Istanbul: Memories and the City
by Orhan Pamuk
translated by Maureen Freely
Alfred A. Knopf (2005 )
320 pp. with 206 photographs, $36
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
translated by Maureen Freely
Alfred A. Knopf (2005 )
426 pp., $38
The Economist likes to lace its clever commentary with acid. In its March 2005 survey of Turkey, it invoked Czar Nicholas I’s infamous diagnosis of the Ottoman Empire as “the sick man of Europe,” and then noted that, “Over the years many Turks have quoted this with perverse pride. They may have been sick, but at least they were part of Europe.”
Since its birth as a secular nation-state a century ago, Turkey has been caught in the intersecting shadows of imperial decline and Western nationalism, while roiled by questions of Islam’s place in national life. Turkey’s modern ills bespeak a much longer story. Six hundred years of Ottoman civilization fell after World War I, a buckling that prepared the way for General Mustafa Kemal, later apotheosized as “Atatürk” (father of the Turks), to initiate the vigorous reinvention of a fallen Islamic imperium as an ascendant secular nation-state. The Turkish patriotism that developed was intended as both a cure for a collective psyche wounded by its post-imperial diminishment and an equalizer for a people anxious to stand beside their advanced Western neighbours.
Today, Turkey is poised for entry talks with the European Union this October and both pulled toward and pushed away from political, military, economic, and cultural identifications with Asia, the Mediterranean, and the West. It remains troubled by its struggles with Greece over Cyprus and by the plaints of its Kurdish minority. Above all else, Turkish life is perpetually concerned with Islam’s standing. This is a democracy with a fissile fundamentalist element; its religious status is guarded by generals rarely shy of boasting their brawn in the name of constitutionally enshrined secularism. In short, modern Turkey is embedded at the axis of contemporary geopolitics.
As his recent books make clear, Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most prominent contemporary writer, is himself deeply rooted in this dense and dark soil. This native commitment, however, has been severely tested of late. In a February interview, Pamuk openly criticized Turkey’s 1915 massacre of its Armenian minority, an event still fraught with controversy in Turkey. In the still-unfolding aftermath, Pamuk’s books have been removed from Turkish libraries and burned in political rallies; he has been sued for anti-state actions and pilloried in major newspapers. Security concerns have precluded a book tour. Critically renowned, translated into more than thirty languages, Pamuk is surpassing Salman Rushdie as the world’s pre-eminent Muslim writer. This, Pamuk is realizing, can be a burdensome achievement.
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