A couple of people have posted about this book already, but my take is so different from theirs that I thought it deserved a new post. Well, and I’m a lunatic, of course, which makes me different from absolutely no one.
It’s so hard to know what authors intend. I finished the book yesterday, and I couldn’t be more surprised if Samsung had produced a slim, shiny, high-tech device for turning Americans into Turks.
What should the international warning symbol be, for a device which might do such a thing by accident? Warning: Culturally Metamorphic.
Only for men. Women are born Turkish, and can have nothing to fear from this book.
I’m tempted to compare Pamuk’s facility for creating an apparently endless succession of clearly different and relatable characters with that of Dostoevsky. Except Dostoevsky never made me a Russian. He was crippled, too, by the vanity of his ideals. By his christianity. Pamuk suffers from no such antiquated ideological cage.
And apparently the book is a work of fiction. If such a creation can be regarded as fiction, who could ever tell the truth? We need a new word, for the more important truths for which the only evidence is imaginative. Truths about what we hold in common, the cultural wreckage that prevents us from drowning in our own humanity.
by tolkienfan2759