Essays:John Butler Yeats once mused in a letter: '[I] If I had not been an unsuccessful & struggling man Willie & Jack would not have been so strenuous. [A] successful father is good for the daughters. For the sons it is another matter", writes Richard Tillinghast.
In My Father's Suitcase, his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk seems to come to similar conclusions about the dynamic between his strenuous, productive life as a writer and his father Gündüz's easy-going, pleasure-loving existence.
Of the importance of reading and writing in his own life, Pamuk writes: "Let me explain what I feel on a day when I've not written well, am unable to lose myself in a book. First, the world changes before my eyes; it becomes unbearable, abominable. Those who know me can see it happening . . .".
Pamuk descends from the secular, upper-middle-class Istanbulite elite who have guided Turkey's economic and intellectual progress since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. His grandfather made a fortune in railroads, a fortune that slipped through his sons' hands through high living, unwise investments and poor business decisions. Pamuk has written at length about his father in his 2005 non-fiction masterpiece, Istanbul: Memories of a City.
Gündüz Pamuk was born to wealth and comfort, smiled easily, was incapable of being faithful to his wife or present for very long in the lives of his children. As a young man he had wanted to be a poet, and translated Valéry into Turkish. Late in life he gave his son a suitcase full of notebooks, many of which he had kept as a young man in Paris. Pamuk's anxiety about opening the suitcase forms the plot of his Nobel speech. Once read, the notebooks turn out to be not very interesting: the drama inheres in the author's feelings about the contrast between his and his father's lives. Pamuk often emphasises the time a writer spends alone in his workroom, and insists that "A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is".
THE CONFLICT HERE is between the examined life praised by Socrates and the unexamined life Pamuk snr leads. "Was happiness thinking that I lived a deep life in that lonely room? Or was happiness leading a comfortable life in society, believing in the same things as everyone else, or acting as if you did?" Pamuk is forever questioning; characteristically the first section of Other Colours is called "Living and Worrying". "Actually I was angry at my father because he had not led a life like mine, because he had never quarrelled with his life, and had spent his life happily laughing with his friends and his loved ones."
If this seems self-absorbed, it is. Pamuk is the most introspective of novelists. But introspection is not an end in itself for him any more than it was for Proust. He writes fascinatingly on architecture and politics, the Turkish terror of earthquakes, and a dozen other subjects. There are also, surprisingly, several very sweet short pieces about his young daughter Rüya. But this book is, above all, a splendid primer on the art of the novel. The chapter on Tristram Shandy, written as an introduction to the Turkish edition, is delightful: "We'd all like an uncle like Tristram Shandy, an uncle who is always telling tales and losing his way inside them, even as he nimbly pulls us in with his jokes, word games, indiscretions, follies, quirks, obsessions, and hilarious affectations . . .".
AND THEN THERE is Pamuk's use of colour, crucial for a man who painted when he was young. "I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than 'seeing the world with words'," the author writes. "From the moment he begins to use words like colours in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is . . ." Colour is a theme throughout Pamuk's work. The Black Book is a multifaceted dazzler - part detective story, part historical novel, part pastiche, many of its chapters masquerading as columns from an Istanbul newspaper. The White Castle is a post-modernist study of dual identity, where the struggles between an Italian hostage and his Turkish captor in early Ottoman Istanbul explore the sibling rivalry that is one of Pamuk's recurring obsessions.
In Snow (Kar in Turkish), Pamuk's most political book, where a man called Ka visits the provincial, snowbound city of Kars in eastern Turkey trying to understand a wave of suicides among the city's headscarf-wearing girls, Pamuk returns to the numinous colour white (ak in Turkish). White is as culturally significant to the Turks as red is to the Chinese. Turkey's current ruling party, for example, is the Ak Party. My favourite novel of his is My Name Is Red, a historical work set in early Ottoman Turkey at its prime, a murder mystery played out among a circle of miniaturist painters patronised by the Sultan.
Pamuk's comments on the book here are fascinating: "My novel's central concern: to blend the more distilled and poetic style derived from works in the style of Persian miniatures with the speed, power, and character-drive realism of the novel as we understand it today." He succeeds mightily, and this is where any reader new to this important novelist should begin.
Richard Tillinghast's eighth book of poetry, The New Life, is due out next year. He and Julia Clare Tillinghast have recently finished Dirty August, a selection of translations from the Turkish poet Edip Cansever, also scheduled for publication in 2008, as is his book Finding Ireland, a collection of essays. He lives in south Tipperary and is a frequent visitor to Istanbul
Other Colours By Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely Faber & Faber, 433pp. £20