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🦋 Pamuk on writing The Black Book

(From this interview with Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.) Pamuk published The White Castle while he was in New York, being "his wife's husband" -- she was studying for her doctorate at Columbia University.

I had a little room at the library in which I wrote more than half of The Black Book. And very typical of a non-Western person coming through main cultural centers of Western civilisation, say London, Paris, New York, and then having a sort of an anxiety about his cultural identity, and, ah... I lived these things, and I faced the immense richness of American libraries and culture; and I began to ask myself, what is Turkish culture? What am I doing there? And at that time, I used to think that Turkey's cultural identity should only be a sort of ultra-Occidentalism.

There, at the age of 33, I began to read old Sufi allegories, the whole classic texts of Islamic mysticism -- most of them are classical Persian texts -- with an eye on Borges, on Calvino: they have told me to look at literary texts as sort of structures which have metaphysical qualities. I have learned from Borges and Calvino to delete the heavy religious vein of classical Islamic texts, and see these texts as sort of, em, geometrical shapes; metaphysical structures and allegories; parables full of literary games.

Also some interesting stuff in the interview about fluidity of identity and how that plays into his novels. Engdahl mentions René Girard -- Pamuk confirms that he likes what Girard has to say but says he came to Girard's stuff late in life; Engdahl asks if Pamuk sees jealosy as playing a major role in his work, and Pamuk agrees that it does.

posted evening of Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
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