The Red Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk

Simplicity is a very complex concept. ‘Keep it simple’ is good advice, but not if its result is a dumbing down of content or a dilution of ideas towards the patronizingly inane. Simplicity, when it indicates an elegant and succinct portrayal of otherwise complex material, is what writers often seek, but rarely achieve. For some truly great artists the quality is achieved apparently without effort. This is the quality and the power of illusion.

An impressive example of this complexity of the apparently simple can be found in The Red Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk. So much fiction takes the form of a biography that examples need not be listed. These life stories take many forms, from chronological sequence to end-of-life recollection, from jumbled memories to self-analysis. Very few would follow the highly original form of Orhan Pamuk’s novel and, crucially, the reader of this book will not be aware of its experimental originality until the end, perhaps even some time after finishing the book.

The Red Haired Woman is in the three distinct parts. The novel’s principal character is called Cem, though the narrative is well developed before we are aware of any name. In the first part, Cem is still at school. His impoverished family cannot raise the cash to enable the lad to attend a crammer to assist his studies, so he takes a holiday job labouring for a well digger. We are aware, though never explicitly, that there are complexities in these familial relationships. We are in Istanbul, where we habitually find Orhan Pamuk, but thirty years ago when the city had not sprawled to its current extent and perhaps where certain things were not discussed openly.

Mahmut, master of his trade, is the well digger. He and his two helpers begin to work on sloping ground in Őngőren which, at the time, is a sleepy little place beyond the city limits, where everyone knows everyone else's business and where modernization is just on the horizon. The well diggers go about their task during the day and retire to a bar in town most evenings. There is a theatre group in the town, and one of its members is a thirty-something woman with red hair. Cem becomes obsessed with her beauty and, as often is the case in Orhan Pamuk’s fiction, the sensation becomes all-consuming for this young and impressionable man. Stubbornly, the well excavation does not yield its goal and Cem extends his stay in Őngőren. Perhaps predictably, encounters with the red-haired woman do much to educate the young man. Eventually the labourer leaves the project in strange circumstances before it is finished to return home to Istanbul, leaving behind in Őngőren things that will continue to haunt him.

In part two of The Red Head Woman, we meet Cem again, but now he is an adult, university trained - so the crammer the labouring paid for did at least some good - and on the way to becoming a rich property developer, a significant but perhaps not major force in Istanbul’s modernisation. He is aware of much that he left behind in Őngőren, since the summer of well digging has left many indelible memories. These are brought into sharp focus when a contract to redevelop parts of the area comes across his desk and Cem decides to pursue the project. He thus needs to re-visit to the area and re-tread the only partially recognizable paths he trod during that personally influential summer some three decades previously. Some of the characters he knew those years ago are still around. Some of the issues that motivated dissent are still in focus.

Part three of the book is written after Cem's involvement with Őngőren has concluded. It is in this section that we hear a different perspective on Cem’s life and to reveal its detail in a review would devalue the impact of the book. Suffice it to say that from this different perspective, Cem's actions and memories take on a wholly different character. We knew all along that there was potential for consequences, but Cem never thought to find out what might have happened. But reality catches up, and resentment grows when it is ignored. All experience is particular, and we must all be aware that individual perspectives are nothing more than that, individual. It is the consequences that are shared.

But Orhan Pamuk’s The Red Haired Woman is much more than an individual fictional life. The well diggers, visiting the bar in Őngőren, chat about many things. Repeatedly, two stories are examined from different viewpoints. Oedipus, a man condemned to murder his father and marry his mother, is one. A perspective the well diggers explore is that Oedipus is not aware of the curse that directs his life, and that even when he consciously tries to avoid it shackles, the power of fate further condemns him to its confines. The second story, from the Shahmaneh, features Sohrab and Rostam. Almost counterbalancing Oedipus, this story has a father kill his son. And it is these themes, predetermination, fate, the paternal, maternal and filial, and then eventually powerlessness that form an intellectual backbone in the work. Cem the property developer is set to modernize the place that did so much to influence his personality, his outlook on life and his future. But the place will reassert itself in his life in a different, wholly unpredicted way that Cem, himself, created, but can neither influence nor control. The patricide and the filicide of the stories that obsessed Cem in his youth eventually fight it out in this brilliant book.

The Red Haired Woman, this short, accessible and apparently simple novel thus develops intellectual and philosophical dimensions, blended with its constant undercurrent of political identity and economic change. Only at the end does the reader become fully aware of the complexity of its themes, and how expertly Orhan Pamuk blends these apparently disparate ideas into a biographical whole called Cem, the principal character through which we experience an entire view of the world. And yet the reading of this book, start to finish, is always simple. The style is transparent and the reality is almost tangible. It is both personal and general, mundane and ontological, reassuringly simple and yet emotionally tangled and challenging. It is a perfect example of how simplicity is it the heart of the complex. Or was that the other way around?

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

When, some thirty years later, Paul Theroux repeated the journey that he had described in The Great Railway Bazaar, he declared travel writing to be ‘the lowest form of literary self-indulgence.’ His original journey in the early 1970s was a deliberate act, a ruse upon which to hang a book. The travel featured was nothing less than an occupation, whose sole product was to be collected and recorded experience. We, the readers, must thank him for his single-minded devotion to selfishness, for The Great Railway Bazaar takes us all the way there without having to leave the armchair.

The journey began and finished in London. In between Paul Theroux took the orient Express to Istanbul and then crossed Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan before doing the length of India. He even went to Sri Lanka by train. Then there was Burma and a meander through South-East Asia. His account of smoking cigarettes in Vientiane will stick in the mind. Malaysia and Singapore were taken in, the latter clearly not being to the writer’s taste. Japan was clearly a curious experience, but the Trans Siberia from near Vladivostok to Moscow seemed strangely predictable, its length being its major characteristic. Eventually, the final leg across Europe hardly counted, a mere step along a much bigger way.

Any such journey can only offer mere impressions of the places en route, but such first impressions are always interesting in themselves, if not always accurate or justified. Thirty years on, some of them may even have historical significance. It would be a challenging task these days to cross the current Iran and Afghanistan by rail. And a contemporary journey would surely cross China, a route barred to the 1970s independent traveller.

But it’s the people met along the way that give the book its prime characters. We never get to know these people and we encounter them largely as caricatures, but it is the experience of travel that is described, and this experience inevitably involves a multitude of these ephemeral encounters. They are always engaging. We expect to be confronted with the surprising, the unknown and the little understood. We expect the experience to be recorded, whilst the mundane is edited out of the account. And furthermore, we do try to make sense of our often confused responses to the unexpected. This is why we travel: at its base it is a challenge.

Paul Theroux does litter the trip with indulgence, however. There is a fairly constant search for alcoholic beverages, for instance. Furthermore, in several places there are encounters with and deliberate attempts to seek out the local low life. Offers of girls, boys, older women, wives, transvestites and every imaginable service are received. Sometimes, the services in question require some imagination. It is easy, of course, to sensationalise experience when it is sought at the margins of what a society dares to admit. In the case of Japan, where much of this material is located, it has to be admitted that the margins are rather wide.

Balancing this crudity is Paul Theroux’s constant desire to reflect upon his love of literature. Some of the material he recollects produces some wonderful insights, surprising juxtapositions and apposite comment.

Travel writing might be pure self-indulgence, but this particular example of the vice transcends the purely personal. It feels like being taken along for the ride. Thus, like all good travel writing, The Great railway Bazaar is not merely an account of another’s observations, it is nothing less than a journey to be experienced.

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

When I read Snow by Orhan Pamuk a second time, I will pay more attention to its central character, nicknamed Ka. He is a poet, a Turkish émigré, fresh from Germany. He’s also a journalist and is travelling to Kars, a town in north-eastern Turkey (can the similarity of name be mere coincidence?) to investigate a series of crimes. It’s the detail of these crimes that give the book its poignancy, tension and fascination. 

Girls have committed suicide. These are crimes. In Islam suicide is a sin, eternally damning. So what drove apparently happy, conventional, balanced young women to take their own lives? On the surface there are some obvious candidates for the answer. Turkey’s secular though military state requires women not to wear a scarf, while their religion demands it. Could it be this political and cultural tension that has provoked these women, out of shame, to end their lives?

My review will not be a plot-spoiler. In the case of Snow, that would also be hard, because it’s the issues and contexts that matter, not the events. Suffice it to say that while in Kars, Ka meets many people who can offer opinion and proffer hypothesis on the town’s recent history. There’s a newspaper owner who, in order to promote circulation, predicts the news. There’s an old-fashioned communist, a one-time agitator, whose current activities appear to be thoroughly questionable. There’s a travelling theatre group who will play great roles in the plot. There’s an underground Islamist on the run. He’s called Blue, surely a reference to themes raised in My Name Is Red. Political associations of colour might be naïve, but might also be a tad revealing. There’s military personnel, policemen, secret agents, an occasional murderer. There’s also snow, and enough of it to cut off the town and prevent outside knowledge of a shooting coup where interests vie for control.

And if this were not enough, there’s a hotel owner with two daughters of stunning beauty. One, İpik, was once the apple of Ka’s desire. His return promises a long-deferred bite of forbidden fruit. But then there’s politics, history, culture, religion, rules, regulations, laws, even personal preferences that can get in the way. Snow is a complex novel whose density needs to be fully entered for a reader to share its preoccupations. It’s an intense experience, a miasma of contradictions, political, cultural, religious, the whole gamut. 

The only problem with Snow, in my opinion, is its central character, Ka. This is why next time I must be more careful to assess his sincerity. Unlike most poets of any worth, he writes from revelation, not from hard work, etching out a word at a time. For me, this does not seem genuine. But then, as the book unfolds, the reader realises that these are merely Orhan Pamuk’s own recollections of Ka, described from afar. Some years later, he has tracked the poet down to his apartment in Germany, soon after he has been murdered by an anonymous assassin. Now I wonder who that might have been? As ever in Orhan Pamuk’s work, Snow is deeply enmeshed within the characteristics and contradictions of Turkish culture and society.

Equally, as we would expect from Orhan Pamuk, it allows the Western reader (politically and culturally Western, not geographically) to appreciate how Western values, so rarely questioned on the inside of the argument, can be perceived as essentially imperial, colonial and perhaps oppressive. If you like your reading to provoke thought, please do read Orhan Pamuk’s Snow.

The Museum Of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

The Museum Of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk presents what might appear to be a daunting challenge. It runs to more than 500 pages and a flick through the text reveals scant use of dialogue. It all looks very dense. There is also the added challenge of knowing that the novel is set in an unfamiliar cultural landscape, underpinned by assumptions we may not share, assumptions that we may not even recognise.

But no reader need be daunted. I read it – and even re-read some sections – in less than two days. Rarely have I been drawn by a writer inside a character in the way that Orhan Pamuk invited me to become Kemal Bey. The book is a perfect example of a work that tells you nothing, but takes you all the way there.

Kemal is a rich young man at the start of the book’s recollected but largely linear story. It is 1975. Kemal has returned from business school in the USA and has taken up a perhaps assured position in Satsat, literally Sell-Sell, his family’s distribution and export company. It’s a successful company, making money hand over fist, and provides its owners with both status and wealth. Kemal is part of Istanbul’s, even Turkey’s elite, a rich man even among the rich. He can have what he wants. His life is on a flat track in the fast lane from the start. He is close to engagement and marriage to Sibel, a beautiful woman he loves.

And then one day Kemal visits a shop to buy his girlfriend a present. He recognises the girl who serves him as the daughter of a distant relation, a woman he used to call Aunt Nesibe. There was no direct blood tie, perhaps, but ties with this poorer branch of the family were stronger when Kemal was young.

Hence he remembers the shop girl who serves him as Füsun, Aunt Nesibe’s daughter. She is just 18, has bleached hair in the modern style and promises an imminent and full bloom of womanhood. Kemal is transfixed and from that moment on his life is changed. The Museum Of Innocence – at least in part – is a novel about obsession. Kemal wants to possess, to own every aspect of Füsun. He yearns for her body – that might be taken for granted – but he also wants to absorb her, in some ways to become part of her. 

For him she is a Madonna, a sex object, a future wife, an analyst, a support and a superstar all in one slight, beautiful frame. He changes every aspect of his life so that it fits the shape she projects merely so that he can metaphorically and literally wrap himself around her. In one of their encounters, she loses a monogrammed earring. Kemal finds it, but doesn’t return it. And so this earring becomes the first of many things associated with Füsun that Kemal collects. Eventually these thousands of artefacts become the exhibits in his museum dedicated to her, Kemal’s museum of innocence.

But Orham Pamuk’s writing is never merely one-layered. In The Museum of Innocence he takes us on a tour of Istanbul’s high society and culture. We experience – not just observe – clashes of culture, tradition versus modernity, family versus individuality, responsibility versus interest. Events that made Turkish history of the period affect everyone’s lives. Political and economic change go hand in hand, though sometimes the hands are fists. We meet Zaim, for instance, whose company makes Meltem, Turkey’s favourite domestically-made soft drink.

But as the years pass, can his brand compete with Coke and Pepsi? And if so, what tactic should it employ to find its market? Should it use Western advertising methods? Kemal also meets Feridun, a budding film director who, via various mechanisms eventually persuades Kemal to finance a film company as a joint venture. Lemon Film’s first offering is hammered by the urban critics, but poor communities throughout Anatolia can identify with its traditional message and so it becomes a capitalist hit. Kemal has success is almost every aspect of his life but not, it seems, in love, a subject he confines to his museum. He becomes, incidentally, a compulsive museum visitor!

A review of The Museum Of Innocence cannot begin to offer a flavour of the entire book. Its canvas is too broad, its achievement too great, its success too complete. Obsession is the key word, however, and Orhan Pamuk manages to draw the willing reader into Kemal’s psyche, so that his tunnel vision becomes an obsession for the reader. We see his world through his eyes, and thus feel what he feels. Perhaps we even empathise. Looking back, The Museum Of Innocence, like life itself, is not such a long journey after all.

Voyagers, travel stories by Philip Spires

People should not do quite a number of things, including reviewing their own work. Well, I suppose that’s another resolution I have just broken, because here is Philip Spires’s review of Voyagers by Philip Spires. Voyagers is a set of short stories loosely based on the experience of travel. They all portray a srong sense of place alongside characters that find themselves in unfamiliar settings. Several of the stories have grown out of personal experience, or sometimes events I witnessed along the way. I have traveled a little over the years and it has always seemed to me that when a voyager ventures beyond the habitual comfort zone, then the potential for surprise and challenge increase, thus presenting opportunities to learn. And that learning, as often as not, is about oneself. Voyagers begins with Discoverers, a novella. Mr Tony has worked several contracts as an expatriate biology teacher in Brunei. We meet him as he sets off with yet another group of students on a field visit into the rain forest. These are jungles he knows well and loves. They are, however, under threat, and are being burned by people trying to establish building rights. Mr Tony has a campaign against these illegal practices and his efforts are about to uncover publishable truth. He learns over a long weekend, however, that people of power have their own schemes to stop his work. Assessors is a grovelling email written by a professional of the future who has seen his status redefined. The story was inspired by an interview with the physicist Michio Kaku. On a morning when London Heathrow’s new terminal could not match passengers with their luggage, he confidently claimed on BBC Radio that the near future would confirm our ability to tele-transport entire molecules in real time. Initiates is also set in Brunei. Aussies Ted and Sylvia have been invited to a Malay wedding. Ted works alongside the bride most days and knows her well, well enough of course to be invited to this normally wholly local event. Despite easy-going friendship and apparent shared experience, however, there is one part of the day’s custom that reminds both Ted and Sylvie that they remain mere guests in this place. I know that the principal characters of Protesters did in fact meet. One, a president of a Central American republic outlawed by the West was to address a solidarity group meeting in Westminster Central Hall. An aged writer – and a very famous one as well – is also present. His personal history suggests a pointed conversation between the two men, a conversation that forms the story. I put them together for a few minutes before they emerge to deliver their speeches. Predators is set in Nya Trang on Vietnam’s beautiful coast. A holidaying couple find themselves witness to predatory acts along the hotel corridor. Candid observation of the society and their surroundings suggest that such exploitation might not be too rare. A few decades later, the memory comes home. Seers is set in pre-war Yugoslavia. A group of Australian travellers are caravanning across Europe. In a Dubrovnik café they meet a bar-fly who likes to brag about the quality of his contacts. There may be truth in some of his words. He may even be the arms dealer he claims to be. Who knows? Strangers is the shortest of the stories. Set in England’s north Devon, a couple on a long weekend seek rest and recuperation in an idyllic coastal village. They idyll soon fades to a reality as they learn more of local lives. Victims is a set of emails. An aid worker finds herself caught up in the complications of struggle in Sri Lanka. She seeks advice on how to deal with the unique position she occupies by virtue of the information she has learned. Who does she think she is talking to? Whose interests will prevail? And is she, herself, now in danger? Wonderers follows a retired Englishman who is trying to pay his personal homage to wonders of the ancient world. These dependable, classical, trustworthy images of unquestionable greatness and significance offer him confirmation of the psychological stability and order he craves. His means of accessing them, alongside the contrasting and challenging experience of visiting them offer up difficult questions, however. He finds an answer that surprises him. Worshippers is set in Florence. A recent art school graduate finds her life at a crossroads. Her secular upbringing has created a near-religious commitment to art. But her own identity and self-obsession often appears at the centre of her universe. She meets a resting actor, a man whose pragmatism seems at first to be attractive. But he is troubled by something, an emotional response she resolves to uncover. They do seem to share a passion for art until, that is, aesthetics get in the way. Voyagers thus examines how a traveller’s identity might be simultaneously questioned and confirmed by the surprising moments that arise when we are beyond our own context. The voyagers themselves sometimes emerge both richer and wiser, but sometimes their limitations are merely confirmed. Voyagers is available both as a paperback and an ebook, including a Kindle edition.

A review of The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

I have visited Turkey, but not Istanbul. It’s one of those iconic places that keeps cropping up in travel plans, but then gets overlooked, possibly because its name fits so easily into my thoughts that I convince myself I have already been there. Having just read Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, that illusion will be orders of magnitude stronger. Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature and this seems to have spurned new translations of his work, new versions which hopefully can widen his readership in the English-speaking world.

The Black Book is a gigantic work. And, in the way that I suspect most readers might understand the term, there is no plot. Suffice it to say that Galip wakes up one morning and his wife has disappeared. He assumes she has gone off to seek out her first husband, Celal, a well-known newspaper columnist. Galip sets off to find Celal and, he assumes, his wife, but strangely the journalist has also disappeared. As a means to help him track down the two missing people, Galip immerses himself in Celal’s life, his writing and, gradually, his very identity. Effectively he becomes the person he is seeking. He re-reads his past work and discovers unknown things about his own, his wife’s and her former husband’s past. By then, however, we cannot be sure if we are dealing with reminiscences of Celal, Galip’s interpretations of them, Galip’s reworking of them, or, indeed, Galip’s own words presented as if they were those of Celal.

But the plot in The Black Book is almost irrelevant. It’s not a book that one reads to discover what happens. It’s a book that’s replete with flavour, experience and history, and the reader feasts on vast helpings of all three.

Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul – let’s face it, there is no other city on earth that has been named three times and where, on each occasion, that name has passed into language as an expression of political, strategic, religious and economic pre-eminence. It’s a city that bridges continents, ideologies and faiths. Nowhere else on earth has a greater claim to the very quintessence of humanity than Istanbul. And yet modern Istanbul is a Turkish city, and perhaps its most fascinating aspect is its potential to mirror contemporary debates on religion versus secularism, tradition versus modernity, imperial past versus global present.

The Black Book has thirty-six chapters, each having its own title and prefacing quotation. The form, at least in part, is its content, in that each chapter could be read as if it were an article written by Celal or by Galip impersonating Celal. There is no linear narrative. We experience what inspired the writer and there is no ordering of time or place. But we feel we are in that city. We feel we are living its history, whatever that might be. And we feel we are experiencing contemporary debates on its and its people’s identity. The city is central to everything in the book, with its multiple histories and allegiances mixed into the melting pot of its contemporary form.

Throughout, Galip finds he gradually becomes his quarry, Celal. He trades identities and roles, but never permanently, never for sure. In this way the characters become the city, whose sense of place and multiplicity of identities pervade all, thus mirroring the apparent confusion of its – and humanity’s – complexity. But the people eventually are always welcomed by some aspect of the city’s – and humanity’s – multi-faceted nature.

The Black Book is a work that demands to be re-read, but not because it is in any way a difficult or impenetrable read. I have never been to Istanbul, but like the book, I feel it will be an experience that, once tried, will demand to be re-visited.