I give different answers whenever people ask what my favorite novel is, but Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red (1998) is probably my most frequent reply. The way Pamuk tells what is at the center of its atom a pulpy murder mystery inside the most pointillist, deliciously orbital structure; the way he joyfully insists upon the vital and complex interiority of every character, however peripheral (the dog’s chapters are among my favorite) feels instructive not just creatively, but also ethically. Taking in Pamuk’s 50-year bibliography feels like an extended fulfillment of this life-doubling promise of narrative art — you get to perceive the world robustly from myriad unprecedented subjectivities wholly separate from your own.
To behold Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022, Pamuk’s new book of selected journal entries and paintings translated by Ekin Oklap and published by Knopf, is to witness one of the great literary imaginations of the last 50 years at work. It turns out that making a novel is labor and nothing is inevitable — on one page, we see the Nobel Laureate working out plot details about A Strangeness in My Mind (2014) in the margins of a watercolor of his window view. On another, “This coconut green, the garden, the dogs, the yellow sand, the trees …” The book is a treasure trove of beloved particulars for the Pamuk-obsessed like me, but it’s also an indispensable document for anyone interested in how art gets made, how inspiration has to find the artist working. It was my luck to be able to speak with Pamuk over Zoom on a sunny Iowa morning earlier this month. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Kaveh Akbar: We are ostensibly met here to talk about your new Memories of Distant Mountains. This is a sort of Blakeian book of your journals over your watercolor paintings; it’s a beautiful, extraordinary art object to hold in your hands.
Orhan Pamuk: I have been keeping diaries since the age of 10 in Ankara when my mother gave me as a birthday president a diary in which there was a lock, which told me that there is a habit called “keeping a diary.” I was only 10 years old. And then it is related to secret thoughts because there is a lock on it. I tried to write. It didn’t work, but I had an idea of what a journalist was. I am a, I wouldn’t say manic, but a journal reader, from Virginia Woolf to Tolstoy and Thomas Bond. So many people kept journals, and most of the time they’re edited. And I like these texts, but it’s a practicality. I’ve been keeping these Moleskines. I have 30 of these.
So one day I said, “Why don’t I do a book with them?” So I picked up the best, say, 400 double pages with pictures — but all the pages are with pictures — from the notebooks that I’ve been keeping from 2009 to today, while I also had many others without pictures. I then tried to form a book, the logic being that the editing of the book, the sequence of the pages, is not chronological but thematical. The book starts with what I wrote in 2016 about landscape. We turn one page, then it continues to what I wrote about the landscape in 2012, then we turn a page. The book is designed by themes, but not, as in many journals or memoirs, by time. And it took a lot of time to compose and put them together.
KA: For readers who haven’t picked up the book yet, could you provide some background?
OP: The readers should know perhaps that I am a well-known novelist, but till the age of 22, as I wrote in my autobiographical Istanbul book, I wanted to be a painter. A screw was loose in my mind. I thought I killed the painter in me, but after 10 years, I began to paint more and more. As sometimes I jokingly say, I got out of the closet as a painter in the last 10 years. I even have a museum now. So the suppressed painterly side in me, which I thought was more authentic, more genuine … because to live between the ages of seven and 22 in a family of engineers, civil engineers, I made them accept that I would go to the Istanbul Technical University, but since I like painting, I would also be an architect. And they all said yes.
KA: You talk about killing the painter inside you, but now he’s back.
OP: I couldn’t kill the painter in me. In fact, it resurrected. One day I entered a stationery shop, got out two big sets of art materials and notebooks, and from then on I was happily painting. But secretly, not proudly showing, and perhaps knowing that essentially I am a better writer while I can’t help it.
KA: That’s my thing! I paint too.
OP: Oh really? That’s so nice to hear.
KA: I have a painting room, and a nice easel my spouse got me.
OP: Wow! You’re like me. What is your hierarchy of writers who paint?
KA: William Blake. Number one.
OP: He’s the obvious one, because he was successful in an equal measure and he was thinking of the page as both painting and text.
KA: That’s the obvious correlative with yours — his illuminations, Paradise Lost, working directly with a text.
OP: But for me, I always think that August Strindberg, the Swedish playwright, is the best writer-painter. How do you measure that? John Updike studied painting art in Oxford and was interested in these subjects, but he did not paint himself, or he didn’t get out of the closet as a painter.
KA: How about painters who are writers?
OP: Yeah. Picasso wanted to be like that.
KA: Yeah, of course. I love Paul Klee.
OP: Oh, of course! Paul is important because I have an exhibition in Germany in Lenbachhaus where they have the best Paul Klee collections. Another Klee collection is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
KA: And his writing is extraordinary. I love his writing so much.
OP: He went to North Africa, to Tunisia, in his 30s. And that also, some critics say, influenced his paintings.
KA: It’s fun to think about writers who are secretly great painters, and painters who are secretly great writers. But I mentioned that I paint, too, to say that the reason that I write and don’t paint publicly is because I can write well enough to do it in a public way and can make a living at it. Painting, I am not talented. I just like doing it.
OP: Okay, I’m embarrassed. I’m exactly like you, but shameless, perhaps.
KA: No! No, I think that what you’ve made here is extraordinary.
OP: Thank you. Don’t forget that I also have a museum. That is, I imagined a museum. So that was the first time that the dead painter, or the painter that I tried to kill that is inside me, publicly went out.
KA: Of course, because you created the perfect museum for him.
OP: Yes. I created a museum related to my novel, The Museum of Innocence.
KA: Do you want to talk about the museum for the readers who might not know about it?
OP: Perhaps because there is a painter in me who never died, one day I had an idea: “Why don’t I open a museum in which I exhibit objects, but the stories of these objects will be told in an annotated museum catalog in which the annotations are put in such a sequence that it may read like a novel without pictures?” Then, just as I was about to finish the novel, I decided — a conservative decision that I sometimes regret — to make the novel look like a normal 19th-century novel instead of an annotated catalog.
KA: But this is one of the great geniuses moments in your work.
OP: Oh, if you’re going to continue like that, I will be shy.
KA: No, sorry.
OP: And then you’ll say, “This guy is a maniac narcissist! He says genius!”
KA: No, you don’t have to! I’m saying it.
OP: Okay, I like it, continue saying it!
KA: So many novels have a linear trajectory through which they move through these terminals of narrative, right? But, in The Museum of Innocence and My Name is Red, you move from a speaker to the dog, you know? It’s this orbital motion where all the propulsion is centripetal.
OP: Yes, which comes to my idea that I like writing novels. But what I like more is imagining novels. That is, you’re just asleep, lying on your sofa with your dog, then you’re thinking, “This part will be told by this, then there will be a chapter which no one understands” — or they will understand, of course, when they’re doing a second reading or reading carefully — and then you plan this. Then I switch to this kind of composition of the novel. Before you begin to write, imagining your set composition is even more joyful than executing a novel. You compose, you know what you’re going to do, you’re going to write this, but sometimes you cannot. That’s the bad part. That’s what they call here “writer’s block.” And you imagine there’s no block. The imagination is boundless. A serious writer’s tragedy is his hands, his fingers, his pencils do not obey and listen to what’s in his or her mind.
KA: What do you do to clear that synapse?
OP: I advise: Just don’t insist too much because it will be frustrating. My advice to writers is, please develop your story a lot before executing to write it. Chapter it, then pile up notes about that chapter. And also don’t listen to the advice of a writer who is 70 years old!
KA: That’s always my thing, whenever a student asks me anything, I always say, “I wouldn’t have listened to me.” I would’ve said, “I know what I’m doing. Leave me alone. I have my library to teach me. I don’t need you.” That brings me to the fact that it feels to me like you are in many ways this Borgesian writer for whom the physical book itself is the magic. You know how when you read Nabokov or Borges, you feel their profound affection for the book object itself?
OP: For Nabokov, Borges, yes. In fact, in his novel Ada, Nabokov had also alluded to Borges. While, on the other hand, I admire Borges a lot, but he never understood the novels. He once said, “Henry James would have written a long novel about this, but let me tell you this in a short story.”
KA: Exactly. He wrote extraordinary poetry, too.
OP: Yeah. But on the other hand, he tells this story in three pages. So Henry James is, and is not unnecessarily, 597 pages. It’s just Borges doesn’t have the joy, or he maybe does, but he is a bit cynical. For Borges, a novel is not its story. It’s something else.
KA: That’s true. But there’s a way in which he was a vacuum. He was just this voracious mouth that wanted to consume stories — the more efficient, the better, right? There’s this piece from him I love where he’s talking about the Qur’an as the supreme Arab text—
OP: “There are no camels, there are no camels.”
KA: Right! He says because there are no camels, the Qur’an is supremely Arab. “Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were particularly Arab.” But in fact, there are camels everywhere in the Qur’an! It’s clear that Borges read two chapters that happened to not mention a camel. And so he says, “I got what I need there.”
OP: It’s that he was talking to people who had never read the Qur’an.
KA: Of course. So he can say there are no camels in the Qur’an. But I love this because it shows he got the idea and he moved on.
OP: But it’s good to illustrate one idea and I like that.
KA: Yeah, he kind of channels Schopenhauer to say that, though there are no nightingales in Argentina, Keats heard the nightingale for everyone. I say this to say that the utter joy in wringing out from the universe what would never exist had it not been for your being there in that moment — that is everywhere apparent in the pages of Memories of Distant Mountains. We are experiencing a process of live cognition. It’s like reading Klee’s journals, or Woolf’s, that sense of utter delight. And I don’t mean everything is about pink puppy tails and babies wagging their toes, but that delight in having created where otherwise there would be nothing, something I associate with Borges and Woolf, two of my favorite writers, and I very much associate with you as well.
OP: Yes. Thank you so much … I don’t know what to say!
KA: No, I know! I’m sorry, I’m just barking like a happy walrus. So can you talk a little bit about how you curated these pages?
OP: First, humanity invented journal keeping, as my mother’s gift to me at the age of 10 suggests, to write secret ideas. You bury your treasure. You write a note. You have some thoughts you want to write down, because they will be unacceptable by society. So you have to have a secret place. And a diary was, has always been, even there was nothing secret there, been a secret place. In the 1930s, French writer André Gide published parts of his diary, and suddenly he legitimized publishing your journal when you’re alive. I am a journal-keeper, and keeping journals is, I would say, easy. I fill a page like this, there are no pictures here in half an hour. And in this half an hour, most of the time, I’m waiting to go out with my wife. She’s late. I’m waiting for a taxi. I have some empty time. There are times I say to myself, “I haven’t written to my journal for five days. Why don’t I sit down and give two hours?” I carry these notebooks in which I draw and write. It feels like carrying my writing desk and my watercolors and painting materials with me. And I’m happy I am doing it. And I’m always saying to my friends, “Why don’t you keep a journal?” I go to my wife, I go to my friends, “You know what we did in three years, two months ago?” And I read it aloud.
And, again, it’s partly related to self-importance, partly that this is an original idea that I may never develop. I have an idea. I write that down, that idea. At the beginning when I was keeping these notebooks, it was not for publication, but after a while I realized that I was also addressing some future readers, one day.
KA: Of course. And you also now have control over it too, right? As opposed to some posthumous collection coming out.
OP: Yes. After I go, they’d immediately publish the pages that I don’t want to be published.
KA: Of course. I think about this. I also think about my generation for whom all of this is digital now. And no one is going to want to read our emails.
OP: Why? There may be some people who are interested. We may be writing some of our best lines in an email. Italo Calvino called himself a graphomaniac. A graphomaniac is someone who is obsessively writing. And he never went down in his quality, the cloth was Calvino cloth, of course.
KA: I associate that with Dickinson too, right? Where there’s the seamlessness between her letters and her poetry.
OP: You produce that cloth all the time, but sometimes then the story, the composition, the total meaning is not clear. Diary or publication of diaries is about honoring these little fragments of pages that you understand will not form a whole by itself. And I decided that I would publish some of it, hoping that some people would be interested — some people like you would be interested.
KA: So many of the paintings that we see in these pages are landscapes of sorts of the view out a window, or the city view. You write in the book about how painting starts with visualizing what you can’t remember, and so, functionally, what is being painted is time, instead of a landscape.
OP: Yes. Let me clarify. If you paint the same landscape all the time — which I do from here, from my New York or Istanbul window, looking at Hudson or Bosphorus, or the landscape of your table — then you begin to write about, in a way, time.
KA: Can you share a little bit about this experience? When we see Istanbul in your novels, we see it across time. We see you experiencing it as a young man and then as an older man. One of the things that I think about in relation to your work, and to being an Iranian writer situated in America, is that if I was in Iran today and I was writing the exact same stuff that I was writing, but in Farsi, I would feel excluded from a global conversation of letters. Whereas being an Iranian in America allows me to participate.
OP: Good question. I think I am extremely lucky because after the age of 40, my books began to get translated into English, and they were relatively successful. Better publishers always wanted my work. I had a father who wanted to be a poet like you, who failed and ended up a businessman, who respected my decision to be a writer. When I was 24, he would say, “Well, it’s easy being a famous writer in Turkey. What about international, global recognition?” My father would challenge me with words like that. Unfortunately, he didn’t see my Nobel Prize! Either way, I would be so happy if he had seen it. But he would also say that I would get it before anyone else. I had a father like that, and he had a big library. I owe him a lot. I owe a lot to my mother, too. When they divorced, my mother raised us.
KA: You write about this beautifully. What’s the difference between being a famous writer in Turkey and being an internationally famous Turkish writer with a Nobel Prize?
OP: I’ll give you an example: What I write about should have global resonance. I have self-consciously thought about this, especially when I was writing A Strangeness In My Mind, which was about the making of a shantytown in Istanbul. At that time, I was, relatively speaking, famous and successful. So I went to Brazil and saw favelas of Rio de Janeiro. I went to Bombay and saw Dharavi, which is also a favela and a business place. And I researched and researched about Turkey’s shantytowns, which were relatively better, I would say, whatever “better” means, more comfortable. I said to myself that when I’m picking up details of Turkish shantytowns, I will also consider what is more — “universal” is a kitschy word — but what are the general problems? At that time when I was writing A Strangeness in My Mind, around 2012 to 2016, I was already thinking of my novel as a global novel, but not when I was young. When I was writing my Black Book or early novels, I was only addressing Turkish leadership. But the fire that my father put in me that I had to be internationally successful was there all the time.
KA: And it’s cool to see the names of characters from A Strangeness in My Mind in your notes. We see you contemplating its main characters, Mevlut and Rayiha, presumably as you write them.
OP: Yes. These are the parts of [Memories of Distant Mountains] that I really care about. The whole effort of a fiction writer, especially when writing a long novel like me, is forcing yourself to identify with your characters like a really naive person. They make fun. I have to be Mevlut. I have to be one of my characters. I have to see the world and the beauty — or not the beauty, but convincing power — the beauty of the sentence is something else — but the convincing truth. The authenticity of the subject matter really depends on the writer’s identification with the character. You write about places that you don’t belong to by culture and class, or by geography, or even sometimes by language. It gets harder and harder if there are these distances. While on the other hand, we don’t want to read about the middle-class writer’s personal life all the time. In fact, the joy of being a writer is, I am not this person. I’m not Mevlut. I’m a middle-class writer, but I’m doing so much to identify with him. First, I will respect this person as a humanist. Second is my capacity to see the world through my character’s point of view. Be that person. These are the most attractive, interesting, playful sides of being a novelist. Not only do you have to identify with the character so that you will think what he or she will do next, but you also — this is another part we may talk about — you also have to write it beautifully.
KA: Of course. No one wants to just be hit on the head with a cudgel of narrative, right? You have to earn the reader’s attention. Horace says that language should delight and instruct. And we are in a time when many of the sociopolitical circumstances of our reality feel very dire and urgent. In America, I don’t know if this is the same in Turkish literature, but it feels like lots of writing is really galloping headfirst into instruction and perhaps neglecting the delight a little bit.
OP: You think so? This is what they used to say about left-wing writing in Turkey in the 1970s: “You are always very pedagogical or propaganda. What about beauty?” In the non-Western world they expect you to be more didactic, educational, useful. Especially in my early time, I was always criticized for not being political enough. I was considered in the first two decades of my writing in Turkey a bourgeois writer, while other writers, more political, more leftist, more radical, consider themselves doing an ethical job. While I’m trying to defend the autonomy, the beauty of the sentences. It was very hard.
KA: Snow becomes the riposte to those criticisms of you because it is more overtly — I don’t think that there’s such a thing as apolitical language — but it is more explicitly political in its narrative. But I also think it’s interesting because you talk about visiting the favelas and visiting Bombay, but when you talk about writing Snow … it’s almost like in writing those characters, you are writing on the cusp of between provinciality and modernity.
OP: Provinciality is a great subject of mine, and it’s deeply related to the fact that there was an Ottoman Empire which dissolved very fast on the edge of Europe. So Europe is very close, but as a Turk you’re also living a very poor life, you’re not important. You don’t have any power over history. Who cares about you? These are questions that you also ask. And you’re now talking about a global readership: Oh, I’m so lucky. I have to thank God many times. Yes, I have that privilege. But only 1% of the world is global, the rest is provincial and feels deeply so. Then you realize provinciality is also a great subject that addresses the hearts of the people. It’s also a very taboo subject. The provincial will never say, “I’m provincial.”
KA: Exactly.
OP: “I’m like you! My heart is like yours!” That is the most they can say: “I’m like you.”
KA: It’s the cumulative exhausting effect of having to insist all the time, “We’re just like you. I’m just like you. I’m just like you.” It’s in contemporary Persian literature. Or right now you see all of these voices from Palestine saying, “We love our children just like you. That’s how we love our children. And look what you’re doing to them!”
OP: Which they’re saying, unfortunately, so that they’re killed less.
KA: Of course, because you have to impress that upon empire. Empire doesn’t understand. The interiority of someone that you can’t imagine is an interiority that you treat brusquely. You treat the security of that person with ambivalence. Which is why it is excruciating to have to continually say, “You know how you love your children? That’s how we love our children. You know how you love your husband? That’s how we fell in love.” So much of the world lives in this provinciality, illegible to empire.
