Word: turkishly
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...lecture in a crowded Sanders Theatre yesterday, the Turkish novelist said that most writers attempt to guess how a reader will respond to their writing, just as a chess player makes his move in anticipation of his opponent’s next move in a chess game...
...extremism, won’t find it here. Pamuk’s name took on a controversial coloring in the wake of that novel—in 2005, his remarks about the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of Armenians and Kurds earned him a much-debated prosecution under Turkish law for “explicitly insulting the Republic,” and a year later he took home the Nobel Prize in Literature amidst accusations by his countrymen that he had sold out to the West. But Pamuk is no activist. In his latest, civil war and sectarian violence...
Stripped to its essence, the plot is an old-fashioned tale of unrequited love. Kemal, a successful middle-aged Turkish businessman, walks into a boutique to buy a handbag for his fiancée and is immediately smitten with an 18-year-old shopgirl named Füsun, who happens to be a distant relative of his. Their affair—initially, a casual one—takes on a special gravity; despite its European affectations, 1970s Istanbul remains deeply wary of women who have sex before marriage. The two eventually do consummate their relationship, however, and the first...
...Istanbul, and the sense of that isolation drifts throughout his painstaking dissection of heartbreak. More than any other novelist today, Pamuk has laid claim to the dispassionate prose style and layered, self-reflective inheritance of Proust. At one point, he follows a numbered list of the ways in which Turkish girls are socially condemned for surrendering their chastity before marriage with a note: “Clever readers will have sensed that I have placed this anthropological lesson here to allow myself a chance to cool off from the jealousy that Füsun’s love stories provoked...
With that mindset wilts one potentially massive critique: Pamuk never writes his way out of Istanbul; the physical and mental geography mapped out in “Museum” is old hat. Lost loves and newspaper columnists, tea houses and Turkish-brand sodas recur in all his books, and the emphasis on B-movies and the world of cinema in particular strongly echoes the more metaphysical treatment afforded them in his novel “The New Life.” These themes could easily grow as worn as the belongings of Füsun’s that...