Ideas are his passion, International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner, Orhan Pamuk, tells Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent.
Ideas, rather than stories, keep Turkish writer and this year's IMPAC winner, Orhan Pamuk, permanently on the run. Having reached the age of 51 earlier this month, he appears to be a jumpy character, half clever boy, half sage, with one foot firmly inside the door of his fiction. His impatient defiance acts as a kind of personal tic. In him, the swagger of the public man of letters is at war with the insecurity of a dreamer at the mercy of a hyperactive imagination. There's a flamboyance about him, as well as a relentless concern with the abstract and a sense of uncertainty.
He says he writes to please himself, yet leaves no doubt he also wants as many readers as possible to enter his world of intellectual arabesques. On a hot day in Dublin, he submits to interview and immediately gives the impression of wanting to talk loudly forever while simultaneously wishing to fall asleep.
He has an interestingly mobile face, capable of looking pleasing and rather terrifying in the space of the same sentence. Within moments of meeting he says he wants to write a book in English. It seems a good idea to me, but then he asks, "Why should I write a book in English?"
Since the British publication of his third novel, The White Castle in 1990 (originally published in Istanbul in 1979 and the first of his novels to be translated into English), Pamuk has been recognised as a literary heir of Calvino and Borges. He shares their metaphysical free fall, that quality of now you think it, now you possibly live it. But he lacks their detachment; his mediations tend to convey more urgency, a greater sense of unrest, almost panic.
Only couple of minutes into the interview, he is, as expected, mentioning the impact Nabokov had on him - "I also write for my own pleasure" - and he refers to his "metaphysical, philosophical bent".
Style concerns Pamuk, but he is less a stylist and more a magician with a team of contrasting white rabbits all completely dissimilar and each wanting to be liberated from the same hat. It's an interesting struggle.
Just as his major literary theme is the notion of East meets West, Pamuk is the product of an Eastern sensibility drawn to the culture of the West. My Name is Red was published in Istanbul in 1998. Three years later the British publication appeared. As with his previous books, it is full of ideas - indeed the ideas have often overpowered his narrative. This time, however, Pamuk has made effective use of two elements - story and, most importantly, humour. My Name is Red is many things: murder mystery and burlesque analysis of art and truth; the real and the fake.
Love, honour and life itself, as well as the importance of tradition and history, race through the pages. Yet for all the colour and dazzle, the staggering images and the violence, the genius of the novel lies in the dark, manic comedy. This is a very funny book, sustained by a comic tone. A gleeful hilarity is frenetically at work - and that same gleeful hilarity informs Pamuk the man, who hovers between deliberation and hysteria. He may be difficult, alternatively friendly and abruptly remote, but he is never dull.
It is the humour that sets My Name is Red apart from the three other Pamuk novels available in English: The White Castle, The Black Book and The New Life, although it shares a great deal in approach and methodology with The Black Book - in its variations on the quest theme. The other great allure of My Name is Red is the fabulous visual imagery.
For the Western reader, Orhan Pamuk is as vital an entry into the world of contemporary Turkish fiction as Haruki Murakami is to that of Japanese writing. Mainly this is because Pamuk, in common with Murakami, is interested in, and understands, Western culture. Pamuk is writing the Western novel in Turkish against an exotic backdrop provided by a rich Eastern culture. For this he has devised what he calls "a hidden geometry"; characters, a bit of narrative, stories, and in this latest novel, a lot of comedy, provide a structure to facilitate his ideas. "I am an intellectual who writes good novels, ideas concern me - story is useful."
How did it all begin? Were the Pamuks a literary dynasty? The writer, who is famous in Turkey, first established a Western following with The White Castle, which is about a 17th-century Christian Italian scholar turned slave and his Muslim master who are so alike they exchange identities. And, further assisted by the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, he is now becoming even more famous. He stretches his arms, shifts in the armchair, and seems to be considering how his story began - then he answers. His was an engineering family. "My grandfather owned the railway." That grandfather made a fortune, which Pamuk's father set out to spend and did spend between the ages of 25 and 35. The family story is described by Pamuk as one of "constant decline".
"I wanted to be a painter," he says. But his family interpreted this wish as meaning the young Pamuk wanted to be an architect. Off he went to study architecture, only to drop out after two years, aged 22, and all the while he was writing. His first book, Cevdet Bey and Sons, yet to be translated into English, was completed when he was 26. "It is a family saga about three generations of an upper-class Istanbul clan", and according to him, "is like Buddenbrooks". Realist in approach, it is very different from his second book, The Silent House - also as yet untranslated into English. The action spans a single week in the lives of three unhappy siblings waiting in their grandmother's house as the old lady prepares for death. Mann had already yielded to modernism, Pamuk was at that time bowing to Faulkner.
Interviewing Pamuk does not lend itself to seeking out conventional biographical details. True, it is possible to discover he is one of two sons and his mother believed in her son the aspiring writer, but Pamuk thinks on a larger scale. He has a large ego, but he does not talk about himself. For him, Istanbul is interesting as a "has-been capital. In the 16th century it was the richest city in the world. But then, the decline and it lost its glory. When I was born in 1952, it had a population of one million. Now it has 10 million".
When I suggest to him My Name is Red could have been written by a Russian, he peers at me, so I rephrase the remark. If the novel were to have been written by a writer from any other country, that country would have been Russia. He seems to have a lot in common with Russian writers, particularly in his use of the surreal and quasi-fantastical as well as in his approach to the interior world of his narrators. Pamuk considers this and seems to be in agreement because he replies, "Russia is also a has-been". There are many reasons for this - Russia, in common with Istanbul and the Pamuk family, was drawn to Western culture. The Russian aristocracy looked to France, it spoke the language and learnt the social manners. This practice was also adopted by many Eastern societies. Although he grew up in a "99 per cent Muslim" society, Pamuk says his family were "upper middle-class, secular, French-influenced, not too enthusiastic about religion, but, just in case God does exist, yes, we believed in God."
He draws on Turkish and Muslim history and culture in his work, "but in a cultural rather than political way". He could easily have described this as sophisticated. Unlike, say, Salman Rushdie, Pamuk's use of such cultural material is not satirical. Well accustomed to writing on, and reacting to, public issues in Turkey, he often speaks out against the Turkish government. "I'd like Turkey to become part of Europe. But this cannot happen until many problems are addressed, particularly that of human rights - we have a poor record."
He speaks very fast and a lot of things are flying about in his mind. If his first two books saw him working through Mannand Proust to Faulkner, the four that have followed have led him through Calvino and Borges, closer to Paul Auster than he would care to admit, with a nod to Umberto Eco and on to, judging by the cohesion of My Name is Red, a happier balancing of his ideas and wide depth of learning. Now he has achieved a comic tone that serves to balance his many preoccupations and ideas. "I have found pathos," he says with the satisfaction of a man who has found the promised land.
He is a reader - compulsive and thorough - and a natural student: "I enjoy research." Dostoyevsky, Marquez and Updike are but a few of the names that dart about throughout his conversation. But there is another very important factor - translation. Did Pamuk suddenly discover a natural showman's comic voice, or had it been there all along, concealed by Earth-bound translation? Victoria Holbrook translated The White Castle into English, while Güneli Gün is the translator of both The Black Book and The New Life. When it came to translating My Name is Red into English, Erdag M. Göknar was given the project. He is a Near-Eastern scholar, US-born of Turkish parents, and spent 18 months on the job, working very closely with Pamuk.
According to Göknar, Pamuk writes in a formal Turkish prose, using Persian and Arabic words, deliberately defying the more modern usage introduced by the linguistic revolution in 1929. "His sentences are long, often spanning a page," says Göknar. The result is a novel that amounts to a fabulous adventure graced by learning, mortality and an exploration of what happens when money, art and tradition are set against each other. He is a European writer doing what Europeans are so good at - the merging of ideas and metaphysics with story.
Pamuk is fascinated by the art of the miniaturist and has spent hours looking at pictures and manuscripts. He sees the conflict at the heart of his book - the supplanting of traditional Eastern art by new Western possibilities - as less a sinister subversion than merely the outcome of progress. "It is what happened. We can't say such things are bad, they just happen."