Other Colors, by Orhan Pamuk
mark beyer
Orhan Pamuk is a meticulous noticer. People, objects, animals, weather, documents, and — most importantly — the places in which he finds himself. By places I mean both the physical space around him, and the mental, aural specter of being. The 73 collected essays in Other Colors typifies all the qualities and peccadilloes of Pamuk’s prose writing and mindful thinking. Here, Pamuk laments the lost hours of life from writing all day long and coming home “Dead Tired in the Evening”:
What did you do today, darling?
Can’t you see? I’ve got salad in my mouth. My teeth are crumbling in my jaw. My brain is melting from unhappiness and trickling down my throat. Where’s the salt, where’s the salt, the salt? We’re eating our lives away. And a little yogurt too. The brand called Life.
Then I gently reached out my hand, parted the curtains, and in the darkness outside caught sight of the moon. Other worlds are the best consolations. On the moon they were watching television. I finished off with an orange—it was very sweet—and my spirits lifted.
Pamuk, that sensitive type of writer, feels his way through life by writing about some of the more mundane aspects and events one might encounter: giving up smoking, getting rid of books, his first passport, luxuriating in “poetic justice”, the first time he meets Americans. Pamuk notes in the preface his preference towards “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.”
Writing as a way to discover what one thinks about things (travel, foreigners, the neighbor who lives as a hermit) is not novel. Numerous (countless?) writers have said as much with enthusiasm. Yet Pamuk is not merely repeating this notion in more enthusiastic terms. He makes his claim personal by giving the essays to us as a gift of what he has experienced. All of the essays are very personal—we get to know Pamuk unlike many another novelist who writes poor essays, or merely reviews—some touch on the universal. What separates, or perhaps its opposite—confederates, Pamuk from other novelist-essayists is the over-arching theme of identity in these essays. Identity is a concept he has struggled with as a Turk both at home and since traveling widely through Europe as a visitor for book readings and conferences. “To describe such epiphanies, such curious moments when truth is somehow illuminated, Virginia Woolf once used the term ‘moments of being’.”
Pamuk has worn many masks, he concedes, because he has often felt as an outsider. He is an outsider in Turkey because he is an intellectual in a country where books are not widely read: “I live in a country that views the nonreader as the norm and the reader as somehow defective […]”. He is an outsider in Europe because he is a Turk, a Muslim: “… my recollections of what I saw in [Geneva’s] shop windows, cinemas, people’s faces, and the streets of the city are memories of my first glimpse of an imagined future. For people like me, Europe is only interesting as a vision of the future—and as a threat.” And, while attending a school as a boy in Switzerland,
My parents had been mistaken in hoping that we might learn French just by listening to the teacher day in and day out. At recess, my brother and I would wander among the crowds of children playing until we found each other and held hands. This foreign land was an endless garden full of happily playing children. My brother and I would watch this garden of happiness with longing and from a distance.
Life and politics go hand in hand, Pamuk observes correctly. That is, the politics of social conformity, literary politics, sexual politics, the politics of self-conscious thoughts. If you can name it, Pamuk writes about it.
My favorite essays in this collection are Pamuk’s meditations on life and work (“Giving Up Smoking”; “My Father”; “To Be Happy”), politics and Europe (“My First Passport and Other European Journeys”; “A Guide to Being Mediterranean”; “Traffic and Religion”), and reading (“The Pleasures of Reading”; “Albert Camus”; “How I Got Rid of Some of My Books”). Pamuk has stated in a number of interviews that he spent twenty-odd years sitting in a room learning how to write. He came out of that room with novels that are both specifically Turkish yet universal to the human condition. His mind is that of a writer, an artist—and while his mind reaches out to grasp so many varied subjects, thoughts lead back to his life as a writer, a reader, a thinker, a man.
Other Colors, by Orhan Pamuk
Knopf, 433 pages
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