Business Books. Humor in Nonfiction. Creative Nonfiction. Write Better Poetry. Poetry Prompts. Poetic Forms. Interviews With Poets. Why I Write Poetry. Poetry FAQs. Get Published. Build My Platform. Find a Fiction Agent. Find a Nonfiction Agent. Write My Query. Sell My Work. Business of Writing. Breaking In. Be Inspired. Writing Prompts. The Writer's Life. Writing Quotes.
Vintage WD. From the Magazine. Pamuk's most recent book, Istanbul , is a poetical work that is hard to classify, combining the author's early memoirs up to the age of 22, and an essay about the city of Istanbul, illustrated with photographs from his own album, and pictures by western painters and Turkish photographers.
In Pamuk published The Museum of Innocence , a novel about a man's lifelong infatuation with a young woman and his attempt to build a museum housing the objects associated with his love. The catalogue of the museum, The Innocence of Objects , was published the same year. Pamuk's second collection of essays was published in Turkey in under the title of Fragments of the Landscape , while his Charles Norton Eliot lectures on the art of the novel, entitled The Naive and The Sentimental Novelist , were published in It is the story of boza seller Mevlut, the woman to whom he wrote three years' worth of love letters, and their life in Istanbul.
Pamuk has been awarded The Peace Prize, considered the most prestigious award in Germany in the field of culture, in Again in , Pamuk was honoured with the Richarda Huck Prize, awarded every three years since to personalities who "think independently and act bravely. In , TIME magazine chose him as one of the most influential persons of the world. Pamuk is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and holds an honorary doctorate from Tilburg University.
But once we have shut ourselves away we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. I believe literature to be the most valuable tool that humanity has found in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors—and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signs that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern.
My father had a good library, fifteen hundred volumes in all—more than enough for a writer. By the age of twenty-two, I had perhaps not read them all, but I was familiar with each book.
I knew which were important, which were light and easy reading, which were classics, which an essential part of any education, which forgettable but amusing accounts of local history, and which French authors my father rated highly.
Sometimes I would look at this library from a distance and imagine that one day, in a different house, I would build my own library, an even better library—build myself a world. But this was a world seen from our own corner, from Istanbul.
In the seventies, I did begin, somewhat ambitiously, to build my own library. There was inside me a relentless curiosity, a hope-driven desire to read and learn, but at the same time I felt that my life was in some way lacking, that I would not be able to live like others.
This was a feeling I shared with everyone in Istanbul in those days. There was another reason for my anxiety: I knew only too well that I lived in a country that showed little interest in its artists—whether painters or writers—and offered them no hope.
In the same way, there was world literature, and its center was far away from me. Actually, what I had in mind then was Western, not world, literature, and we Turks were certainly outside it. To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the otherness of another, in the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels in order to escape his life and flee to the West—just as I did later. Books in general, it seemed to me in those days, were what we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found wanting.
To fill those notebooks of his, my father had gone to Paris and shut himself up in a room, and then he had carried the notebooks back to Turkey. Perhaps this was the main reason that I felt angry at my father for not taking literature as seriously as I did. In fact, I was angry at my father because he had not led a life like mine—because he had never quarrelled with his life, and had spent it happily laughing with his friends and his loved ones.
Is happiness believing that you live a deep life in your lonely room? Or is happiness leading a comfortable life in society, believing in the same things as everyone else, or, at least, acting as if you did? Is it happiness or unhappiness to go through life writing in secret, while seeming to be in harmony with all that surrounds you?
But these were ill-tempered questions. Wherever had I got the idea that the most important measure of a good life was happiness? People, papers—everyone acted as if it were. Did this alone not suggest that it might be worth trying to find out if the opposite was true? After all, my father had run away from his family many times—how well did I know him, and how well could I say that I understood his disquiet? As soon as I opened the suitcase, I recalled its scent of travel and recognized several notebooks that my father had shown me years earlier, though without dwelling on them for long.
Most of the notebooks I now took in my hands he had filled when he was in Paris as a young man. Although, like so many writers I admired—writers whose biographies I had read—I wished to know what my father had written, and what he had thought, when he was the age I was now, it did not take me long to realize that I would find nothing like that here.
Beneath my fear that my father might not have been my father when he wrote was a more profound fear: the fear that, deep inside, I was not authentic. During my first ten years as a writer, I had felt these anxieties keenly, and, even as I battled them, I had feared that one day I would have to admit defeat—just as I had done with painting—and give up writing as well.
For years, I had, in my reading and my writing, been discovering, studying, and deepening these emotions, in all their variety and their unintended consequences, their nerve endings, their triggers, and their many colors. Certainly my spirits had been jarred by the confusions, the sensitivities, and the fleeting pains that life and books had sprung on me, especially as a young man.
For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, own them, and make them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing. A writer talks of things that we all know but do not know that we know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader visits a world that is at once familiar and miraculous.
When a writer uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he is aware of it or not, putting great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one another, that others carry wounds like mine—and that they will therefore understand.
All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that we resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a center. I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with the same feeling of inauthenticity and Chekhovian provinciality, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, insecurity, and degradation than I do.
The angel of inspiration who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others favours the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing — when he thinks his story is only his story — it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him stories, images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build.
If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination — that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.
But later my thoughts took a different turn. These thoughts, these dreams of renunciation and patience, were prejudices I had derived from my own life and my own experience as a writer. There were plenty of brilliant writers who wrote surrounded by crowds and family life, in the glow of company and happy chatter.
I knew, too, that some of those very notebooks were in this suitcase, because during the years before he brought it to me, my father had finally begun to talk to me about that period in his life.
He spoke about those years even when I was a child, but he would not mention his vulnerabilities, his dreams of becoming a writer, or the questions of identity that had plagued him in his hotel room.
When I became a writer, I never forgot that it was partly thanks to the fact that I had a father who would talk of world writers so much more than he spoke of pashas or great religious leaders. I had to bear in mind that when he was living with us, my father, like me, enjoyed being alone with his books and his thoughts — and not pay too much attention to the literary quality of his writing.
But as I gazed so anxiously at the suitcase my father had bequeathed me, I also felt that this was the very thing I would not be able to do. My father would sometimes stretch out on the divan in front of his books, abandon the book in his hand, or the magazine and drift off into a dream, lose himself for the longest time in his thoughts. When I saw on his face an expression so very different from the one he wore amid the joking, teasing, and bickering of family life — when I saw the first signs of an inward gaze — I would, especially during my childhood and my early youth, understand, with trepidation, that he was discontent.
Now, so many years later, I know that this discontent is the basic trait that turns a person into a writer. To become a writer, patience and toil are not enough: we must first feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary, everyday life, and shut ourselves up in a room. We wish for patience and hope so that we can create a deep world in our writing.
But the desire to shut oneself up in a room is what pushes us into action. Montaigne was a writer to whom my father returned often, a writer he recommended to me. I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who — wherever they are in the world, in the East or in the West — cut themselves off from society, and shut themselves up with their books in their room. The starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his books.
But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself.
Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. My father had a good library — 1 volumes in all — more than enough for a writer. By the age of 22, I had perhaps not read them all, but I was familiar with each book — I knew which were important, which were light but easy to read, which were classics, which an essential part of any education, which were forgettable but amusing accounts of local history, and which French authors my father rated very highly.
Sometimes I would look at this library from a distance and imagine that one day, in a different house, I would build my own library, an even better library — build myself a world. But this was a world seen from our own corner, from Istanbul. The library was evidence of this.
My world is a mixture of the local — the national — and the West. In the 70s, I, too, began, somewhat ambitiously, to build my own library. I had not quite decided to become a writer — as I related in Istanbul , I had come to feel that I would not, after all, become a painter, but I was not sure what path my life would take. There was inside me a relentless curiosity, a hope-driven desire to read and learn, but at the same time I felt that my life was in some way lacking, that I would not be able to live like others.
There was another reason for feeling anxious and somehow lacking, for I knew only too well that I lived in a country that showed little interest in its artists — be they painters or writers — and that gave them no hope. In the centre of the world, there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. Today I think that I share this feeling with most people in the world. In the same way, there was a world literature, and its centre, too, was very far away from me.
Actually what I had in mind was Western, not world, literature, and we Turks were outside it. I felt that my father had read novels to escape his life and flee to the West — just as I would do later.
Or it seemed to me that books in those days were things we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found so lacking. To fill those notebooks of his, my father had gone to Paris, shut himself up in his room, and then brought his writings back to Turkey.
After working in a room for 25 years to survive as a writer in Turkey, it galled me to see my father hide his deep thoughts inside this suitcase, to act as if writing was work that had to be done in secret, far from the eyes of society, the state, the people. Perhaps this was the main reason why I felt angry at my father for not taking literature as seriously as I did.
Actually I was angry at my father because he had not led a life like mine, because he had never quarrelled with his life, and had spent his life happily laughing with his friends and his loved ones. Or was happiness leading a comfortable life in society, believing in the same things as everyone else, or acting as if you did?
Was it happiness, or unhappiness, to go through life writing in secret, while seeming to be in harmony with all around one?
But these were overly ill-tempered questions.
0コメント