Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist

I was once invited to give a talk at the Film Centre in Istanbul, Turkey. We stayed at a university lodge overlooking the Bosphorus - Bosphorus that figures so vividly in Orhan Pamuk's work and which has become a symbol of the flow of culture between East and West. After the talk, in the evening, there was a get-together at which a number of distinguished film scholars, cultural critics and intellectuals were present. I had read some of Pamuk's novels and was interested in finding out the general response to them. I asked one of the literary critics what he thought of Pamuk's work; he said that Pamuk is highly gifted, very popular among readers but is an elitist. Later, I came to realize that this was a sentiment shared by many others.

In 2006, Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature; he had won many other prestigious prizes as well. The Nobel committee said that, "In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, Pamuk has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures." The English translation of his latest novel, 'The Museum of Innocence', has just been published. It deals with a doomed and obsessive relationship between a middle-aged man and a teenager against the backdrop of modern Turkey. The novel is somewhat reminiscent of Nabokov, and in one of the pieces in his book of critical essays 'Other Color', he confesses his great admiration for Vladimir Nabokov. The opening sentence of the novel, "It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it", captures the tone and irony of the story.

Orhan Pamuk is the author of eight novels and collection of critical essays that deal with the changing cultural landscape of Turkey and a poetic childhood memoir titled 'Istanbul: Memories of a City'. His third novel, 'White Castle', which reminds one of allegories by the Argentine writer Borges, and the Italian writer Italo Calvino, deals with the complex relationship between a captured Venetian sailor and his Turkish master; they are, in fact, lookalikes. The master-slave relationship so vividly highlighted by Hegel is given a new inflection. It is as if, as Nietzsche announced, the whole world was going back to being a fable again. His novel, "My name is Red", recounts a mystery and love story set in the context of intrigues and machinations among miniaturists of the sixteenth century Ottoman culture. The author has succeeded in deftly stitching the characters into the tapestry of sixteenth century Turkey. Issues of art and nature, East and West, religiosity and secularism intersect in this novel in interesting ways. He seems to be moved by the conviction that literary art is redemptive when it provokes a recalcitrant world by investing it with new valences.

Pamuk's novel, Snow, can be described as a thriller situated in the 1990s that examines the life and actions of a poet who is at the centre of a military coup. This is, in many ways, his most political novel. The conflict between tradition and modernity is a vital presence in almost all of his novels. As he himself remarked, in an 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 with the colours of today."

Orhan Pamuk is himself a product of the two traditions- Western and Ottoman Turkish. He is a great admirer of novelists such as Dostoevsky, Proust, Calvino, Grass, Faulkner, Llosa and Nabokov. At the same time he looks towards Turkish cultural traditions for inspiration and guidance. As he once observed, Ahmet Hamidi Tanpinar is the writer "with whom I feel the closest bond."

Pamuk has had his share of run-ins with the state; in 2005 he gave an interview to a Swiss newspaper in which he commented on the Turkish massacre of a million Armenians and tens of thousands of Kurds. The Government found his remarks deeply offensive and he was on the verge of being imprisoned for three years. There was a chorus of protest from writers in many quarters of the world, some whom were his models, and he was spared that indignity. I have chosen to focus on this fifty seven year old Nobel laureate, because his dominant themes have a deep relevance to us in Sri Lanka. Pamuk is interested in the complex unfolding of modernism. Turkey modernized itself very early thanks to the efforts of its pioneering leader Kemal Ataturk. However, modernity proved to be a dubious triumph. Even as he deconstructs the modernity that envelops Turkey, Pamuk is also interested in re-configuring the meaning of the Ottoman-Turkish cultural heritage. It is this interplay, and the transgressive impulses that fuel it, that invests Pamuk's writings with so much pulsating power and meaning.

This theme finds a ready echo in our literary discussions. Martin Wickreamsinghe and Gunadasa Amarasekera are the two most brilliant Sinhala novelists of the twentieth century. Both of them, from their differing vantage points, sought to re-read modernity in Sri Lanka and examine the contemporary relevance of the Sinhala-Buddhist cultural heritage, in the same way that Pamuk attempted in his fiction. All of them perceived the crisis of authority and social order that marked their respective societies as symptomatic of a larger crisis of cultural dislocation. They saw with increasing dismay how ultra-modernity locks its espousers in a closed universe of diminished meaning and potentiality.

The unapologetic humanism that informs the argument of their fiction offers a challenge to currently fashionable thinking and prompts a re-imagining of the power of tradition. At a deeper level of artistic apprehension, all three novelists have sought to fashion a new semantic-field in which questions of modernity, tradition and religion could be purposefully discussed from fresh angles. Also, all of them sought to find an unassailable space for the sacred in the secular. All three perceived a beguiling symmetry in the advance of secularism and the retreat of religiosity, and sought to rectify it. Pamuk seems to be saying that religion and secularism anticipate each other, but are involved in a game of hide and seek.

Human dignity and self-worth are issues that are of paramount importance to Pamuk. He once remarked, "what literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears; the fear of being left outside, and the fear of being counted for nothing, and the feeling of worthlessness that comes with such fears." Heidegger, glossing Holderlin, says that to be human is to be a conversation. Without the kind of human visibility that he urges, Pamuk argues that this conversation is impossible.

Orhan Pamuk is a writer with expressive desires and a personal vision. He clearly contradicts Roland Barthes statement that, "Writing is that neutral composite oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost".