by Orhan Pamuk
But once I spent half a semester in the United States while my ex-wife was taking her Ph.D. at Columbia University. We were living in an apartment for married students and didn’t have any space, so I had to sleep and write in the same place. Reminders of family life were all around. This upset me. In the mornings I used to say good-bye to my wife like someone going to work. I’d leave the house, walk around a few blocks, and come back like a person arriving at the office.
Ten years ago I found a flat overlooking the Bosphorus with a view of the old city. It has, perhaps, one of the best views of Istanbul. It is a twenty-five-minute walk from where I live. It is full of books and my desk looks out onto the view. Every day I spend, on average, some ten hours there.
INTERVIEWER
Ten hours a day?
PAMUK
Yes, I’m a hard worker. I enjoy it. People say I’m ambitious, and maybe there’s truth in that too. But I’m in love with what I do. I enjoy sitting at my desk like a child playing with his toys. It’s work, essentially, but it’s fun and games also.
INTERVIEWER
Orhan, your namesake and the narrator of Snow, describes himself as a clerk who sits down at the same time every day. Do you have the same discipline for writing?
PAMUK
I was underlining the clerical nature of the novelist as opposed to that of the poet, who has an immensely prestigious tradition in Turkey. To be a poet is a popular and respected thing. Most of the Ottoman sultans and statesmen were poets. But not in the way we understand poets now. For hundreds of years it was a way of establishing yourself as an intellectual. Most of these people used to collect their poems in manuscripts called divans. In fact, Ottoman court poetry is called divan poetry. Half of the Ottoman statesmen produced divans. It was a sophisticated and educated way of writing things, with many rules and rituals. Very conventional and very repetitive. After Western ideas came to Turkey, this legacy was combined with the romantic and modern idea of the poet as a person who burns for truth. It added extra weight to the prestige of the poet. On the other hand, a novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever written poetry?
PAMUK
I am often asked that. I did when I was eighteen and I published some poems in Turkey, but then I quit. My explanation is that I realized that a poet is someone through whom God is speaking. You have to be possessed by poetry. I tried my hand at poetry, but I realized after some time that God was not speaking to me. I was sorry about this and then I tried to imagine—if God were speaking through me, what would he be saying? I began to write very meticulously, slowly, trying to figure this out. That is prose writing, fiction writing. So I worked like a clerk. Some other writers consider this expression to be a bit of an insult. But I accept it; I work like a clerk.
INTERVIEWER
Would you say that writing prose has become easier for you over time?
PAMUK
Unfortunately not. Sometimes I feel my character should enter a room and I still don’t know how to make him enter. I may have more self-confidence, which sometimes can be unhelpful because then you’re not experimenting, you just write what comes to the tip of your pen. I’ve been writing fiction for the last thirty years, so I should think that I’ve improved a bit. And yet I still sometimes come to a dead end where I thought there never would be one. A character cannot enter a room, and I don’t know what to do. Still! After thirty years.
The division of a book into chapters is very important for my way of thinking. When writing a novel, if I know the whole story line in advance—and most of the time I do—I divide it into chapters and think up the details of what I’d like to happen in each. I don’t necessarily start with the first chapter and write all the others in order. When I’m blocked, which is not a grave thing for me, I continue with whatever takes my fancy. I may write from the first to the fifth chapter, then if I’m not enjoying it I skip to number fifteen and continue from there.
INTERVIEWER
Do you mean that you map out the entire book in advance?
PAMUK
Everything. My Name Is Red, for instance, has many characters, and to each character I assigned a certain number of chapters. When I was writing, sometimes I wanted to continue “being” one of the characters. So when I finished writing one of Shekure’s chapters, perhaps chapter seven, I skipped to chapter eleven, which is her again. I liked being Shekure. Skipping from one character or persona to another can be depressing.
But the final chapter I always write at the end. That is definite. I like to tease myself, ask myself what the ending should be. I can only execute the ending once. Toward the end, before finishing, I stop and rewrite most of the early chapters.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever have a reader while you are working?
PAMUK
I always read my work to the person I share my life with. I’m always grateful if that person says, Show me more, or, Show me what you have done today. Not only does that provide a bit of necessary pressure, but it’s like having a mother or father pat you on the back and say, Well done. Occasionally, the person will say, Sorry, I don’t buy this. Which is good. I like that ritual.
I’m always reminded of Thomas Mann, one of my role models. He used to bring the whole family together, his six children and his wife. He used to read to all his gathered family. I like that. Daddy telling a story.
INTERVIEWER
When you were young you wanted to be a painter. When did your love of painting give way to your love of writing?
PAMUK
At the age of twenty-two. Since I was seven I had wanted to be a painter, and my family had accepted this. They all thought that I would be a famous painter. But then something happened in my head—I realized that a screw was loose—and I stopped painting and immediately began writing my first novel.
INTERVIEWER
A screw was loose?
PAMUK
I can’t say what my reasons were for doing this. I recently published a book called Istanbul. Half of it is my autobiography until that moment and the other half is an essay about Istanbul, or more precisely, a child’s vision of Istanbul. It’s a combination of thinking about images and landscapes and the chemistry of a city, and a child’s perception of that city, and that child’s autobiography. The last sentence of the book reads, “‘I don’t want to be an artist,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be a writer.’” And it’s not explained. Although reading the whole book may explain something.
INTERVIEWER
Was your family happy about this decision?
PAMUK
My mother was upset. My father was somewhat more understanding because in his youth he wanted to be a poet and translated Valéry into Turkish, but gave up when he was mocked by the upper-class circle to which he belonged.
INTERVIEWER
Your family accepted you being a painter, but not a novelist?
PAMUK
Yes, because they didn’t think I would be a full-time painter. The family tradition was in civil engineering. My grandfather was a civil engineer who made lots of money building railroads. My uncles and my father lost the money, but they all went to the same engineering school, Istanbul Technical University. I was expected to go there and I said, All right, I will go there. But since I was the artist in the family, the notion was that I should become an architect. It seemed to be a satisfying solution for everyone. So I went to that university, but in the middle of architectural school I suddenly quit painting and began writing novels.
INTERVIEWER
Did you already have your first novel in mind when you decided to quit? Is that why you did it?
PAMUK
As far as I remember, I wanted to be a novelist before I knew what to write. In fact, when I did start writing I had two or three false starts. I still have the notebooks. But after a
bout six months I started a major novel project that ultimately got published as Cevdet Bey and His Sons.
INTERVIEWER
That hasn’t been translated into English.
PAMUK
It is essentially a family saga, like the Forsyte Saga or Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Not long after I finished it I began to regret having written something so outmoded, a very nineteenth-century novel. I regretted writing it because, around the age of twenty-five or twenty-six, I began to impose on myself the idea that I should be a modern author. By the time the novel was finally published, when I was thirty, my writing had become much more experimental.
INTERVIEWER
When you say you wanted to be more modern, experimental, did you have a model in mind?
PAMUK
At that time, the great writers for me were no longer Tolstoy, Dos-toyevsky, Stendhal, or Thomas Mann. My heroes were Virginia Woolf and Faulkner. Now I would add Proust and Nabokov to that list.
INTERVIEWER
The opening line of The New Life is, “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” Has any book had that effect on you?
PAMUK
The Sound and the Fury was very important to me when I was twenty-one or twenty-two. I bought a copy of the Penguin edition. It was hard to understand, especially with my poor English. But there was a wonderful translation of the book into Turkish, so I would put the Turkish and the English together on the table and read half a paragraph from one and then go back to the other. That book left a mark on me. The residue was the voice that I developed. I soon began to write in the first person singular. Most of the time I feel better when I’m impersonating someone else rather than writing in the third person.
INTERVIEWER
You say it took years to get your first novel published?
PAMUK
In my twenties I did not have any literary friendships; I didn’t belong to any literary group in Istanbul. The only way to get my first book published was to submit it to a literary competition for unpublished manuscripts in Turkey. I did that and won the prize, which was to be published by a big, good publisher. At the time, Turkey’s economy was in a bad state. They said, Yes, we’ll give you a contract, but they delayed the novel’s publication.
INTERVIEWER
Did your second novel go more easily—more quickly?
PAMUK
The second book was a political book. Not propaganda. I was already writing it while I waited for the first book to appear. I had given that book some two and a half years. Suddenly, one night there was a military coup. This was in 1980. The next day the would-be publisher of the first book, the Cevdet Bey book, said he wasn’t going to publish it, even though we had a contract. I realized that even if I finished my second book—the political book—that day, I would not be able to publish it for five or six years because the military would not allow it. So my thoughts ran as follows: At the age of twenty-two I said I was going to be a novelist and wrote for seven years hoping to get something published in Turkey … and nothing. Now I’m almost thirty and there’s no possibility of publishing anything. I still have the two hundred and fifty pages of that unfinished political novel in one of my drawers.
Immediately after the military coup, because I didn’t want to get depressed, I started a third book—the book to which you referred, The Silent House. That’s what I was working on in 1982 when the first book was finally published. Cevdet was well received, which meant that I could publish the book I was then writing. So the third book I wrote was the second to be published.
INTERVIEWER
What made your novel unpublishable under the military regime?
PAMUK
The characters were young upper-class Marxists. Their fathers and mothers would go to summer resorts, and they had big spacious rich houses and enjoyed being Marxists. They would fight and be jealous of one another and plot to blow up the prime minister.
INTERVIEWER
Gilded revolutionary circles?
PAMUK
Upper-class youngsters with rich people’s habits, pretending to be ultraradical. But I was not making a moral judgment about that. Rather, I was romanticizing my youth, in a way. The idea of throwing a bomb at the prime minister would have been enough to get the book banned.
So I didn’t finish it. And you change as you write books. You cannot assume the same persona again. You cannot continue as before. Each book an author writes represents a period in his development. One’s novels can be seen as the milestones in the development of one’s spirit. So you cannot go back. Once the elasticity of fiction is dead, you cannot move it again.
INTERVIEWER
When you’re experimenting with ideas, how do you choose the form of your novels? Do you start with an image, with a first sentence?
PAMUK
There is no constant formula. But I make it my business not to write two novels in the same mode. I try to change everything. This is why so many of my readers tell me, I liked this novel of yours, it’s a shame you didn’t write other novels like that, or, I never enjoyed one of your novels until you wrote that one—I’ve heard that especially about The Black Book. In fact I hate to hear this. It’s fun, and a challenge, to experiment with form and style, and language and mood and persona, and to think about each book differently.
The subject matter of a book may come to me from various sources. With My Name Is Red, I wanted to write about my ambition to become a painter. I had a false start; I began to write a monographic book focused on one painter. Then I turned the painter into various painters working together in an atelier. The point of view changed, because now there were other painters talking. At first I was thinking of writing about a contemporary painter, but then I thought this Turkish painter might be too derivative, too influenced by the West, so I went back in time to write about miniaturists. That was how I found my subject.
Some subjects also necessitate certain formal innovations or storytelling strategies. Sometimes, for example, you’ve just seen something, or read something, or been to a movie, or read a newspaper article, and then you think, I’ll make a potato speak, or a dog, or a tree. Once you get the idea you start thinking about symmetry and continuity in the novel. And you feel, Wonderful, no one’s done this before.
Finally, I think of things for years. I may have ideas and then I tell them to my close friends. I keep lots of notebooks for possible novels I may write. Sometimes I don’t write them, but if I open a notebook and begin taking notes for it, it is likely that I will write that novel. So when I’m finishing one novel my heart may be set on one of these projects, and two months after finishing one I start writing the other.
INTERVIEWER
Many novelists will never discuss a work in progress. Do you also keep that a secret?
PAMUK
I never discuss the story. On formal occasions, when people ask what I’m writing, I have a one-sentence stock reply: A novel that takes place in contemporary Turkey. I open up to very few people and only when I know they won’t hurt me. What I do is talk about the gimmicks—I’m going to make a cloud speak, for instance. I like to see how people react to them. It is a childish thing. I did this a lot when writing Istanbul. My mind is like that of a little playful child, trying to show his daddy how clever he is.
INTERVIEWER
The word gimmick has a negative connotation.
PAMUK
You begin with a gimmick, but if you believe in its literary and moral seriousness, in the end it turns into serious literary invention. It becomes a literary statement.
INTERVIEWER
Critics often characterize your novels as postmodern. It seems to me, however, that you draw your narrative tricks primarily from traditional sources. You quote, for instance, from the Thousand and One Nights and other classic texts in the Eastern tradition.