Indian Writing

Orhan Pamuk, 54, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2006. The Nobel Prize site felicitates him as one “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”

BBC profile here. Paris Review interview here. Guardian author page here. And NPR interview here.

Extract from Istanbul here:

Great as the desire to westernise and modernise may have been, the more desperate wish, it seemed, was to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire: rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernise amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums. That which I would later know as pervasive melancholy and mystery, I felt in childhood as boredom and gloom, a deadening tedium I identified with the traditional alaturka music to which my grandmother tapped her slippered feet: I escaped this state by cultivating dreams.

Excerpt from Snow here:

Early that morning, before the city woke up and before he had let the snow get the better of him, he took a brisk walk through the shantytown below Atatürk Boulevard to the poorest part of Kars, to the district known as Kalealt. The scenes he saw as he hurried under the ice-covered branches of the plane trees and the oleanders—the old decrepit Russian buildings with stovepipes sticking out of every window, the thousand-year-old Armenian church towering over the wood depots and the electric generators, the pack of dogs barking at every passerby from a five-hundred-year-old stone bridge as snow fell into the half-frozen black waters of the river below, the thin ribbons of smoke rising out of the tiny shanty houses of Kalealt? sitting lifeless under their blanket of snow—made him feel so melancholy that tears welled in his eyes. On the opposite bank were two children, a girl and a boy who’d been sent out early to buy bread, and as they danced along, tossing the warm loaves back and forth or clutching them to their chests, they looked so happy that Ka could not help smil- ing. It wasn’t the poverty or the helplessness that disturbed him; it was the thing he would see again and again during the days to come—in the empty windows of photography shops, in the frozen windows of the crowded teahouses where the city’s unemployed passed the time playing cards, and in the city’s empty snow-covered squares. These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world.

Picture via The Ledge.