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Why The Black Book Is Black |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / BOOKS FROM ABROAD |
| Author: Jale Parla |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 6/1/1991 |
| Size: 3,014 Words, 17,774 Characters |
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KARA KITAP
(The black book)
Orhan Pamuk
Istanbul
428 pp., $8
Orhan Pamuk's four novels display a thematic continuum: He has preoccupied himself with the themes from his first novel on and has developed them into more complicated narrative modes with each new book. His first novel, Cevdet Bey ve Ogullani (Cevdet Bey and his sons), was a combination art novel and family saga; his second, Sessiz Ev (The quiet house), experimented with polyphonic narrative and anticipated the third and fourth books. Sessiz Ev is haunted by the memories and, actually, the memoirs of an obsessed empiricist, one of those Turkish Pioneers of westernization who believed they could singlehandedly bring about an epistemological revolution. Pamuk returned to the theme of epistemological fissure between the Eastern and the Western systems of thought in his third novel, The White Castle, and transformed it into a doppelganger story of a captive Venetian scholar in opposition to Hoja, a Turkish savant. The two take turns in playing now the first, then the second selves to each other, and this relationship becomes for each double a search for identity. Just as the encounter in The White Castle goes beyond the historical moment, so the context of The Quiet House is just a pretext for Pamuk's experimentation with a new narrative mode, the unreliable, polyvalent, polyphonic narrative that he will totally ahistoricize and depersonalize in The Black Book, with its now-familiar themes of the artist, reality, illusion, and identity.
Mysterious disappearance
The plot of The Black Book is simple, almost diagrammatic. Galip, a lawyer, who is married to his cousin, the beautiful Ruya, is abandoned by her and begins a search. His first guesses about her wherea...
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...it is because its author has overburdened the frame. The last sentence of the book reiterates a maxim uttered earlier by one of Galip's selves: "Nothing can be as startling as life, except for writing ... except for that only consolation, writing." If it is not tongue in cheek, this conclusion is sure to embarrass its author in his next endeavor, when Pamuk will have nowhere to turn but life.
(1,807 of 17,774 characters)
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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