The Indian Express | 1 month ago | 16-10-2022 | 11:40 am
The yellow journal that he holds close to the computer screen has an illustration of a sandstone fort, sketched in detail. Below it, in a neat hand in Turkish, Orhan Pamuk has written about his visit to Amber Fort in Jaipur in 2011. He had been speaking of art and influences and how it had once been the vocation he had dreamt of, when Turkey’s foremost cultural ambassador to the world stops midway to rifle through his desk and pick out the diary. For over 15 years, he has maintained illustrated journals, detailing his travels and artistic impressions of places and events. Some of these have just been published as Memories of Distant Mountains, an art book in Turkish and French. The entry on Amber Fort is part of the book, but it also has resonance with his newest novel, Nights of Plague (Penguin Hamish Hamilton, Rs 799), that releases in India this week. It was, the writer says, the impression that guided his imagination of the pink-stone Arkaz Castle on the fictional Ottoman island of Mingheria, a “pearl of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea”, between Istanbul and Alexandria, and the site of action in his novel.It’s 9 am in New York, where Pamuk, 70, Nobel laureate and author of critically acclaimed works such as My Name Is Red (1998), Snow (2002), Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005), The Museum of Innocence (2008) and A Strangeness in my Mind (2014) is speaking from over Zoom, and where he is the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. In the renewed bustle of everyday life, it is easy to forget the horrors of COVID-19, but pandemics have been a long-standing interest with him. Even now, he says, holding up a copy of Richard S Ross III’s Contagion in Prussia, 1831: The Cholera Epidemic and the Threat of the Polish Uprising (2015), he has been reading up about the many ways they have altered the political and social scaffolding of nations.“Humanity, more or less, behaves the same in pandemics. First there is denial. Denial makes the numbers go up. This leads to conspiracy theories, nationalism, going inward, blaming the government or other ethnicities. Sometimes, it leads to new governments being formed. Other times, the government is involved but it becomes authoritarian. So, you see, the subject of plague is always related to politics,” he says.Part historical, part murder mystery, it is the slow disintegration of an empire and the origin story of a nation state that lies at the heart of Nights of Plague. Set in 1901, against an Ottoman Empire on the wane, the gossamer charm of Mingheria, home to a mixed community of Greeks and Turks, begins to fray under a fatal outbreak of bubonic plague. Anxious to avoid the economic blockades from European powers, Sultan Abdul Hamid sends the empire’s best-known quarantine specialist, the royal chemist, to the island. When he is found murdered, the Sultan’s niece and former political prisoner, Princess Pakize, and her doctor husband Nuri Bey are dispatched on a dual mission — to contain the damage and to solve the murder of the public-health official.The framework of the thriller or the detective story has been one that Pamuk has dabbled with on a few occasions, including in My Name Is Red, but he has no special affinity for the genre. “I never, for example, enjoyed Agatha Christie. But I am a great admirer of Patricia Highsmith. She had depth, she invented Dostoevskian thrillers. There is also, though I wouldn’t call him a mystery writer, John le Carré, who was very good,” he says.Despite his indifference to the genre, what it allows Pamuk is an insight into the insecurities of a body politic. Over 700 pages, Pamuk traces the panic and the denial, the mounting deaths, the enforcement of stringent quarantine measures, the economic losses, the clash of cultures and the shifting sands of political aspirations. “In the end, my novel is not only about plagues or the formation of nation states out of the ashes of empire, it is also about the creation of national secular myths that hold the people together after the empire falls, after the emperor vanishes,” he says.The plague pandemic had been hovering at the edge of his literary arc for four decades. In his 1983 novel, Silent House, a history professor searches for traces of plague in archives. In The White Castle (1985), descriptions of plague in 17th-century Istanbul linger in the background. In the beginning, he had been interested in the metaphysics of it — “What happens if death arrives before its time. It was a philosophical interest in death and the individuality it brought. (The differences between) East and West, individuality, these subjects always interested me. But I was a young author then and didn’t want to go into that debate,” he says.Pamuk finally began work on Nights of Plague in 2016, slowly teasing out a story from years of research. His plans of focussing on the responses a pandemic provoked — fatalism in some, stoic pragmatism in others — had led him to examine it through the prism of that other binary that has been his life’s work: the dichotomy between the East and the West. “I told myself, Orhan, you have been thinking of writing a plague novel for 40 years. (President Recep Tayyip) Erdogan’s government in Turkey is getting increasingly authoritarian. Why don’t you write an allegorical, historical plague novel on the last decade of the Ottoman Empire as it decayed, disintegrated and fell apart?” he says.Yet, no amount of research could prepare him for the emotional cost of COVID-19, when it arrived in March 2020. A beloved aunt who lived two lanes away from his apartment, was among the first victims of the pandemic in Turkey. “She was 94. She had been prepared to be buried next to her mother and her husband. And then doctors in white coats came and took her body away. It made me afraid. I realised that I’ve been working on this plague novel for over three years and there was something missing that I had learned from life — fear,” he says.As the pandemic raged on, Pamuk, who claims to not have much of a social life, poured his anxieties into writing. He had hoped that the worst would be behind him by the time the book was published, but in March 2021, when it came out in Turkey, Istanbul was under lockdown. “There was a day I particularly remember, when the Turkish government had locked the rest of the city down and allowed people over 65 to take walks outside. So, I went out into a city of 18 million that was empty of all but elderly people, making my way down to Istiklal, the high street in Istanbul, to the biggest book store there. I found a tower made out of copies of my new book on display and, sadly, not a single person to buy them,” he says, with a laugh.When Snow was released soon after 9/11, the novel’s interplay between the forces of fundamentalism and secularism established it as Pamuk’s most emphatic political statement. The writer says Nights of Plague shares the same tenor, set to a larger canvas. The clash between secularism and political Islam in Turkey that he explores in his work, his interpretation of the civilisational differences between the East and the West have often landed him in trouble, but Pamuk has never shied away from articulating his opinion. In contemporary Turkey, governed by an Islamist-nationalist coalition, voices of protest rear up at a cost. “I am, perhaps, partly protected by my fame although I’m also trying to resist as much as I can. But in my heart, I’m not a political person. I don’t spend my time thinking about resisting Erdogan all the time. But there are many brave journalists who end up in jail for their opinions. There is no free speech in Turkey. It is horrible that the government puts anyone who criticises them into jail. I’m angry, partly with the West also, that they are not criticising the Turkish government enough, (that) they are only busy (with the fact) that Turkey holds the immigrants — Muslim, Asian, North African, Afghan — who want to go to Europe. They are happy that Erdogan is giving this service and they do not care about Turkish democracy. I’m critical of that,” he says.As a writer, Pamuk is not unfamiliar with the perils of speaking up. In February 2005, a little over a year before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in an interview to a Swiss magazine, he had spoken of the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman government between 1915 and 1917 (during World War I), that goes unacknowledged in his country, and of contemporary clashes between the Turkish government and the Kurds. Pamuk was accused of insulting “Turkishness”, a criminal offence in the country, and put on trial. The charges were later dropped but he has since lived with a constant barrage of death threats and relentless criticism from nationalist hardliners, that have necessitated a life hemmed in by security arrangements and bodyguards. The next year, in October 2006, the Swedish Academy acknowledged his outspokenness in the Nobel citation: Pamuk, “in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”In Turkey, Pamuk continues to be a polarising figure. On its release last year in the country, Nights of Plague drew another charge of fuelling animosity through a purported insult to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. After it was initially dropped, an appeal by the complainant has led to the reopening of the investigation. But, Pamuk’s faith in the power of free speech remains undeterred. “I don’t think humanity’s desire for free speech is fading away. Sure, there may be right-wing governments who are winning elections but what about the fact that (Donald) Trump lost? What about the fact that (Emmanuel) Macron won?Erdogan is going to lose the elections, all the Turkish polls are saying that. Maybe I am an optimist, maybe I’m naive, but I don’t subscribe to the idea that all free speech is dying. Look at Iranian women bravely going out in the streets, dying for their body, for their freedom. I am not pessimistic about the future of humanity at all. The deeper sentiments of people are more important than governments. No government stays forever,” he says.He hasn’t had a chance to speak to fellow writer Salman Rushdie since the attack on the latter in New York in August, but in his defence of Rushdie in an article in The Atlantic last month, Pamuk wrote, “Whenever a writer comes under physical attack, everyone starts talking about responding to words with words, to books with more books. But does this old adage make sense? Those who are pulling the trigger or wielding the knife tend to have read very few books in their life. Had they read more books, or been in the position to write one themselves, would they have turned to this kind of violence? …What we need to do is use our privilege of free speech to acknowledge the role of class and cultural differences in society — the sense of being second- or third-class citizens, of feeling invisible, unrepresented, unimportant, like one counts for nothing — which can drive people toward extremism… If we hope to see the principle of freedom of expression thrive in society, the courage of writers like Salman Rushdie will not suffice; we must also be brave enough to think about the sources of the furious hatred they are subjected to.” It is a novelist’s job, Pamuk says, to be representative of the dichotomy that creates faultlines, without fear or favour. “Lofty ideas aside, if you can speak for both sides, if you can express them through human stories, that’s what matters,” he says.Now that Nights of Plague is out in the world, Pamuk has moved on to his next project — a novel set in 1942, involving a group of card players. In between, a series of lectures on how to write a novel at Collège de France in Paris awaits. He also hopes to find a home for Memories of Distant Mountains in other languages. It’s been a lifetime steeped in stories for him. “My assistant reminded me the other day that I have been writing for 48 years. Yet my desire is the same: To wake up and start the day and write that book. I cannot think of anything more attractive or joyful than writing. I am fascinated by all that it brings — the interviews, the lectures, the travel. There was a time, in my early 30s when I was writing and writing and the phone was not ringing. Now, it doesn’t stop ringing and I love it. I have learnt so much from writing — about both art and craft, and about life. If you give me another 50 years, I would want the same life,” he says.
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