Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel The Museum Of Innocence is a magnificent love story that describes an affair between a 30-year-old aristocrat and an 18-year-old shop girl. In an exclusive interview with DNA, Pamuk, who is on a whirlwind trip to Mumbai, talks about his attempts to explore what happens to us when we fall in love
The first thing Orhan Pamuk does you meet him is to take your picture, which can be a little unsettling for a journalist come to interview, and photograph him. He lovingly refers to his latest novel, The Museum Of Innocence, as his ‘baby, and when he speaks, he often interrupts himself to mentally google for the right word, sometimes asking you for suggestions, before returning to complete his sentence hanging patiently in the air. In Bombay to promote his novel, Pamuk, 57, spoke to DNA about his novel, about love (in great detail), about Islam, and how he needs solitude like a diabetic needs his pills. Excerpts:
Istanbul figures prominently in your works. Do you see many similarities between Istanbul and Mumbai?
Yes, I see in both the melancholy ruins of modernity. There is this great attempt to be modern, which is imposed by the state or by the ruling elites -- be it the colonizer or the local national elites. And over a period of time, it begins to decay; it forms a certain texture which suggests a sort of melancholy that I write about in my books. I see the decay of Ottoman modernity in the decayed surfaces of colonial India. The presence of the past, the glories of the past, is perceptible in the ruins of the past, and it suggests a kind of sadness. I grew up in Istanbul in such an atmosphere, and this is also linked to the idea that we had a great history, but now-we-are-not-doing-well kind of feeling. We’re not at the centre of the world, the world is Europe, the West, and we are out of it, powerless and poor. These feelings I had in my childhood, and I also feel them somehow in Bombay, in India.
Did the alluring protagonists in The Museum of Innocence, Kemal and Fusun, come to you fully formed or did they take shape in the process of writing?
No fictional character can come to you just like that, fully formed. Characters, like scenes, develop as you rewrite, rethink. A novel, just like a tree, grows from a seed. First I had some little idea about the novel. But it took me 11 years to fully realise, and execute this novel.
What’s the idea behind introducing yourself as a character in The Museum…?
So many people are asking me this that I sometimes regret putting myself in my novel. Borges makes an appearance in his fiction, and it’s considered to be Borgesian -- it has ontological, philosophical, metaphysical connotations. For me, it’s not that important. In some of my books, in Snow, and in this one, I make an appearance just to pull the story together after the main characters exit, and also to give a sense that this is a novel, and thus an artificial construct — but without making too much of a fuss over post-modernism. But it is more of a cute thing, like Hitchcock appearing in his movies, than a Borgesian philosophical thing.
The Museum… is a love story. When all around you, there is war, recession, poverty, and terrorism, not to mention climate change threatening the planet, how can you possibly sit down to write a love story?
This is exactly what, in the 1970s, my friends in Turkey — my Marxist, Maoist friends — would tell me. They would give me belittling glances. In a way, they were right, and in a way they were wrong. Those were the years, in the 1970s, when Jean Paul Sartre in France said, “If I were living in Biafra, I would never write books.” But this statement was also an insult, implying that, if you are coming from the Third World, you don’t even open your literary notebook — meaning, literature is only for us, and about us, the rich, Western man. This is not only untrue, it is also humiliating and condescending. Literature is something that addresses the human heart, and even if you are living a life of extreme deprivation, literature is still a way of representing, and of communicating between peoples, and my books attempt to do just that.
Do you find it strange that while India has been battling religious fundamentalism, Turkey has had to grapple with secular fundamentalism of sorts?
I would use another term: religious or secular authoritarianism. This is a symptom of intolerance, and the sign of an undeveloped democracy lacking in egalitarianism. This is the case in Turkey definitely. Whether you are a religious conservative or a secularist is not important -- these are not problems of ‘religion in general’, as an American would say. Americans like to say, “your problem is Islam, blah-blah-blah.” But the real problem is intolerance, and the weakness of civil society. But civil society is now growing in strength in both India and Turkey, and that makes me more hopeful about the future of democracy in these two countries.
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