Orhan Pamuk at the Nourse Theater SF for Arts and Lectures Series

This author is a genius.  He is teaching at Columbia Univerisity in NYC. He was in conversation with Steven winn, at the Arts and Lecture Series at the Nourse Theater on Hayes, in SF.  November 2.

The description with which I agree is the following:  "He writes vivid and lyrical works, often set in the changing and political and cultural landscape of his native country of Turkey.  "  Turkish Americans were among those who stood up in the audience and queried him about Turkey's political elections.  He said he liked being in America, as he did not require body guards and could speak freely to his friends.  Humorously,he also remarked that his students at Columbia are very ambitious and talented and intelligent and "scare" him, but then he laughed, "But they are also scared of me."

"Istanbul:  Memories and the City: Pamuk's  nostalgic autobiographical work of his childhood in Istanbul was a point of refence.  I visited Istanbul with my husband and in laws in the early 1990s and loved the city and the countryside, the coastline, and the many Hellenic sites.   The professor who directed the writing department at UPENN where I taught for some time, had his Fulbright in Turkey in Ankara, and had returned several times. He encouraged me to get my fulbright, which I did, in Central Asia, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan in 2000-2001.

Winner of the Nobel Prize, I had heard Pamuk over a decade ago, at the Public Library in Philadelphia, and was so impressed by his authenticity and dediction to literature.  His books,  Snow, My Name is Red, The Black Book, Silent House --- his brilliant book of essays, from which I have taught selections, and his book, compiled from his Norton lectures at Harvard, from which he quoted in his talk: The Naive and Sentimental Novel, based on a quotation by Friedrich Schiller, about the naive and sentimentl novel --- I reread these lectures when at Dorland Arts Colony, and find it a remarkable meditation on fictive writing, and the novel in particular, which he commented in the 20th century, has marginalized poetry and the essay and non fiction. .






and a lesser known novella, The White  Castle, which I like very much, and found it suitable for my peace education course in Macedonia, - so you can see I am one of his avid readers.





The new book, features a street vendor seller; he interviewed many vendors and obtained their life stories, which he said is similar in many ways, and then wrote a 600 page novel on this life story; he had intended it to be a novella, but it grew of its own will. The novel is titled "A Strangeness in My Mind".  Pamuk is commended for his humanity and his creating such dignity in the life of a common street vendor when he, himself is from the upper classes, was intentional.   There is a recent review in the Sunday NYT. “A complex psychological drama . . . [and] a tremendous concatenation of voices and places and politics and culture, gathered around a melancholy hero . . . [written with] virtuosic craft, intellectual richness, emotional subtlety and a feeling of freedom that comes from a narrative that finds its most meaningful moments in the side streets of storytelling . . . [A Strangeness in My Mind] wrestles with the complexity of an ever-changing city . . . Most delightful are first-person monologues by the characters themselves . . . It’s very funny, while also allowing into Mevlut tale the colorful voices and contending perspectives of the world around him . . . For Pamuk the vision of life as a complex web of knowable things provides a terrifically interesting way to write a book.” —Martin Riker, The New York Times Book Review

and do not miss Colin Thubron, another of my favorite writers, -- review of this work on pages 52-54  in the NYRBooks  November 5, 2015 Vol. LXII No. 17 .  It concludes:  " I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work." Pamuk has written, "And then I 'm happy."  Sounds like Colin, as well.  Colin was in all the countries in which I lived, at the same time, -- China, Siberia, Central Asia -- about which he was written remarkable travel books of his journeys.  He said to me, "You could write about your journey, as well. "  At least Colin has done that remarkably well.  


- not to forget the last masterpiece, Museum of Innocence have found their way to my shelf.  I found him the most important writer of the late 20th century. Pamuk talked about the completion of this museum of ordinary human nostalgic items, such as Proust speaks of that elicit memory, such as theater tickets and the like which he represents in Museum of Innocence.   Asked if the story of the obsessive love is autobiographical, he insists that it is not, but one of the imagination.






  www.nytimes.com/.../orhan-pamuk-opens-museum

You can listen to his interview on the radio KQED in SF on Sunday November 29 at 1:00 pm