La Vida Nueva

Saf, sahih edebiyat. Yirmili yaşlar manifestosu. Ya da bir nevi masal.

Thanks to meeting Orhan Pamuk, it's a new life for me. Especially in the first sections where the excitement of youth, the desire for exploration, and love are described, the depictions are so beautiful and vivid that they make you want to close the book in the middle, take a deep breath, get lost in thought, or smile under strange gazes.

I think at the end of the book, everyone wished to discover the secret of life. But life is not much, it consists only of a coincidence of time.

This book seems to be a mirror that reflects the essence of life and the emotions of youth. It takes the reader on a journey through different stages of life, making them feel every moment deeply. The language used by Orhan Pamuk is so rich and evocative that it brings the story to life. Whether it's the description of a beautiful landscape or the inner turmoil of a character, everything is presented in a way that engages the reader's senses and imagination.

Overall, this is a book that leaves a lasting impression and makes you think about the meaning and purpose of life. It's a must-read for anyone who loves literature and wants to explore the depths of the human experience.

The original text seems a bit unclear and perhaps contains some errors or unclear notations. However, I'll do my best to rewrite and expand it based on what I can understand.

The expression "2,5'tan 3" is rather strange. Maybe it was intended to be something like "2.5 times the tangent of 3".

If we consider that, we could expand it as follows: We have the number 2.5 and we are multiplying it by the tangent of the angle 3 (presumably in radians or degrees, depending on the context). The tangent function is a trigonometric function that relates the ratio of the opposite side to the adjacent side of a right triangle for a given angle.

When we calculate 2.5 times the tangent of 3, we first need to determine the value of the tangent of 3. Then we multiply that value by 2.5 to get the final result. Without knowing the specific value of the tangent of 3, we can't give a numerical answer, but this is the general process for evaluating the given expression.

It's important to note that if the "3" in the expression was meant to represent something other than an angle for the tangent function, then the interpretation and calculation would be different. But based on the most likely interpretation, this is how we would approach and expand on the given expression.

I am now done with 60% of the book, and I just couldn't hold myself back from jotting down something, anything, about it, with my half-open sleepy eyes.

When I first embarked on this literary journey with this book, I had a desire to truly love Pamuk. Through his interviews, talks, the reviews of his works, and my previous encounter with "Snow", I had formed some rather strong opinions about him. I had hoped that in the process of reading this novel, those opinions would change. However, so far, they remain intact. But here's the thing, I almost liked him.

Here are some of my observations up until now:

1. Osman and Janan bear a striking resemblance to Ka and Ipek. The male protagonist is (overtly) sentimental, sensitive, and vulnerable, while the female protagonist is mysterious and angelic.

2. The fact that young people masturbate and watch porn. Is Pamuk's emphasis on this related to the religious and moral climate in Turkey?

3. His novels are superbly planned, yet the writing lacks precision. There are too many words (which is bad), too many themes (which is good), and too many layers (which is awesome).

4. Pamuk is IMPORTANT for political reasons. He has made a tremendous contribution to postmodern literature (perhaps been an avant-garde?), but his voice - where it comes from and what it says - is of utmost significance in our times. "The New Life" was a rage in Turkey. What does that imply? Some people picked up this book and their entire lives were transformed.

5. I consider myself a bad reader. This book, which I will finish in approximately 3 weeks, will require at least three more weeks of re-reading (and brooding) in order for me to even begin to appreciate or denounce the work. All I have managed to achieve in my first reading is getting closer to the end.

6. I will never be able to love Pamuk the writer. But I have immense respect and awe for Pamuk the conjurer, the engineer of ideas, the political philosopher, the explorer of sub-cultures, and the voice on the "West".

The novel is symbolic, expressing the confusion of the youth between customs and traditions and their modern age of globalization.

And how we all spend our lives in search of a new life, a different life from everyone else. We don't want our lives to be traditional; we want them to be unique and perfect.

The young man, Othman, the hero of the novel, along with his contemporaries like Janaan and Mohammed and others, want to reach a new life and leave their studies in fields like medicine and engineering in order to find this new life and set off bravely on the roads in search of it in a nomadic life. But no one reaches the new life promised by the book.

Othman marries a beautiful girl and has a beautiful child, but he resorts to sugar because he wants Janaan, his beloved. He is not satisfied with what he has and wants to continue his search for Janaan and the new life.

Othman meets many opponents of globalization and the enemies of globalization during his journey, including Dr. Fain, who eventually turns into a terrorist in his war against globalization, in his war to preserve customs and traditions and what is old. As a result, his life is completely destroyed.

Othman kills the one Janaan loves in order to get her, but in the end, he doesn't get her and Janaan leaves. When he hears news of her years later, he finds that she has married and gone to Germany.

Othman leans towards settling with Janaan in Dr. Fain's house during his journey because, like the nature of all young people, he leans towards customs and traditions and stability, as well as towards the new life and the consumer prices that have spread in the country and the luxury of living.

Othman dies at the end of the novel after finally realizing that he wants what he has, that he wants to meet his wife and daughter and live with them. He dies in a road accident after seeing the angel for the last time.

I thought when I was reading that the narrator was addressing Janaan (his angel), but with time, Orhan Pamuk confirmed to us that he was addressing the angel himself, as he showed us the name of the hero in the middle of the novel.

It is always wonderful for book lovers to read, and this is clearly shown in this novel, whose entire theme is the book that changed the life of its hero. The book does not symbolize a specific book, but rather symbolizes all the books that have a profound impact on our lives.

This novel itself has a very strong impact. I felt throughout that I wanted to leave the house, take the longest possible means of transportation, and finish the novel while traveling to a place I don't know where.

And this novel opened my eyes to something else, which is that there are suitable places to read novels. I read most of the pages of this novel during my trips to Cairo or to places around my city due to my job, which requires a lot of movement.

And another time I read a novel that made me feel that its events were running parallel to the events of my life, and this always doubles my enjoyment of the work.

The hero traveled a lot.

The hero knew the beautiful Janaan whom he loved, but she loved someone else. (Fortunately, this did not happen to me exactly in reality, but it was very close.)

The hero searched for a new life, and I searched for a new life after being cut off from the world and work for a year.

And many other parallels that I have forgotten now.

When talking about the parallels, what about the contradictions in this novel?

This novel expresses the love of customs and traditions and our not forgetting our origin, and at the same time, it encourages the search for everything new and the development of our lives.

The events of the novel last, I think, for 16 to 17 years. In it, the author presents to us all the changes that took place in the country after 14 years of his journey with Janaan. Everything has changed. The buses are now new and comfortable, the roads are paved, and foreign advertisements are spread everywhere.

The traditional market and national goods no longer exist.

I did not expect this strong style from Orhan Pamuk. I know that he won the Nobel Prize and everything, but really, I did not expect this novel to be so exciting. It is very complex and requires intense concentration in reading, but at the same time, if you give it its due in concentration, you will be able to enjoy it all and understand all the messages between its lines and behind its symbols.

I am sure that there are other symbols that I have not yet discovered, but I will leave their discovery to myself in the future after I return to reading it one day.

One day, I read a book and my life changed.

This is how the book begins with Orhan Pamuk's sentence that is on everyone's lips. But we have romanticized this sentence very wrongly. Because the character's life is really changing. It is going up and down, upside down.

One day, the character who reads the New Life book, for some reason, thinks that this book is real, falls in love and dedicates himself to finding the country described in the book. Neither his mother nor his wife and children matter, only Canan and Melek.

He spends his months on the bus, encounters accidents, murders and people like him who think this book is real and thinkers in the search.

There are dozens of people who believe in a religion, that is, in absurd stories.

He has told his love in his own way again because Mr. Orhan cannot write about love. But he is a world brand when it comes to obsessive characters. The character reminded me a bit of Kemal from the Museum of Innocence. The book also mentions Celal Salik in a few places. I think the book has become the Pamuk book that I have read and liked the most so far.

I don't really know what to say about this one.

I think I will be thinking about it for a while.

I will say this: I found it both compulsively readable and boring as hell, both at the same time, all the time, beginning to end.

Despite all the great writers Pamuk is compared to on the cover blurbs and inside (Kafka, Marquez, Borges, Proust, etc.), the writer he most reminds me of here is Thomas Pynchon.

Both come off as almost retardedly intelligent & way too clever.

Both are more interested in playing games and laying out a view of the world as a paranoid (in Pamuk's case metaphysical) delusion/illusion than they are in writing about actual human beings and the things that happen to them, the things they feel and desire.

They are also both very good writers of sentences.

The thing is, I just keep thinking, what if I just ripped this page out? What if I just read every other sentence? What if this chapter was written in invisible ink? What if the book ended here? What if it never began?

I think in general I found the book useless. I just didn't know what to make of it, emotionally.

I can understand how some can get caught up in the voice, the style. It's just the feeling I don't care for, or the lack of it. It's just one note all the way through.

People live, love, fight, learn, run, hide, die, laugh... all in the exact same register... all without my feelings changing one bit. Like watching a film in fast motion... only it takes a really long time.

That being said, I know a guy in a foreign country who seems to have been absolutely overwhelmed by its power, so who knows... maybe the angel only comes to those who aren't expecting it.

The New Life of Ouhan Bamouk

There are few works that I have expressed in the new and popular youth terms these days, but I found cowardice in that, to soil this great work with words that do not suit its greatness.

What was the author thinking when writing this work? And what circumstances did he live through to produce this unique creation?

It is a very wonderful work. It took me three days to read it (and this may be the longest time for me to read a literary work).

It belongs to those works that require you to focus every cell in your brain so that it can reach you completely. So that you can understand its great meaning and its greatest value.

One of the greatest chapters I have read in my life and the greatest sentence at the beginning when the author said, "I read a book one day and it changed my whole life." To translate the dream of Defne, which is to live the life of books and make books your life.

Then the author begins to weave and build a literary world of the noblest things that can be. A fictional world strengthened in a (playful) way through which he was able to show you his golden ability to control his different fictional tools.

A strange love story, and the secret of its charm lies in its surprise, surprise with details and events. Sometimes the details are very simple and sometimes they are complicated in place, but all of that does not hide its hidden charm.

And the question remains: Can you face the magic of reading, even if this magic will change your whole life, whatever the change that will occur, and whether it is for the better or for the worse.

The answer is within the pages of this book.

In general, it is a very excellent work, strongly structured, and extremely wonderful. And as usual, Nobel Prize-winning works may not give you pleasure in reading them, but you cannot deny the magical effect of their works.

The good translation indicates the greatness of the work in its original language. The events, details, and characters have no description less than magic.

“Geri dönmek isteyenin ötesine geçmemesi gereken bölgesine ayak bastım hayatın.” - Dante

In 1994 when the book was published, those who had at least completed their adolescence will remember that the advertisements of this book were on the huge billboards on the streets. Orhan Pamuk was criticized for being a media-savvy writer and selling his book through advertising.

Life is just like this: We don't know while we are alive what or who will be filtered out by the sieve of history. I was in college at that time, and under the influence of those criticisms, I looked down on Pamuk. But 25 years later, I realize how wrong I was. Just as Dante said, by reading "New Life", I left behind a state of mind that I could no longer return to, and I stepped into a new life, a new perspective: Our search for meaning in life is resolved by a simple candy wrapper fortune-telling!

I'm sure Pamuk is a very skillful curator. In fact, he even created the Museum of Innocence physically, opening up a new playing field for postmodern art. We shouldn't be surprised that he worked meticulously on each word unit that makes up "New Life", controlled the formation of meanings in sentences, and finally exhibited the result on the street billboards of Baghdad Avenue in 1994.

But yet we are surprised. There are still those who are surprised that he won the Nobel Prize. Actually, what we are curious about is the artist behind a masterful modern art collage. What was he thinking when creating this work? The thing that I think makes him similar to other writers who have won the Nobel Prize is this: With his novels, when he takes us beyond, he makes us step into a new life by crossing a line that cannot be returned to:

“What is life? A time! What is time? An accident. What is an accident? A life, a new life...”