Orhan Pamuk: a postmodern sage.
Books
Hidden city
by David Eggleton
Orhan Pamuk’s novel about Istanbul is a book to burrow into, to get lost in – much like the legendary city itself.
The universal city has had many names – Babel, Babylon, even London and New York – but the oldest continuously inhabited city with the strongest claim to be universal is Istanbul, located on the Bosphorus Straits at that point where Asia meets Europe. It has been an important site for a succession of civilisations and empires, from Greek to Roman to Christian to Islamic.
Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Black Book – first issued in an English translation in 1995 and now reissued in a more sophisticated translation by Maureen Freely, who grew up in Istanbul – is a rhapsodic celebration of the ancient metropolis, and also a sober meditation on the fate of the Turks in the 20th century.
In The Black Book, Istanbul is “the black book”: that is, a text, a book of signs to be studied, a great palimpsest made up of layer after layer of history. Intricate and phantasmagoric and labyrinthine, it is a book to be burrowed into, and as our hero Galip burrows into it like a bookworm, disappearing down the foggy ruins of time, the reader hurries to follow him.
The story opens on a cold morning in January 1980, when Turkey is a rustbelt economy in a state of near-anarchy. Istanbullite factions – Marxist students and conservative nationalists and Islamic radicals – battle it out in the streets, while the military is preparing to stage a coup. Skirting the disorder, Galip is a liberal lawyer who discovers via a handwritten note that his wife, Ruya, has left him. He suspects she’s taken up with Celal, a famous and conservative newspaper columnist forced into hiding after becoming the target of death threats by arch-reactionaries who’ve decided that he’s not conservative enough.
Istanbul, then, is a city of intrigue, a city haunted by its ghosts. Its bazaars are cluttered with the bric-à-brac of fallen empires, while the domed interiors of its mosques, flickering with candles, echo with mysterious murmurs and whispers. Galip, jilted husband in search of an errant wife, stumbles into armies of mannequins made for Ottoman sultans in underground catacombs, and fumbles for secret rooms in tenement buildings.
Desperately seeking Celal, he elects to read his entire back catalogue of news-paper columns and thus discovers the occult Islamic practice of Hurufism: the medieval belief of a Sufi sub-sect that people’s faces represent a kind of mystical alphabet: if you learn this alphabet you can read character and destiny.
The Black Book is a fable, an insider’s guide to Istanbul as a state of mind at a time of crisis. As Galip wanders among salt-of-the earth shopkeepers, tailors, yoghurt peddlers, wrestlers, pot-bellied belly dancers, orchestra musicians and pudding shop customers he begins to notice mystical letters on all their foreheads, but he is unable to decipher what these signs mean. Gradually, too, he becomes conscious that he is being followed. Has he been smoking too much in one of the ubiquitous hashish shops, or is this amateur detective being shadowed by the secret police?
Pamuk’s prose arabesques draw from the techniques of classic Arabic literature – story twists into story – but he’s also steeped in contemporary European literature. Possibly too steeped – his style sometimes blends into the stylistic tricks of other novelists writing about fabled cities: James Joyce on Dublin, Italo Calvino on Venice, Salman Rushdie on Bombay. However, it’s his ability to dig deep into the essential energies of his own city, to dig down to its treasure hoard gleam, that saves him from being a pale imitation.
For, finally, Pamuk proves he is a kind of postmodern Sufi sage, a whirling dervish of the surreal. He’s able to craft latter-day mosaics of Byzantine complexity out of day-to-day life so as to reveal his two main characters, the chaser and the chased, as equally quarrelsome and conflicted. They are emblems of an age-old identity crisis – the occidental and the oriental – seen symbolically silhouetted against the salt haze of the blue Bosphorus, or nearly obliterated by a blizzard of late winter snow, before coming into focus as doppelgangers, doubles, twisting around on one another with question and answer routines, as if interrogator and informer are one and the same person.
THE BLACK BOOK, by Orhan Pamuk (Faber, $27.99)
