READIN

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

🦋 Mistranslation

This is the epigraph in front of Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle:

To imagine that a person who intrigues us has access to a way of life unknown and all the more attractive for its mystery, to believe that we will begin to live only through the love of that person -- what else is this but the birth of great passion?

Marcel Proust, from the mistranslation of Y.K. Karaosmanoğlu

This seems really intriguing to me: Pamuk is quoting a mistranslation into Turkish of a French text (and presumably a real, historical mistranslation), which has subsequently been (who knows, possibly mis-?)translated into English! (This book is translated by Victoria Holbrook, a new name to me -- it will be interesting to see how her rendering of Pamuk's work compares with that of Maureen Freely and of Erdağ Göknar.)

I'm not familiar with Proust and have no way of knowing what the correct translation of the quoted bit is -- not really something I can look up via Google. I wonder...

posted afternoon of January 17th, 2008: 1 response
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Saturday, December 15th, 2007

With the sojourn in Güdül, The New Life is starting to feel more like a book than it was before. I mean it is still very weird and different from other books -- but I now have the sensation that I'm reading a novel, which I didn't really before. I'm seeing some intimations of Snow -- the narrator's reaction to the town is a bit reminiscent of Ka in Kars; his desire for Janan is like Ka's desire for İpek -- and this though they are very different characters individually and pairwise; and the militant fundamentalism in Güdül, and the sense that the place is on the edge of breaking down -- these are some bits that I think come out more fully in Snow.

posted evening of December 15th, 2007: Respond
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Monday, December third, 2007

🦋 Great Cinema

My brother asks in e-mail, "Really, did you actually love 'Aguirre, etc.' or did you just understand that it's a Great Film?" by way of saying that he understood it to be Great Film but did not find anything to enjoy in the film itself. This is interesting to me because (a) I did actually, authentically enjoy this film and (b) I worry, when I am liking something that I know is Great, about whether my enjoyment is real.

In "On Reading: Words or Images", Pamuk says,

When we notice [our surroundings while reading], we are at the same time savoring our solitude and the workings of our imagination and congratulating ourselves on possessing greater depth than those who do not read. I understand how a reader might, without going too far, wish to congratulate himself, though I have little patience for those who take pride in boasting.

So that is the worry when I tell myself I loved Aguirre, the Wrath of God or My Name Is Red or whatever -- how do I distinguish between the externally-directed pleasure of fancying myself a connoisseur of fine film or literature, and the internal, actual pleasure of understanding and appreciating the work in question? I have an unexamined prejudice that the former pleasure is in bad faith, is boastful and something to be ashamed of.

Herzog's (and Kinski's) genius is certainly front and center in Aguirre -- it seems to me like it would be difficult to watch the movie without having the thought that it is the work of a genius, that it is Great Film. But, I'm not quite sure how to put this, the movie itself is so powerful and moving, the second-hand attributes of the movie are not primary in my mind while I'm watching it.

posted evening of December third, 2007: Respond
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... I said to myself: the young traveler was so determined to find the unknown realm, he let himself be transported without respite on roads that would take him to the threshold.

With this line, at the end of the third chapter, I feel like I am starting to get a handle on The New Life -- that it is the narrative this character has conjured up for himself to distance himself from disappointment and lack of fulfilment in his own life.

This book seems to me like it would make a great movie -- there is a definite cinematic feeling to some of the descriptive passages.* But I guess in the adaptation, the book which leads the main character to intimations of a new reality would need to be changed to a movie on videocassette or some such.

*What I mean to say is, I think the narration fetishizes visual impressions -- like for instance, the narrator describes the experience of reading the book several times in terms of light pouring out of the book. (Another argument for using a videotape instead of a book?) I often get the impression that the only connection between the world in his head and the world outside his head, is the portal of his eyes.

posted evening of December third, 2007: Respond
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Sunday, November 18th, 2007

It has happened to all of us: one day, one ordinary day when we imagine we're making our routine rounds in the world with ticket stubs and tobacco shreds in our pockets, our heads full of news items, traffic noise, troublesome monologues, we suddenly realize we are already someplace else, that we are not actually where our feet have taken us.
        -- The New Life

My reaction to this line is sort of characteristic of how I've been reading The New Life -- I'm reading along sort of lacksadaisically, thinking about different things without focus,* and then I stumble on something like this that just blows me away.

What I take away from this reading may be a disjointed collection of beautiful quotes.

*I'm trying to reconcile this with my reaction to the opening passage and have not quite figured out how to yet... The whole opening couple of pages was a moment of genius but I haven't quite figured out how to read the book as a whole yet.

posted afternoon of November 18th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, November 17th, 2007

🦋 The opening passage of The New Life

Reading this book is a puzzle -- every time I set it down & then pick it back up I am having to start from the beginning, reciting the words like poetry trying to burn them into my consciousness, "trying to find my path" into the book. -- Because I am trying to understand the transition from narrator reading, p. 1-7, to narrator with his mother on p 8 and outside on p 9 ff.

posted evening of November 17th, 2007: Respond

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

🦋 Good timing

Check out the opening passage of Pamuk's The New Life. I am going to quote it at length a bit because it's blowing my mind:

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed. Even on the first page I was so affected by the book's intensity I felt my body sever itself and pull away from the chair where I sat reading the book that lay before me on the table. But even though I felt my body dissociating, my entire being remained so concertedly at the table that the book worked its influence not only on my soul but on every aspect of my identity. It was such a powerful influence that the light surging from the pages illumined my face; its incandescence dazzled my intellect but also endowed it with brilliant lucidity. This was the kind of light within which I could recast myself; I could lose my way in this light; I already sensed in the light the shadows of an existence I had yet to know and embrace...

So it was that as I read my point of view was transformed by the book, and the book was transformed by my point of view. My dazzled eyes could no longer distinguish the world that existed within the book from the book that existed within the world... I began to understand that everything the book had initially whispered to me, then pounded into me, and eventually forced on me relentlessly had always been present, there, lying deep in my soul.

This is making me think -- I had already been thinking, based on some essays in Other Colors -- that Pamuk reads books the same way I do. (Irony alert -- that is just a rephrasing of what Pamuk is saying I should say -- but I'm sticking with it.) This passage that I'm quoting is what I wanted to say before about identifying with a text. (Well I should hasten to add -- I've never experienced it quite as intensely as the narrator is doing here -- but the idea's the same.) I'm not actually sure if I'm going to keep on reading this book right now -- but it is a really nice piece of information to have on hand.

posted evening of November 15th, 2007: Respond

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

Over at Unfogged, they're talking about books people are embarrassed about not having read. For me this usually comes up (nowadays I mean -- ten years ago I was incessantly feeling embarrassed about my lack of intellectual achievement) in the context of books which I should have read in order better to understand the book that I am reading at the moment, and enjoying, and I'm feeling like the enjoyment is a false consciousness because I don't have the background necessary to actually enjoy the book.

Like last night on the way home from the Truman Sparks show, I was reading Pamuk's marvellous introduction to the Turkish edition of Tristram Shandy, and my dormant feelings of embarrassment about being unable to get through Sterne were reawoken -- I thought I had gotten over that during the group read at Is There No Sin In It?* last year. Other authors Pamuk is making me feel bad about my lack of acquaintance with: Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Victor Hugo.

But Pamuk also gives me hope that I may pick Shandy up again someday:

Behind the smoke and noise of his anger, there is the knowledge that great literature is what gives man his understanding of his place in the scheme of things, and so, reminding himself that writing is one of the deepest and most wondrously strange of human activities, he picks up the book again in a moment of solitude.

posted afternoon of November 11th, 2007: Respond
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Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

🦋 Being Orhan Pamuk

Reading Pamuk's essay "How I Got Rid of Some of my Books", this evening, I was identifying almost completely with its author. The reader's complaint about having too many books and not wanting the ownership attachment to the contents of his library is, well, kind of commonplace* -- I've heard it voiced by many different people, felt it myself too; but Pamuk's voice is so distinctively concise, rings so true, I felt like the essay was me speaking. This is something I get with a lot of the books and stories and essays that I really enjoy, I will identify myself strongly with the author/narrator (or sometimes with a character) and perceive the book as being about me. Egotistical maybe but it can be very pleasant.

So then I was reading his next essay, "On Reading: Words or Images", where he lists three pleasures he takes from reading:

1. The pull of the other world I mentioned earlier. This could be seen as escapism. Even if only in your imagination, it is still good to escape the sadness of everyday life and spend some time in another world.
2. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six, reading was central to my efforts to make something of myself, elevate my consciousness, and thereby give shape to my soul...
3. Another thing that makes reading so pleasurable for me is self-awareness. When we read, there is a part of our mind that resists total immersion in the text and congratulates us on having undertaken such a deep and intellectual task...

And I thought (note that I was here not identifying strongly with the text, I was outside it taking notes) Hmm, I would agree with all of those points -- but I would add 4. The opportunity to identify with the author. But well, this is really in opposition with point (3), identifying with is the same as immersing yourself totally in the text -- so they are opposite poles both with some attraction for me. I think immersing myself too quickly and uncritically in a text can lead to lazy reading, and that this journal is in part a way of working to keep myself from reading that way. Real immersion of the kind that comes through understanding the text, is a consummation devoutly to be wished -- I had a lot of this when I was reading Snow. In "How I Got Rid of Some of my Books", Pamuk references Flaubert, whose works I have never read, but this statement makes me want to:

Flaubert was right to say that if a man were to read ten books with sufficient care, he would become a sage. As a rule, most people have not even done that, and that is why they collect books and show off their libraries.

*As is the opposite sentiment, expressing the exhilaration of having books and the love of books as physical objects -- the two sentiments can coexist quite contentedly within one reader -- indeed Pamuk gives voice to the latter one just a few pages later in "The Pleasures of Reading", when he says:

After finishing certain pages of this wondrous book, my eyes would pull back from the old volume in my hand to gaze at its yellowing pages from afar. (In the same way, when I was drinking a favorite soft drink as a child, I would stop from time to time to gaze lovingly at the bottle in my hand.)

-- which image reminds me strongly of Sylvia.

posted evening of November 7th, 2007: Respond
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Saturday, September 29th, 2007

🦋 The Sin of Solitude

I have read nearly to the end of the first section of Other Colors, titled "Living and Worrying". A couple of interrelated things: I think this section title is very apt; the essays seem to me to show Orhan in the world but not part of it, worrying about what is going on around him. I referred to some of the essays below as "impressionistic gems"; and while I don't understand everything that is communicated by calling something "impressionistic", I am going to tentatively say that it describes this book well. Where I am going with this is, roughly, that I'm not getting a good sense of Pamuk as a character, though I am certainly getting a wealth of insights about his surroundings. (Note: the prose is so fluid and comfortable, it is frequently impossible to distinguish my own insights from Pamuk's.) At first I found this a little surprising, since characterization is such a core strength of his story-telling; but thinking about it further, probably not such a strange thing, that such a wonderful story-teller would be shy about opening up his own psyche.

The "Earthquake" essay (and I'm presuming the next one, which is called "Earthquake Angst in Istanbul") is amazing in its evocation of the chaotic scene following the earthquake. Pamuk is a master of description and in these few pages gives me a sense of being there, being able to see the fallen buildings and debris. Something that really struck me (after a lifetime of reading opinion pieces about how poor planning contributes to damage and loss of life in eartchquakes, hurricanes etc.) is how Pamuk mentions in passing or just alludes to the substandard construction of apartment buildings on the islands south of Istanbul, the corruption that allowed contractors to evade construction codes, and lets the reader fill in the blanks.

Update: I noticed the Times review came out today. A very positive review although it seemed to focus a little more on Pamuk's life and work than on this book itself. Like maybe the reviewer did not know just what to make of the book? I was surprised they waited this long to review it.

posted afternoon of September 29th, 2007: Respond

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