🦋 Identity
Another jarring moment of recognition in The Black Book -- in the story Galip is telling in chapter 15, about a Turkish bachelor who obsessively loves Proust, he says, "like all Turks who come to love Western authors that no one else reads, he went from loving Proust's words to believing that he himself had written them." I'm a little blown away by this identity-with-the-author thing that I've come up with to describe my experience reading Pamuk -- it is very much Pamuk's own trope; but it seems to me I started talking about it before I had happened on Pamuk's use of it. This probably means he is describing a universal experience -- and thinking back now that I've constructed this way of relating to the book, I can see how it applies to some reading I've done in the past -- the coincidence just seems pretty shocking to me, that I would hit on it to talk about this particular author, whose work turns out to contain it.
 I am a little curious about whether each of the alternate chapters which is a column by Celâl, is the column which is printed on the day of the following chapter. This would mean that each of the narrative chapters takes place a day after the previous one, which I'm not sure that would work. ... And indeed it does not work: Chapter 17 takes place immediately after Chapter 15. Oh well, another hypothesis down the drain.
posted evening of Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
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