I have read Mr. Pamuk's novels in both English and Turkish and I couldn't tell you now, or even while reading, what happens in most of them. Mine is scarcely a unique reaction. Maureen Freely, one of his translators, cheerfully avowed in a recent interview that you need a good memory to follow the plot of "The Black Book." Or did she mean "My Name Is Red," in which a coin, a tree, a dog and a dead man (among others) internarrate an impenetrable mystery over hundreds of pages? She could equally have meant "The White Castle" -- Kafka, anyone? -- where the Sultan's chief engineer tries, with Sisyphean longueurs, to relocate a giant cannon up a hill for an entire book. I believe that's what happens. You're not really supposed to know. You are only the reader. The text refers to itself and to other texts; we are merely eavesdroppers.
And this:
... Orhan Pamuk writes in Turkish for foreign plaudits. He hasn't taught anyone anything they didn't already know, but he has made precisely the right noises that the "progressive" arbiters of taste in Europe like to hear. And it flatters their own semi-informed sense of activism to reward him for it.
There's nothing wrong with impressing a foreign plaudit or two, especially when it has to do with Turkey's oppressive speech laws. And if he was saying things everybody already knew, what was the big todo over?
ReplyDeleteMy take at this point, is that this type of critique of Pamuk, that puts the Nobel selectors up to be poorly-read airheads, is the best his political detractors can do, and seems to be the spin they all want to get behind.
Crimmeny, there was talk of him getting the peace prize. It's hard for a country to look at itself like the Nobel people have put out there for them to do. It's tough to accept and change. Remember MLK and the USA?
I haven't read Pamuk, but people whose judgment I respect speak well of his work. I hold no brief for the Swedish Academy, but in this case it seems to have chosen a writer with genuine literary merit - something it hadn't done in recent years, IMHO. Also, as J.B. Priestly pointed out once, we pick and choose what we like from other nations' literature and just because the citizens of those nations think otherwise about a given writer's merits - Russians think less of Turgenev than foreigners do, apparently - well, too bad.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with most of the points already made, from the suspicion of the motives behind the Nobel committee's choices (I always remember that Alfred Nobel was not a nice man, so I sometimes think of the Nobel Prizes as lingering attempts to soothe guilty consciences, in the collective AND the specific), to the fact that Pamuk is deserving of the recognition, as a writer. I've read, I think, two of his novels, in translation. I think he veers more towards metafiction than fiction, which is okay as I like metafiction. But I note that Borges has been equally praised, and equally vilified.
ReplyDeleteI was re-reading some of Conrad Aiken's book Collected Criticism this morning, and I am struck at the moment by how things are still the same as they were 100 years ago: la plus ca change, la plus meme chose.
Interesting (to me, anyway) that you should mention Aiken's criticism. I just got that book in the mail this morning.Ordered it after Patrick Kurp posted about it.
ReplyDeleteThe truth about the Nobel is that, as an indicator of literary merit, it's a very mixed bag. It's not so much the people they've given it to who seem less than major. It's all the truly major authors they didn't give it to - Proust and Joyce and Borges and Tolstoy, among many others.
And in recent years the choices have been of distinctly marginal writers. Tom Stoppard is a better playwright than Harold Pinter.
And what about the poor Norwegians and Knut Hamsun? I suppose the Nobel should be a bit of a helpful hint towards checking out a writer though I admit to an absloute lack of interest in a group of people joining together under the banner of Booker/Nobel or whatever, and choosing to award someone. Heathen that I am but not much modern fiction tempts me to check it out either and I'm also rather sceptical of there being sufficient number of truly great writers around to justify a Nobel every year; something that purports to put a seal of rather stuffy greatness on the author. If for my blog contributions I should ever be awarded a Nobel, I shall issue a haughty refusal.
ReplyDeleteBetter clarify a little...The Hamsun comment in relation to
ReplyDelete"just because the citizens of those nations think otherwise about a given writer's merits - Russians think less of Turgenev than foreigners do, apparently - well, too bad." Though of course, it's political reasons that has soured Norway's relations with the great writer. Understandably so too, it should be added. I think part of the greatness of Hamsun is that unconcealed edge or hint of ugliness. A complex beast, man.
Let me clarify also, Andrew. It's fine if the Russians want to think less of Turgenev. But it's also fine if the rest of us want to think better of him. He may just speak to something in us that many Russians either lack or value less.
ReplyDeleteAs for Hamsun, a deeply flawed person, to say the least, but an unquestionably great writer.
For what it's worth, Frank, virtually all the people I've met most enamoured with Joyce, tend to be American. The Irish like meself, tend to be less excited. Which isn't to impose too much of a generalisation or to say who happens to be more correct. For what it's worth, I find something very unhealthy and suffocating about him. This allergic reaction has prevented me getting beyond more than a few pages of Ulysees, though loking back I think I felt something similar about Portrait of the Artist.
ReplyDeleteHi Andrew,
ReplyDeletePortrait never grabbed me, either - and it somehow doesn't surprise me that the Irish are a bit fed up with Jim, though this wasn't much in evidence when I was there reporting on it two years ago. I am with Anthony Burgess regarding Ulysses: It's a great book for dipping into from time to time. My own personal favorite of all Irish literature - which I think says something perfect about the Irish character - is James Stephens's The Crock of Gold.