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Other Colors
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ALSO BY ORHAN PAMUK
Istanbul
Snow
My Name Is Red
The White Castle
The Black Book
The New Life
CONTENTS
Preface
LIVING AND WORRYING
1. The Implied Author
2. My Father
3. Notes on April 29, 1994
4. Spring Afternoons
5. Dead Tired in the Evening
6. Out of Bed, in the Silence of Night
7. When the Furniture Is Talking, How Can You Sleep?
8. Giving Up Smoking
9. Seagull in the Rain
10. A Seagull Lies Dying on the Shore
11. To Be Happy
12. My Wristwatches
13. I’m Not Going to School
14. Rüya and Us
15. When Rüya Is Sad
16. The View
17. What I Know About Dogs
18. A Note on Poetic Justice
19. After the Storm
20. In This Place Long Ago
21. The House of the Man Who Has No One
22. Barbers
23. Fires and Ruins
24. Frankfurter
25. Bosphorus Ferries
26. The Islands
27. Earthquake
28. Earthquake Angst in Istanbul
BOOKS AND READING
29. How I Got Rid of Some of My Books
30. On Reading: Words or Images
31. The Pleasures of Reading
32. Nine Notes on Book Covers
33. To Read or Not to Read: The Thousand and One Nights
34. Foreword to Tristram Shandy: Everyone Should Have an Uncle Like This
35. Victor Hugo’s Passion for Greatness
36. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground: The Joys of Degradation
37. Dostoyevsky’s Fearsome Demons
38. The Brothers Karamazov
39. Cruelty, Beauty, and Time: On Nabokov’s Ada and Lolita
40. Albert Camus
41. Reading Thomas Bernhard in a Time of Unhappiness
42. The World of Thomas Bernhard’s novels
43. Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World Literature
44. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses and the Freedom of the Writer
POLITICS, EUROPE, AND OTHER PROBLEMS OF BEING ONESELF
45. Pen Arthur Miller Speech
46. No Entry
47. Where Is Europe?
48. A Guide to Being Mediterranean
49. My First Passport and Other European Journeys
50. André Gide
51. Family Meals and Politics on Religious Holidays
52. The Anger of the Damned
53. Traffic and Religion
54. In Kars and Frankfurt
55. On Trial
56. Who Do You Write For?
MY BOOKS ARE MY LIFE
57. The White Castle Afterword
58. The Black Book: Ten Years On
59. A Selection from Interviews on The New Life
60. A Selection from Interviews on My Name Is Red
61. On My Name Is Red
62. From the Snow in Kars Notebooks
PICTURES AND TEXTS
63. Şirin’s Surprise
64. In the Forest and as Old as the World
65. Murders by Unknown Assailants and Detective Novels
66. Entr’acte; or, Ah, Cleopatra!
67. Why Didn’t I Become An Architect?
68. Selimiye Mosque
69. Bellini and the East
70. Black Pen
71. Meaning
OTHER CITIES, OTHER CIVILIZATIONS
72. My First Encounters with Americans
73. Views from the Capital of the World
THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW
TO LOOK OUT THE WINDOW
MY FATHER’S SUITCASE
PREFACE
This is a book made of ideas, images, and fragments of life that have still not found their way into one of my novels. I have put them together here in a continuous narrative. Sometimes it surprises me that I have not been able to fit into my fiction all the thoughts I’ve deemed worth exploring: life’s odd moments, the little everyday scenes I’ve wanted to share with others, and the words that issue from me with power and joy when there is an occasion of enchantment. Some fragments are autobiographical; some I wrote very fast; others were left to one side when my attention was elsewhere. I return to them in much the same way that I return to old photographs, and—though I rarely reread my novels—I enjoy rereading these essays. What I most like are the moments when they rise above the occasion, when they do more than just meet the requirements of the magazines and newspapers that commissioned them, saying more about my interests, my enthusiasms, than I intended at the time. To describe such epiphanies, such curious moments when truth is somehow illuminated, Virginia Woolf once used the term “moments of being.”
Between 1996 and 1999 I wrote weekly sketches for Öküz (Ox), a magazine devoted to politics and humor, and I illustrated them as I saw fit. These were short lyrical essays written in one sitting, and I very much enjoyed talking about my daughter and my friends, exploring objects and the world with fresh eyes, and seeing the world in words. Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than “seeing the world with words.” From the moment he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.
I gathered up these pieces to form a totally new book with an autobiographical center. I discarded many fragments and shortened others, taking only excerpts from my hundreds of articles and journals and assigning quite a few essays to strange locations that seemed to fit the arc of that story. For example, the three speeches that have been published as a separate volume in Turkish and many other languages under the title My Father’s Suitcase (containing the Nobel lecture of the same name, as well as “In Kars and Frankfurt,” the speech I gave to mark the German Peace Prize, and “The Implied Author,” the speech I gave at the Puter-baugh Conference) appear here in separate sections to reflect the same autobiographical story.
This edition of Other Colors was built from the same skeleton as the book of the same name first published in Istanbul in 1999, but the earlier book took the form of a collection, while this book is shaped as a sequence of autobiographical fragments, moments, and thoughts. To talk about Istanbul, or to discuss my favorite books, authors, and paintings, has for me always been an excuse to talk about life. My New York pieces date from 1986, when I was visiting the city for the first time, and I wrote them to record the first impressions of a foreigner, with Turkish readers in mind. “To Look out the Window,” the story at the end of the book, is so autobiographical that the hero’s name might well have been Orhan. But the older brother in the story is, like the older brothers in all my stories, evil and tyrannical, bearing no relation to my real older brother, şevket Pamuk, the eminent economic historian. When I was putting together this book, I noticed with consternation that I had a special interest in and predisposition toward natural disasters (the earthquake) and social disasters (politics), and so I left out quite a few of my darker political writings. I have always believed there to be a greedy and almost implacable graphomaniac inside me—a creature who can never write enough, who is forever setting life in words—and that to make him happy I need to keep writing. But when I was putting this book together, I discovered that the graphomaniac would be much happier, and less pained by his writing illness, if he worked with an editor who gave his writin