where or why she is leaving. This quest for meaning guised as a search for his wife becomes a journey of self-discovery that echoes Pamuk’s question about Turkish identity. The tragic ending of the book is beautifully linked with the collective Turkish question, yet Pamuk doesn’t overstate the link. His is a personal journey as well that explores himself as an author by asking himself why, at all, he is writing? why is it that some choose to tell stories? is it the only thing that keeps them moving in their imaginary journeys?

The book is written in a charming format that alternates between the story of Galib’s search for his wife and columns written by his cousin Celal that he comes across. In each of these columns, Celal talks engagingly about his own life as a columnist, topics of historical, political and religious interest in addition to his complains about his supposed gradual loss of memory which symbolises Turkey’s troubled relationship with its own past. Having similar first names, Celal the columnist (with his very fluid personality) and Jalal el-Din Al Rumi (who is buried in Konya) enrich the pages of the novel that really unfolds like a great symphony. I will undoubtedly read this book more than twice. It is a literary masterpiece that delves deep into the human psyche and the complex tapestry of identity, culture, and history.

The Black Book was my first reading of Orhan Pamuk, and although it was the first, it is already the best novel for me, and it is very difficult for this opinion of mine to change.

The Black Book is intellectually stimulating and has a profound impact because of its strangeness, because of the great hidden love of Orhan for Istanbul in every line, and because of Pamuk's amazing ability to tell a story. The novel belongs to postmodern police literature, which takes a crime as a starting point to discuss a larger issue where knowing the solution to the mystery is not the main goal. The novel begins with the disappearance of Galip's wife Ruya and his niece, followed by the disappearance of his half-brother, the famous journalist Celal. Here lies the genius of Orhan as a writer. Celal is the only hero of the novel with distinction and its center, but he does not appear in any scene, yet he almost controls it in every page and every detail. In a creative way, Pamuk tells the story between Galip and his search for Ruya and Celal, and between Celal's articles that can be read independently and some of which are similar to short stories, but in the end, you realize that they are interconnected and serve the novel as a whole.

In a long journey filled with mystery and strangeness, and with a powerful ability to tell and switch between the past and the present, memories and history, Galip tries to understand the secret of Celal and his inner struggle, which is Istanbul's struggle to find itself and its identity between the past and the present, between the East and the West. Thus, throughout the novel, through many stories and scenes in the streets of Istanbul and tales from the ancient Turkish heritage, Pamuk asks whether man is really himself or is he a slave to others? Celal's journey with the world of literature, the secrets of letters and the codes of language, and the reading of faces that is parallel to the story of the Ottoman Sultan. A journey of Istanbul's search for a modern identity without exaggerating in the heritage of the past.

Literature and its relationship with Sufism and harnessing it to a deeper understanding of the Quran. The idea of sanctifying language and letters and exploring the secrets of words and what is between the lines and trying to understand everything in life and translate it into letters.

A vast world and a great history that is not without bloodshed. Pamuk introduced me to it and made me read about it in depth despite the scarcity of Arabic books about it.

The idea of Celal's articles, some of the most beautiful things that would be especially for the three armed men and writing advice. The imaginary eye that pursues Celal. Who killed Shams Tabrizi? A beautiful and bold treatment of the relationship between Jalaluddin Rumi and Tabrizi, in which Jalal goes so far as to conclude that Jalaluddin is the one who ordered the killing of Tabrizi!!

The relationship of love and the strange attachment between Celal and his sister Ruya. The relationship of love that is sometimes doubted, sometimes hated, sometimes sanctified, which Galip has for Celal. This triangle between Galip, Ruya and Celal is written beautifully.

The novel is heavy and fragrant in its reading because of the many and unexpected switches between the past and the present, history and from one story to another, and the use of long sentences that require great concentration and multiple readings, which reminds me of the thickets of the Patriarch for Marquis.

"One cannot discover the truth without being himself, and if he discovers the truth, this means that he was not himself."

"Nothing is more astonishing than life except writing.. Yes, of course, except for the lonely cypress that is the book."

5/5

This is a rare example of a reread for me. I don't reread books very often, not because I don't want to, but rather because there are so many new books to discover.

My experience of reading this one was a good example of a certain kind of reader's disease. The kind where even though you are trying to focus your attention on the story, the language, etc., your eyes start to water and you kind of glaze over in your mind, turning pages and sort of dimly registering the story. It's not "reading," per se, but it's not skimming either. It's not bullshitting your way through the book - it's more that when you read a lot, your brain (or at least mine) kind of gets blurry when the story or the language doesn't exactly burst out at you.

I think it also makes a difference when the writer's particular style doesn't mesh well with your own individual brain chemistry. His way of seeing is somewhat at odds with yours. It's not a philosophical difference so much as it's about instincts of perception, if you will. The pacing of the story, the level and type of detail, the way he describes a room or how much of it, the length and construction of sentences.... all that kind of stuff. I don't think it's pretentious or poser-ish to continue reading even if the writer's style means you're going to miss most of what's happening. Sometimes you can uncover a jewel even in the midst of confusion or mistakes. And besides, some people just *have* to finish a book once they start it. I'm one of them.

Also, consider the fact that many of the places where the modern reader reads are not particularly conducive to the intimate, erotic, spiritual practice of reading a book. Consider, just for starters, the din of airports, buses, commuter rails, subways, bars, restaurants, living rooms with the TV on, so on and so forth. There is usually a trickle of white noise coming in from at least one direction - there has got to be some of the magic drained out of the experience. I would venture that long, prolonged investments in concentration could be harder to come by now than ever. More comprehension gets shaved off while, ironically, the abundance and availability of material is richer than ever. And then there's the next hundred and seventy-nine pages to go...

So... I kind of shortchanged the book a little bit. I think it's excusable to sort of pass something like this off, as long as you did make a decent effort. Hell, not everything can be easy to understand, right? This is leisure reading, after all. I was not told there would be any math on this exam. I will not put my pencil down.

Anyway, apropos of nothing, I picked this up again recently and it's a whole new experience. The scales have fallen from my eyes. There are still some stumbling blocks here and there - Pamuk is a writer for whom I have great respect, and I absolutely loved "The New Life" - but all in all the tale is beginning to fill in for me and I'm really participating in it in a way I hadn't before. It's funny, since so much of this very provocative, philosophically savvy, eerily clean novel has to do with preoccupations of identity. I deliberately phrased it like this because there's a very strong self-reflexive aspect to the proceedings. The main character is trying to relocate his vanished wife through the medium of the collected newspaper columns of his cousin, her former husband, who has also vanished, who has written a great deal about the identity of Turkey in the (post) modern world, not to mention his own consciousness and psychic disorientation, and so obviously there's a deeply meta-narrative project in place. You can imagine how sticky and obfuscating this kind of thing gets when, for whatever reason, the coordinates of your consciousness aren't really aligned with the text. It's a delicate balancing act anyway, moreso when the author is stepping into some very seductive, Borgesian metaphysical landscapes.

Now that, about three years later, I can dip back into it with pleasure and profit, I am pleased to say that The Black Book, at maybe about 65% done at least, is a very, very worthwhile tome. It has the narrative of a noir: meditative, crisp, somewhat chilly and slightly spare. It has the political significance of Pamuk's status as a player on the Turkish literary scene (if you're actually reading this you should really acquaint yourself with his works and days) and especially when you consider the story's being set in 1980, the significance of this is explained rather neatly in Maureen Freeley's translator's afterward - a little too neatly, if you ask me. And, philosophically, it is very beautifully investigated, well prosed, and that's difficult to do well. Philosophy is an incredible thing. Sometimes its relationship to literature can be a bit awkward and bumbling. Sometimes it adds a moral and existential resonance to a story which is intriguing and enticing on its own merits. Pamuk handles this beautifully -

There's quite a few quotable gems here. Many of them go on at length, necessarily. Here are a few of the shorter ones:

"He felt happy, on the verge of a revelation - the secret of life, the meaning of the world, shimmering just beyond his grasp - but when he tried to put this secret into words, all he could see was the face of the woman who was sitting in the corner watching him."

"He surveyed the dome, the columns, the great stone structures above his head, longing to be moved but feeling stuck. There was the vaguest of premonitions... but this great edifice was as impenetrable as stone itself. It did not welcome a man in, nor did it transport him to a better place. But if nothing signified nothing, than anything could signify anything. For a moment he thought he saw the flash of blue light, and then he heard the flutter of what sounded like the wings of a pigeon, but then he returned to his old stagnant silence, waiting for the illumination that never came."

"For what is reading but the animating of a writer's words on the silent film strip in our minds?"

There's some phenomenal set pieces, too. Pamuk's Istanbul is there in its 'there-ness' but it still has a universal quality, albeit a somewhat dour, crystalline, noir-ish ambience...

It got three stars for a muddled, uncomprehending first read which was decidedly my fault and now it's getting four stars for coming off the bench and working nicely.

"If no work comes to my head" is a book that, despite having many bright parts here and there, fails to have an impact and cannot integrate. Everything is "too much"; but nothing is coherent. This abundance seems more like excess rather than richness, unfortunately. It's as if it's scattered and not gathered. Does it need to be gathered? It's not necessary in every narrative. But at the same time, every book doesn't have to be a fictional one. Well, he could have taken these thought flows and left them un-novelized as he wanted. Or, by creating a different kind of fiction, he could have created a so-called chain of mystery that we expect to be connected to each other. One of the two is mystery; but although there are a few events that arouse curiosity, the stories branch out and bud so endlessly that there is neither mystery nor curiosity left in the middle. The reason for this is the narrative form itself. There are just some little stories left in the middle.

Some of the stories have very high energy and it seemed to me as if they were written first and the rest of the part was made into a book by bringing together a thousand kinds of words (necessary-unnecessary-coherent or not).

I also compared it a bit to "Those Who Could Not Hold On", but I must admit that I liked "Those Who Could Not Hold On" much more.

Well, let me be quiet and let Tahsin Yücel speak:

http://dipnotkitap.net/DENEME/Kara_Ki...

What did I like?

-"I must be myself" (Actually, the handling of this problem, which describes a crisis that many creative people go through at a certain period and which is opened up here and there, was very good.)

-The story of the prince who tries to free himself from everything by erasing his memories.

-The determination that the nations that cannot be themselves, the imitators, will disappear and go" (I completely agree.)