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My Turkish Library By Orhan Pamuk,
Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely At the heart of my library
is my father's library. When I was seventeen or eighteen and began to
devote
most of my time to reading, I devoured the volumes my father kept in
our
sitting room as well as the ones I found in In 1970, when I was
eighteen, I—like all Turkish children with an interest in books—took to
writing
poetry. I was painting and studying architecture but the pleasure I
took from
both was fading away; by night I would smoke cigarettes and write
poetry, which
I hid from everyone. It was at this point that I read the poetry
collections
that my father (who had wanted to be a poet when he was young) kept on
his
shelves. I loved the slender, faded
volumes by poets who are known in Turkish letters as belonging to the
First
Wave (1940s and 1950s) and the Second Wave (1960s and 1970s); having
read them,
I liked to write poems in the same manner. The poets of the First
Wave—Orhan
Veli, Melih Cevdet, and Oktay R fat—are remembered by the name of the
first
poetry collection they published together—Garip, or Strange.
They
brought to modern Turkish poetry the language of the streets, exulting
in its
wit and refusing the formal conventions of the official language and
the
oppressive, authoritarian world they echoed. My father would sometimes
open a
first edition by one of these poets and entertain us with one or two of
their
droll and capricious poems, reading them out in a loud voice and
adopting an
air that led us to understand that literature was one of the wondrous
treasures
of life. I was also inspired by the
poets of the Second Wave, who took this innovative spirit into the next
generation, bringing a narrative, expressionistic voice to poetry, and
also
bringing to their compositions a mixture of Dadaist, Surrealist, and
ornamental
motifs from time to time; when I read these now deceased poets (Cemal
Süreya,
Turgut Uyar, lhan Berk) I would be convinced that I could write as they
did,
rather in the way that someone viewing an abstract painting might be
innocent
enough to think he could do such a painting himself. Or rather, I was
like an
artist who, upon looking at a painting he admires, thinks he has
figured out
how it was done. In much the same way as that artist might rush back to
his
studio to prove the point, I would go at once to my desk to write
poetry. With some rare exceptions,
the work produced by all other Turkish poets was artificial and distant
from
the everyday world, so they did not interest me as poems; it was their
intellectual underpinning that concerned me. As he struggled under the
crushing
influence of Westernization, modernization, and The vexing questions associated
with "drawing from tradition" greatly occupied the writers of the
generation that came before me, and my own generation, too. Because
Ottoman
poetry had flourished for centuries, always remaining aloof to Western
influence, there was a sense of continuity, and that made it easier and
more
comfortable to discuss literary and philosophical questions with
reference to
poetry. Because the novel was a European import, novelists and writers
of prose
wishing to connect with our own literary tradition turned their
attention to
poetry. In the early 1970s, after my
enthusiasm for poetry had flared up and quickly burned itself out and I
had
decided to become a novelist, poetry was still seen as true literature
in
Turkey, while the novel seemed a lesser, populist form. It would not be
wrong
to say that the novel has come to be taken more seriously over the past
thirty-five years, while poetry has lost some of its importance. Over
the same
period, the publishing industry has grown with breathtaking speed,
offering ever
more diversity to ever more readers. When I decided to become a
writer, neither poems nor novels were valued as individual expressions
of an
artistic sensibility, a strange spirit, a soul: the dominant view was
that
serious writers worked collectively, and their work was valued for the
way in
which it contributed to a social utopia and reflected a shared vision
(like
modernism, socialism, Islamism, nationalism, or secular republicanism).
There
was little interest in literary circles in the problem of the
individual
creative writer who drew from history and tradition, or who tried to
find the
literary form that best accommodated his voice. Instead literature was
allied to the future: its job was to work hand in hand with the state
to build
a happy and harmonious society, or even nation. Utopian modernism—be it
secularist, republican, or socialist egalitarian—has had its eyes so
firmly
planted on the future that it has, I sometimes think, been blind to the
heart
and the soul of just about everything that has gone on in the streets
and
houses of Istanbul over the past century. It seems to me that the
writers who
engage so passionately with the question of how to bring Turkey to a
brilliant
future do not tell as honest a story about our lives as writers like
Ahmet
Hamdi Tanp nar and Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, who mourned the loss of our
traditional culture, or Sait Faik and Aziz Nesin, who were alert to the
poetry
of Istanbul's streets and loved the city without prejudice. In the age of Westernization
and rapid modernization, the central question—not just for Turkish
literature
but for all literatures outside the West—is the difficulty of painting
the
dreams of tomorrow in the colors of today, of dreaming about a modern
country
with modern values while also embracing the pleasures of everyday
tradition.
Writers whose dreams of a radical future propel them into political
conflicts
have often ended up in prison, and their plight has given a hard and
embittered
edge to their voices and their outlook. In my father's library there
were also the first books published by Nazım Hikmet— There was a time when I read
so much prison literature that I knew as much about the daily routine
in the
wards, the bravado, and the tough talk (and prison slang, of which I
was very
fond) as if I myself had done time in prison. In those days, my image
of a
writer was someone who always had police stationed outside his door,
was followed
by plainclothes policemen in the street, had his phones tapped,
couldn't get a
passport, and wrote poignant letters to his beloved from prison. This
way of
life, which I knew only from books, was not something I wanted for
myself, but
I found it romantic. When I had a few problems of a similar nature
thirty years
later, I consoled myself by remembering that my problems were so much
lighter
than those suffered by the writers I read about when I was young. I regret that I have not
been able to shake off the enlightenment utilitarian idea that books
exist to
prepare us for life. Perhaps this is because a writer's life in Between 1970 and 1990, my
main preoccupation after writing was buying books for my library; I
wanted it
to include all books that I viewed as important or useful. My father
gave me a
substantial allowance. From the age of eighteen I was in the habit of
going
once a week to Sahaflar, the old booksellers' market in Beyazıt, the
center of
the I would go into a shop
selling secondhand books, comb all the shelves, leaf through the books,
and one
by one I would pick a history of the relations between Sweden and the
Ottoman
Empire in the eighteenth century; or the memoir of the head physician
of the
Bakirköy Hospital for the Insane; or a journalist's eyewitness account
of a
failed coup; or a monograph on the Ottoman monuments of Macedonia; or a
Turkish
précis of the writings of a German traveler who came to Istanbul in the
seventeenth century; or the reflections of a professor from the Çapa
Medical
Faculty on manic-depressive disorder and predisposition to
schizophrenia; or a
small collection of poems by a forgotten Ottoman poet in an annotated
edition
in the Turkish of our time; or an illustrated book of propaganda,
published by
the Office of the Governor of Istanbul in the 1940s, and showing all
the
buildings and parks in black and white. After bargaining with the
shop assistant, I would cart them all away. In the beginning, I
collected all
the classics of world and Turkish literature—it would be more accurate
to
describe these as books that were "important" for Turkish literature.
I thought I would certainly read other books too, just as I'd done with
the
classics. But when my mother, who was worried about me, because she
thought I
read too much, saw me bringing in more books than even I could read,
she would
say wearily, "For once don't go buying more books until you've finished
these!" I wasn't buying like a book
collector but like a frantic person who was desperate to understand why
Then there were the
six-volume, document-laden memoirs by a former president; another book
detailing the ways in which the moral code of Ottoman guilds had
influenced
modern business practices; the Paris memoirs of a forgotten 1930s
artist; a
book about the tricks played by merchants to increase the price of
hazelnuts; a
weighty five-hundred-page collection of critiques of Marxists aligned
with
China and Albania, written by Marxists aligned with the Soviet Union;
the story
of the transformation of the city of Ereğli following the opening of
its iron
and steel factories; a book for children entitled 100 Famous Turks
; the
story of the Great Aksaray fire of 1911; a collection of columns
written
between the two world wars by a journalist who'd been utterly forgotten
for
thirty years; a two-hundred-page history covering two thousand years in
a small
city in central Anatolia whose location was hard to pinpoint with any
confidence on a map; and the claims made by a retired teacher who,
though he
had no knowledge of English, had worked out who shot Kennedy just by
reading
the Turkish papers. Was I interested enough in the authors of such
works to
read them from cover to cover? In later years, whenever someone asked,
"Mr. Pamuk, have you read all the books in your library?," I would,
without taking the question at all lightly, say, "Yes. But even if I
hadn't read them all, they still might prove useful." I meant what I said, and
when I was young my connection to books was limited by the optimism of
an
incurable positivist who believed that he could have dominion over the
entire
world through learning. I believed I would use all this erudition one
day in a
novel. There is in me something of the autodidact hero in Jean-Paul
Sartre's Nausea,
who reads every book in his public library, from A to Z, and of Peter
Klein,
the hero of Elias Canetti's Auto da Fé,[*] who is as
ferociously proud of his books as a soldier might be of his regiment.
The
Borgesian library is not for me a metaphysical fantasy of an infinite
world—it
is the library I have built up in my house in I was missing out on life by
burying myself in books—but even when I'd realized this, I'd still keep
buying
books, as if to take revenge on the life I was fleeing. It is only now,
so many
years later, that I realize how happy those hours were that I spent
making
friends with the shop assistants in those cold bookshops, drinking the
tea that
they offered me, and inspecting those dusty towers of books from top to
bottom. After combing through the
shelves of But mostly my choices were
spontaneous and impulsive. Buying books one by one is a bit like
building a
house stone by stone. In the 1980s I saw many others like me, not just
in the
antiquarian bookshops but in all of In 2008 there are about
three times as many books being published as thirty years ago, but in
the
1980s, there were on average three thousand books published in Turkey
each
year. I saw most of these, and almost half of them were translations.
Because
there were so very few books imported from abroad, I read these hasty
and
careless translations in an effort to understand what was going on in
world
literature. In the 1970s, the stars of
every bookstore were the large historical tomes that sought out the
root causes
of I was never able to resist
any history, novel, or memoir that examined the military coups and
political
movements of our own times, or the series of military defeats during
the last
years of the When I was a child I loved
reading books about Atatürk written by his friends and close
associates. These
were written by people who knew Atatürk well and truly loved him; due
to the
laws protecting the memory of Atatürk, it was very difficult for later
generations to write about his human side, and so the image of Atatürk
was
refashioned to make him look like an authoritarian supremacist, and his
esteemed name was abused to justify political oppression and draconian
laws. In
In the mid-1970s, when I had
given up my dreams of being a painter and an architect and decided to
become a
novelist, there were between forty and fifty novels published in While browsing through these
books, I would feel myself part of a culture, a history; I would think
about
the books I myself would write one day, and feel happy. But sometimes I
would
sink into a dangerous gloom. Overwhelmed by the typographical errors in
a book,
or the carelessness displayed by the author and his publisher, my
attention
would wander; I'd be reading a book on a subject worthy of nuanced and
astute
analysis, and when I saw that this author had killed it, through haste,
anger,
or panic, I felt pain. And anyway, the subject itself seemed a bit
silly, and
trite, too.... It also made me sad if a silly, worthless book was
greatly
loved, or if another book that was so interesting and enchanting
attracted no
interest whatsoever.... Such encounters would set
off a larger and more profound anxiety, and slowly I would feel the
damning
chill of the cloud that hangs over all literary-minded people outside
the West,
all their lives: How important could it be to know that tigers roamed
in In my darkest days, I felt
like Faruk, the hero of my second novel, The Silent House,
who'd studied
documents dating back many centuries in the Ottoman archives, and
carried them
around in his head, never forgetting the facts they contained, but
failing to
connect with a single one of them: I would wonder about the
"importance" of having successfully preserved details of an entire
history, an entire culture, an entire language. How important was it to
know
who set the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922? It seemed to me that there
were only
four or five people other than myself who wished to know the reasons
behind the
military coup of May 27, 1960, or the foundation of the Democracy Party
after
World War II. Was this because Turkish culture was too political? Or
was it
because the country expressed itself most through politics? Or was it
our sense
of being so far from the center—of living on the margin—that made a
person see
so little worth in his national library? When I reflected on the
facts I had learned from the books I had so happily brought into my
house, when
I considered how little they mattered to the rest of the world, I would
feel
empty and useless and all the pleasure would seep away. But though I
was, in my
twenties, plagued by the idea that I lived far from the center of
things, this
did not stop me from loving my library dearly. When I was in my
thirties, and
went to America for the first time, to see other libraries and come
face to
face with the richness of world culture, it grieved me to see how
little was
known about Turkish culture, Turkish letters. At the same time, this
pain
allowed the novelist in me to see more clearly the difference between
the
transitory aspects of a culture and its essence, and I took this as a
warning:
I should look more deeply at life, and at my library. In Milan Kundera's novel Slowness,
there is a Czech character who, while attending an international
conference,
takes every opportunity to talk about "how things are in my country";
as a consequence he is ridiculed. It's right that they should look down
on him
for thinking about nothing but his own country and failing to see the
connection between his own humanity and that of the rest of the world.
But when
I was reading Slowness, I did not identify with those who
looked down on
the man who couldn't stop talking about "my country"—I identified
with the ridiculous man. Not because I wanted to be like that laughable
creature, but because I didn't. It was in the 1980s that I understood
that
if—to borrow two words from the hero of my novel The Black Book—I
wanted
to "become myself," it would not be by deriding Naipaul's "mimic
man" for the things that he did to overcome his provincial ways, or his
depression, but by identifying with him. When I am confronted by such
affectations, I am in sympathy with Dostoevsky, who was so infuriated
by
Russian intellectuals who knew Europe better than they did During the thirty-five years
I have spent writing my own novels, I have learned not to laugh at the
books
written by others, and not to cast them aside, no matter how silly,
ill-timed,
outmoded, outdated, stupid, wrongheaded, or strange they might be. The
secret
of loving these books was not, perhaps, to read them in the way their
authors
had intended.... The point was to read these books—strange, and
indifferent,
and interspersed with moments of astonishing beauty—so as to put myself
in
their authors' shoes. You did not escape provinciality by running away
from the
provinces, but by making it your own. This was how I learned to immerse
myself
in my slowly expanding library, and also how I learned to put myself at
a distance.
It was after I turned forty that I learned that the most powerful
reason for
loving my library was that neither Turks nor Westerners knew about it. But now, they say,
"You've won the Nobel, and this year Notes [*] Copyright © 2008 by Orhan Pamuk; English translation copyright © 2008 by Maureen Freely |