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The Borgesian library is not for me a metaphysical fantasy of an infinite worldâ??it is the library I have built up in my house in Istanbul, volume by volume.

Turkey was never a Western colony, and so when Turks imitated the West as Atatürk decreed, it was never the damning, demeaning undertaking described by Kundera, Naipaul, and Edward Saidâ??it became an important part of Turkish identity.

I hadn't quite gotten this previously -- it is easier to understand his presentation of the conflict between Islamist and Nationalist in Snow, with this point in hand.

When I decided to become a writer, neither poems nor novels were valued as individual expressions of an artistic sensibility, a strange spirit, a soul: the dominant view was that serious writers worked collectively, and their work was valued for the way in which it contributed to a social utopia and reflected a shared vision (like modernism, socialism, Islamism, nationalism, or secular republicanism). There was little interest in literary circles in the problem of the individual creative writer who drew from history and tradition, or who tried to find the literary form that best accommodated his voice.

I'm really taken with the idea of Pamuk as working to introduce the notion of the author as "individual creative writer" into a Turkish literary scene which values the author as a member of an ideological collective.

(One annoying thing: The NYRB software that turns magazine articles into web pages has a problem with some Turkish characters, in particular at least ı and ğ, which it has replaced with blank spaces.)

Update: Scott Esposito is unhappy to see this essay appearing in NYRB so soon after a version was published in the Guardian -- I can see his point although I like the piece a lot better than he does.

posted evening of Sunday, November 30th, 2008
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