My tears were falling into the pot

I was cooking halva, the special kind that's made of flour and butter after someone dies. My tears were falling into the pot, disappearing among the little clumps of flour and sugar, and with each tear that vanished, I felt like another memory was gone. Would we run out of butane gas? Should I have put a bit more meat in the vegetable stew? Whenever people got tired of crying, they came into the kitchen and lifted the lid off a pot to stare quietly at its contents. As if crying for a long time meant you could come over and see what was cooking.

I came to the end of A Strangeness in My Mind, by Orhan Pamuk, and my initial comments stand: it's mostly boring and a little sad. The character Mevlut is somewhat unlikeable, and for all the tedious detail of his life, his motivations and actions remain opaque to me.

Maybe that's the point. That no matter our upbringing and environment, no matter our experiences and outlook on issues, we still end up doing dumb things. Well, not dumb, necessarily, but we still sometimes base our words and actions on something ineffable, that doesn't jive with what our psychological makeup would indicate, or that contradicts our views, whether stated or assumed. We just muddle through life, and it doesn't always make sense.

The latter part of the novel makes a big deal of our words versus our intent. And it's still not clear to me which is meant to be more important.

So this isn't one of my favourite Pamuk books. It's two stories really — a love story, which I found intriguing, and the ongoing tribulations of a street vendor, which failed to engage me — and in my view they don't fit very comfortably together.

Between Public and Private: Orhan Pamuk on the Intentions of Words and the Heart

Strangeness

A novel, for me, is an excuse to pin down, collect, and put together all the little things about daily life that I like writing about. A novel is an excuse to, just like a museum, preserve the details, colors, tastes, social relationships, rituals, advertisements, smells, the chaotic richness and the sentiments that that richness lends us in the city.

— Orhan Pamuk, "I Walk in the City All the Time": An Interview with Orhan Pamuk by Tobias Carroll, Hazlitt Magazine.

It's a new year, baby! Starting now.

It seems I've allowed my time to be swallowed by life, death, and facebook these last few months instead of blogging. I have, however, continued to read, though at a slower rate than in past years. I hate the feeling of not being able to organize my thoughts and set them down in this little piece of internet I call home (you know, at the house icon); I hate the feeling of not having the time to do so.

I have a few comments about A Strangeness in My Mind, the latest novel from Orhan Pamuk. I have not finished reading this book, but I want to. I had a digital review copy, which I let languish a little because life, but then I found myself taking train rides and having the luxury of long, uninterrupted blocks of time to read, and in this way I managed to read about two-thirds of this not so slender novel.

One morning I was happily reading along. My layover gave me time to grab a coffee. Cozily settled into the connecting train, I opened up my e-reader to be greeted by an error — the rights had expired.

So I want to know what happens next, but not because I'm invested in these characters' fates, but because I need to know if
there's a payoff. Frankly, most of what I'd read verged on boring; that is, it wasn't the novel I was expecting to read after the opening chapters describing an elopement. The next 400 pages cover the plight of the peasant coming to the big city to find his fortune, details regarding street vendors and the yogurt-selling trade, against a diachronic view of Istanbul.

I was cut off in my reading just as the narrative was returning to that promised in the beginning, and Mevlut was, it seems to me, discovering religion. That is, just as it was getting interesting.

I need to know if the last third of the novel, makes the first two-thirds relevant. How Istanbul has changed over the last several decades — culturally, socioeconomically, and politically — is actually interesting to me. But to my mind that story would've been better served in a separate collection of stories. I wanted to know more about how it was that, and what came to transpire when, Mevlut married the "wrong" girl.

I'd read some blurbs to the effect that this was a feminist novel. After 400+ pages, I wouldn't say so, but I need to know if the remaining 200 pages make it so.

The novel also makes use of a narrator-switching gimmick. That totally worked in My Name Is Red, but in Strangeness it's a distracting element. There's no regularity to it, or much reason for it beyond laziness to tell of events that couldn't otherwise be easily incorporated into a singular perspective; none of those secondary voices are much developed. Perhaps it works better in print where voices can be distinguished typographically.

Also, what exactly is the strangeness in Mevlut's mind? Is it something to do with religion?

I deliberately stayed away from reviews of this novel, so I could form an unbiased opinion. Let me pause a moment to check out some of those reviews now.

The Guardian, Alberto Manguel:

Though at times it reads as a cross between a history manual and private memoir, A Strangeness in My Mind is above all a love letter to the city in all its faded, messy, dusty glory.

The Independent, Boyd Tonkin:

Across the 600-odd pages of this epic fusion of soap opera, family saga and state-of-the-nation novel, Pamuk's beloved Istanbul mutates into that kind of skyscraping agglomeration: no longer a "familiar home" but "dreadful and dazzling at once".

The New York Times, Martin Riker:

A Strangeness in My Mind becomes a tremendous concatenation of voices and places and politics and culture, gathered around a melancholy hero and a winding psychological plot.

The Scotsman, Stuart Kelly:

Mevlut, of course, is a model not of prevarication, but the awful capability of seeing the virtues in both sides. He likes the Communists because they care about the poor, and he likes the conservatives because a good man needs a break. He even likes the Islamists because their heritage should not be disparaged, and God, is after all, Great. He is not a weathercock, but an amalgam: it is possible to have all these beliefs at once, Pamuk suggests, and that complexity is in itself a good thing.

I was unable to get my review copy extended, and when I first checked, by library didn't yet have it. I won't buy it, because I'm doubtful that the ending is worth it. My library has since acquired it, and I'm second in line for it now. So maybe my disappointment with A Strangeness in My Mind will coalesce into something more positive in a few months' time.

Has anyone read A Strangeness in My Mind? Is it worth seeing through to the end?

These are the other books I've finished reading since August, and I have every intention of writing more about them here.

• Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the fifteenth century, by Charlotte Dacre — which was not at all what I'd expected, omitting as it does "gothic" from its subtitle, which might have better prepared me for its hysterical revenge, bloodlust, and satanic qualities.
• Via Roma, by Mary Melfi — which was mostly forgettable, but portrayed both Montreal and Italian culture and so made for a nice comfort read after my Italian vacation this summer.
• A God in Ruins, by Kate Atkinson — which made me sob, several times, but the part about one minor character dying from brain cancer helped me deal with the fact of my brother's brain tumour.
• Slade House, by David Mitchell — which was creepy and intense and perfect for when I was alone at night
• The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi — which was difficult, but represents the kind of book I wish I were more fluent in reading.
• The Utopia of Rules, by David Graeber — which was somewhat cathartic amid the paperwork and complications I encountered in buying a condo and negotiating a mortgage.
• In the Kitchen, by Monica Ali — which made me hate dumb men for doing dumb things.

So now the only things between me and my blog over the next six or seven weeks are travelling for the holidays, some shopping for furniture and appliances, packing up house, and navigating the other logistical nightmares of moving. Nothing I can't get through.

Notebooks, neckties, and homework

For one and half school years, between sixth and seventh grade, Mevlut worried constantly about where to sit in the classroom. The inner turmoil he endured while grappling with this question was as intense as the ancient philosophers' worries over how to live a moral life. Within a month of starting school, Mevlut already knew that if wanted to become "a scientist Atatürk would be proud of," as the principal liked to say, he would have to befriend the boys from good families and nice neighbourhoods, whose notebooks, neckties, and homework were always in good order. Out of the two-thirds of the student body who, like Mevlut, lived in a poor neighbourhood, he had yet to meet anyone who did well in school. Once or twice in the school yard, he'd bumped into boys from other classes who took school seriously because they, too, had heard it said, "This one's really clever, he should be sent to school," but in the apocalyptically overcrowded school, he had never managed to communicate with these lost and lonely souls who, like the quiz team, were belittled by the rest as nerds. This was partly because the nerds themselves regarded Mevlut with some suspicion, as he, too, was from a poor neighborhood. He rightly suspected that their rosy worldview was fatally flawed: deep down, he felt that these "clever" boys, who thought they would become rich one day if only they could learn the sixth-grade geography textbook by heart, were, in fact, fools, and the last thing he wanted was to be anything like them.

— from A Strangeness in My Mind, by Orhan Pamuk.

Slowly, like an ant

[A] novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.

— Orhan Pamuk, The Paris Review Interviews, IV.

I won a publisher's contest some time ago and was so very pleased to find the prize on my doorstep last week: The Paris Review Interviews (Boxed Set) I-IV. (The corners are smushed and one face is thoroughly gouged, but it still functions perfectly well as a slipcase. The books are fine, and their contents are priceless.)

I've read some of the interviews online, of course, but I expect the books to serve as a sometime reference and serendipitous source of inspiration, there when I need it.

(Here's an excerpt from the Pamuk interview. I remember being struck by a habit he told of, when working in the same space as he was living, of leaving home in the morning as if were going to work, walking round the block, and returning to sit down to work. If ever I find myself working from home again, I mean to try this strategy.)

I'm not really sure how to read this collection of interviews. It's not the sort of thing to be read cover to cover. Although, I'm discovering that a single interview makes for excellent metro reading, and I think I'd be wise to leave a volume in the bathroom.

I've decided to let my reading lead me through them. Since I've recently read novels by Orhan Pamuk and Graham Greene, I thought I'd check out those interviews first. I have Haruki Murakami on my shelf and I'm planning to get to it next month; then I'll read the interview to complement the novel.

Sometimes a reader too must move slowly, like an ant.

The naïve and the sentimental novelist

Excerpts from The Norton Lectures, delivered by Orhan Pamuk:

"Being a novelist is the art of being both naïve and reflective at the same time."

"The reader and writer can never agree on the fictionality of the novel[...] In a corner of our minds we know that this lack of perfect agreement between the reader and the writer is the driving force of the novel."

"The art of the novel is the knack of being able to speak about ourselves as if we were another person and about others as if we were them."

"We feel that we sometimes think with words and sometimes with images. Often we skip from one to the other."

"I too enjoy reading a novel that no one else appears to be interested in with the feeling of having discovered it myself."

Pamuk is both naïve and sentimental in The Museum of Innocence, and it is to his credit.

The museum

So the effect of that moment I was living was of something I was remembering. Visitors to my Museum of Innocence must compel themselves, therefore, to view all objects displayed therein — the buttons, the glasses, the old photographs, and Füsun's combs — not as real things in the present moment, but as my memories.

Here is an incomplete inventory of the objects on display:

- the shop sign that had once hung on the door where she worked (p 5)
- school photograph of maternal grandfather (p 8)
- an illustrated menu, an advertisement, a matchbook, and a napkin from Fuay, a European-style restaurant (p 12)
- the newspaper advertisement, the commercials, and bottles of strawberry, peach, orange, and sour cherry flavors of Turkey's first domestic fruit soda, Meltem, in memory of our optimism and the happy-go-lucky spirit of the day (p 26)
- Füsun's fuchsia dress (p 27)
- one of Füsun's earrings (first exhibit) (p 28)
- floral batiste handkerchief, as a symbol of solicitude (p 30)
- mother's crystal inkwell and pen set, symbolizing refinement and fragile tenderness (p 30)
- belt with oversize buckles, as a symbol of melancholy (p 31)
- photographs and postcards (p 41)
- pictures of movies stars form Zambo (p 45)
- cigarette, usher's flashlight, Alaska Frigo ice cream, symbolizing the desire and solitude of youth (p 47)
- Spleen cologne, from Paris (p 49)
- cigarette packets, teacup, glass, seashell to evoke heavy, draining, crushing atmosphere; girlish hair clip to remind us the stories happened to a child (p 55)
- painting, commissioned; view of Füsun's apartment, with chestnut tree (p 67)
- small collection of funeral photographs (p 83)
- plaster bust of his father, with plastic mustache (p 87)
- postcards of Istanbul Hilton (p 102)
- photo with Ship-Sinker Güven (who ran an insurance company); photo with gentleman banker (p 128)
- clock, matchsticks, matchbooks (p 146)
- depiction of internal organs of human body, from ad for painkiller (p 148)
- picnic basket, with thermos with tea, stuffed grape leave, boiled eggs, soda bottles, tablecloth (p 152)
- painting by Melling, of view similar to picnic view (p 152)
- door chime (p 161)
- stapler, ashtray with company logo (p 171)
- menus and glasses from Fuaye (p 174)
- letter to Füsun (p 179)
- newsclipping, with Ceyda's official beauty contest photo (p 180)
- collar of father's pyjamas, one of his slippers (p 182)
- items from mother's drawers (p 188)
- telephone token (p 201)
- hotel key, headed stationery, replica of sign (p 210)
- enlarged photo of father's toes (p 224)
- bolt of bathroom in Füsun's apartment, but not her lipstick (p 242)
- oil painting, commissioned; view of main room in Füsun's house from point of view of canary (p 250)
- little tin spoon, saltshaker, half-eaten ice cream cone (p 256-7)
- ticket stubs from summer cinemas, lobby photographs, advertisements (p 260)
- Meltem soda bottle (272)
- slender Buren wristwatch (p 288)
- model of Füsun's apartment (p 298)
- picture of view from window in back room (p 300)
- tombala set used for eight consecutive years at Füsun's house (p 322)
- 4,213 of Füsun's cigarette butts, each with its own soul (p 395)
- a pair of optical illusions (p 421)
- blue bikini (p 436)

Anyone remotely interested in the politics of civilization will be aware that museums are the repositories of those things from which Western Civilization derives its wealth of knowledge, allowing it to rule the world, and likewise when the true collector, on whose efforts these museums depend, gathers together his first objects, he almost never asks himself what will be the ultimate fate of his hoard. When their first pieces passed into their hands, the first true collectors — who would later exhibit, categorize, and catalog their great collections (in the first catalogs, which were the first encyclopedias) — initially never recognized these objects for what they were.

This is an excruciatingly lovely book, this book being The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk. Through all these objects, these simple objects — some conventional mementos, others ridiculously banal — a love story is told, and more.

As visitors admire the objects and honor the memory of Füsun and Kemal, with due reverence, they will understand that, like the tales of Leyla and Mecnun or Hüsn and Aşk, this is not simply a story of lovers, but of the entire realm, that is, of Istanbul.

It is a book in 3 parts, the first section being about Kemal's relationships and how he sabotages them. It is very much about the nature of relationships, traditional versus modern, and, in particular, the issue of a woman's attitude to her own virginity. To be a modern woman in 1970s Turkey is a complicated, contradiction-laden thing. And it's evident that Kemal doesn't fully understand it either. Kemal is engaged to Sibel, a beautiful socialite, but he has fallen in love with Füsun. We see Kemal grapple with social conventions and learn his own mind. He makes choices and deals (or not) with their aftermath.

The second section is the meat of Kemal's obsession. It is a meditation on time and memory, and love, of course. This is the story of courtship, in a way. Kemal's grand romantic gestures are comprised of countless trivialities that finally are seen to sum up to something greater than its individually insignificant parts. And yet, it is in those discrete acts that everything is contained.

My life has taught me that remembering Time — that line connecting all the moments that Aristotle called the present — is for most of us a rather painful business. When we try to conjure up the line connecting these moments, or, as in our museum, the line connecting all the objects that carry those moments inside them, we are forced to remember that the line comes to an end, and to contemplate death. As we get older and come to the painful realization that this line per se has no real meaning — a sense that comes to us cumulatively in intimations we struggle to ignore — we are brought to sorrow. But sometimes these moments we call the "present" can bring us enough happiness to last a century, [...]

The third section is quite short and is really more of a postscript. I'm not sure what purpose it serves to the novel as a whole... It allows Pamuk to insert the character of an author named Pamuk, commissioned by Kemal to write his story, as a guide to the museum. So that's a neat trick. Apart from that, I suppose it allows a couple points to be cleared up, things the narrator couldn't've known, and a few things are reported as being said, and I can see that it would've been difficult to have characters say these things naturally within their own narratives. Also presented here is a kind of philosophy of museums. But the astute reader would already have understood these things. Their reinforcement here is superfluous. The story by this time is essentially over. I almost wonder if the novel might be stronger without this section.

Similarly, the book contains an index of characters, absolutely useless to the average reader, but it is in keeping with the philosophy of museum: that it is not directed to the casual visitor, but it takes on import only from the perspective of the subject under examination (the museum's reason for being). The list acts as an acknowledgement of contributors.

It's kind of a disturbing book, actually. (It feels at times a little uncomfortably like Nabokov, for reasons I can't pinpoint but generally to do with the nature of obsession.) I don't know if our narrator is particularly sympathetic. It's not that he treats women badly, but he does some stupid things regarding women and he's such a guy about it. (I mean, he lies to Füsun! He actually thinks it's the right thing to do, he must believe he can get away with it, but he's kind of a jerk about it.) So it's a weird thing to get all wrapped up in his obsession: I don't think we're meant to fully understand it as we go along, it is the point of the novel to make us come round to understanding it.

We're led through this museum of a book, waiting to be told how it came to be. To what tragic end did this love come? You just know — the tone, the verb tenses — that all this, this love, is over. But the obsession continues.

The weirdness is amplified by the fact that we don't really know the object of Kemal's obsession. We know Füsun only through his eyes, and there are times we must question her innocence — is she playing her own game, is she acting out of anger, spite, revenge — we don't really know her at all.

This love is not innocent, nor are the parties to it. So I'm not sure about the innocence:

Main Entry: in·no·cence
Pronunciation: \ˈi-nə-sən(t)s\
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
1 a : freedom from guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil : blamelessness b : chastity c : freedom from legal guilt of a particular crime or offense d (1) : freedom from guile or cunning : simplicity (2) : lack of worldly experience or sophistication e : lack of knowledge : ignorance
2 : one that is innocent
3 : bluet

Chastity (as abstention from intercourse) is a factor, but I don't think it is central, except insofar as it leads to a chastening of character. Perhaps the museum is less a tribute than an attempt at absolution from guilt.

This is a gorgeous novel. I don't think it's as important as Snow, but I suspect it's more accessible, with a kind of quiet, noble beauty about it. It's about this timeless thing called love, after all, dwelling on all its elements in Proustian detail. And happiness! Have I mentioned happiness? No matter how tragic its end, there's a lot of happiness in love.

More
Excerpt: Kissing.

Jeremy is reading The Museum of Innocence and blogging about it as he goes. (I love this approach to reading/blogging, where reactions and associations are more immediate. I wish I did more of this, managed my time better, instead of saving it all up for a binge.)

Washington Post: "And as Kemal becomes more and more obsessed, even ill, in his irrational pursuit of happiness, we cannot help but see that he is utterly blind to the dire politics of his time. Is it lovesickness or innocence or just plain apathy that so distracts him from the bombs, the riots, the crackdowns, the unfortunate ranks among his schoolmates who are being dragged away to jail?"

The National (Abu Dhabi): "But The Museum of Innocence is far more ambitious than it might first seem; before long, Pamuk spins his love story into a damning social history of Turkish taboos and traditions."

New York Review of Books (Pico Iyer): "Every detail, in short, speaks of a culture of quixotic aspirations."

The Harvard Crimson: "The museum-like quality of novels is about preservation, conservation, and resistance to being forgotten."

Norton Lectures:
Excerpts from "The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist," delivered by Orhan Pamuk.
Summarized in Harvard Magazine.

Interviews:
NPR
International Festival of Authors

Today

Today I am sick, with aches and intense sinus pressure and a very sore throat.

We had a whirlwind weekend, in Toronto, celebrating an aunt's 80th birthday, with probably near 80 family members, family friends. It made me proud to bring J-F more fully into the family fold, meeting cousins he'd never met. It made me proud that Helena was bright-eyed and sweet as ever, and that my mother could show her off before the clan.

Helena was a bit overwhelmed. "They love me so much. And everybody wants to give me presents!"

I slept most of the drive home yesterday. All I wanted was a Neo Citran and a blanket.

It didn't take much convincing this morning — J-F told my I should stay home today, and I said OK. Today, I'm a little bit glad to be a little bit sick, that I could nap and read and nap some more, and finish The Museum of Innocence (which is absolutely exquisite and highly recommended), that I could hang out with my cat.

Kissing

Kissing Füsun was no longer a provocation devised to test and to express our attraction for each other; it was something we did for the pleasure of it, and as we made love we were both amazed to discover love's true essence. It was not just our wet mouths and our tongues that were entwined but our respective memories. So whenever we kissed, I would kiss her first as she stood before me, then as she existed in my recollection. Afterward, I would open my eyes momentarily to kiss the image of her a moment ago and then one of more distant memory, until thoughts of other girls resembling her would commingle with both those memories, and I would kiss them, too, feeling all the more virile for having so many girls at once; from here it was a simple thing to kiss her next as if I were someone else, as the pleasure I took from her childish mouth, wide lips, and playful tongue stirred my confusion and fed ideas heretofore not considered ("This is a child," went one idea — "Yes, but a very womanly one," went another), and the pleasure grew to encompass all the various personae I adopted as I kissed her, and all the remembered Füsuns that were evoked when she kissed me. It was in these first long kisses, in our lovemaking's slow accumulation of particularity and ritual, that I had the first intimations of another way of knowing, another kind of happiness that opened a gate ever so slightly, suggesting a paradise few will ever know in this life. Our kisses delivered us beyond the pleasures of flesh and sexual bliss for what we sensed beyond the moment of the springtime afternoon was as great and wide as Time itself.

— from The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk.

The stack

Pictured in random order, but described in a particular order according to a logic I couldn't possibly begin to explain to anyone.

(I've already actually read a couple of these, but they're still in the stack as books I have to contend with (write about, shelve, pass on to someone else). It may not look like much of a stack, but it's enough to make me feel daunted — I've gotten pretty good at not acquiring books I don't actually mean to read fairly immediately. Sure, I have a shelf of book I haven't gotten to in years, but I do my best not to let it grow.)

The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story, by Hanan Al-Shaykh. This was a review copy and I'm not sure why I accepted it because it didn't sound like the sort of thing I would ordinarily read. But! It was captivating! I was not familiar with the author's name, but apparently she's quite revered for her short stories. I was a bit put off by the prologue, which sets up how this book came to be; there was a lot of ego (both Hanan's and her mother's) and little humility. But I guess it speaks to the author's skill that she took me past that and so convincingly channeled her mother's story, about growing up as a woman, and a free-spirited one, in Lebanon in the middle of the last century, with fairy-tale-like exuberance. (Here's a great review.)

The Mystery Guest: An Account, by Grégoire Bouillier. Along with the Greene and Mann below, these are books I ordered for myself just because I really wanted them, and I'd put it off long enough. (The trailer for this book is among the first I ever saw, and still my favourite.) It's a kind of memoir, about a guy who overthinks the significance of every single social gesture or nongesture, particularly as relating to the girl who dumped him with no explanation (I'd've dumped him too). See this review for more details. The book is charming and funny, even while the narrator is a bit of a weenie. At 132 pages it makes for a great read on a rainy Sunday afternoon (which it did this past weekend, between turkey cooking and card-playing).

The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene. I hear it's devastatingly good, and I quite liked Brighton Rock this past summer.

The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann. This is my own personal next project as a close and careful read, or as much like it as I can muster. I've been wanting to get to it for some time, as I myself have a tale of a magic mountain. I've been even more keen on Mann since coming across (via Maud Newton) this quotation from a 1955 interview:

The basic theme on which I've tried to play all my variations is the problem of the artist, the contrast between the excitement of beauty and the demands of life; between, if you will, the ab- or super-normal poetic vision and the normal necessity of catching the eight o'clock bus. My theme is also the paradox that the vision could never live without the opposing necessity since it must be inspired by it.

Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn. I picked this up at our fundraising book sale at work. I'm certain some bloggers have raved about this book in the past, but I can't remember who. Was it you?

Wake, by Robert J Sawyer. I won this book about a week ago (and so far, this is the best reason I can figure to join Twitter: the contests). I find Sawyer has his ups and downs; the ideas in his novels can be awesome, but the writing at times brings it down. In some books, the dialogue was hopeless, and the characterization of women and relationships was less then believable; but he fares better than many genre writers. I've read a few chapters already — while I'm not convinced that Sawyer has the voice of a 15-year-old girl down, the story has a cool concept and I do want to know how it turns out.

The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk. To be released October 20. I have a review copy. For which I am dropping everything. First sentence: "It was the happiest moment of my life, thought I didn't know it."

A quiet life

Russians! In winter! Makes for excellent reading!

"No," she decided at last. "God alone knows what it might have led to; this was not something to trifle with. After all, a quiet life is better than anything else in the world."

Her peace of mind was not deeply disturbed; but she felt sad and once even burst into tears, though she could not have said why — certainly not because she had been outraged. She did not feel that she had been outraged: on the contrary, she had a feeling of guilt. The pressure of various vague emotions — the sense of life passing by, a longing for novelty — had forced her to a certain limit, forced her to look behind her — and there she had seen not even an abyss but only a void . . . chaos without shape.

— from Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev.

Turgenev, now, and this Turgenev, finally, because it was referenced in Orhan Pamuk's Snow. Thoughts already germinating...

Pamuk's library

In The New York Review of Books:

During the thirty-five years I have spent writing my own novels, I have learned not to laugh at the books written by others, and not to cast them aside, no matter how silly, ill-timed, outmoded, outdated, stupid, wrongheaded, or strange they might be. The secret of loving these books was not, perhaps, to read them in the way their authors had intended.... The point was to read these books—strange, and indifferent, and interspersed with moments of astonishing beauty—so as to put myself in their authors' shoes. You did not escape provinciality by running away from the provinces, but by making it your own. This was how I learned to immerse myself in my slowly expanding library, and also how I learned to put myself at a distance. It was after I turned forty that I learned that the most powerful reason for loving my library was that neither Turks nor Westerners knew about it.

On Pamuk's Other Colors

I missed Claire Berlinski's review of Pamuk's Other Colors when it first appeared in The Globe and Mail, which is just as well seeing as I was just then having a tough time of getting through the final pages and, by the sounds of it, this review would've reinforced my sense of its paralyzingly depressing nature, but the ongoing reactions (1, 2, 3) to that review are asking me to reexamine my own response to Pamuk's essays.

I agree with Berlinski's characterization of Pamuk as a "melancholic egomaniac." It did indeed become quite tiresome to be repeatedly told 1. how much he loves books and 2. how depressed he is. But she misses the boat in not acknowledging him as a significant novelist.

This week Keith Gerebian comes to Pamuk's defence.

Pamuk reveals why writing begins for him with disquietude and produces more of the same if it does not go well. [...] His ruminations on disparate things [...] show a major novelist in a minor, lighter key, but one whose sense of enchantment is fuelled by a mordant comic irony (the essay on Istanbul earthquakes) as well as a fascination with phenomenology.

[...] Filled with arabesques, pleasantries and nimble wit, Pamuk's essays on literature, politics, art, architecture and autobiography show us a writer who wisely refuses to have his sense of national identity manipulated by anyone - including Americans and Turks - while he continues to find a different style to suit different subjects.

He is conversational and playful in the essay Meaning, just as he is profoundly aesthetic in Bellini and the East or keenly satiric in My First Encounters with Americans. He is a shrewd, subtle literary critic on Sterne, Gide, Dostoevsky, Rushdie et al., and, despite Berlinski's outrageous misrepresentation of his perspective on Nabokov's Lolita (has she really read this essay?), he reveals himself as a man who can be amazed by his world and the dream of being a storyteller.

The book is depressing, but in my own defense as a reader I can recognize that while I don't like the way the book made me feel, and though it made me roll my eyes more than once, it also made me consider some aspects I hadn't before regarding what goes into the construction of Pamuk's novels (I do have to wonder if Berlinski has read any) — what makes Pamuk a writer.

Suffice it to say: I far prefer Pamuk the novelist to Pamuk the essayist, but Other Colors is not to be dismissed out of hand.

Colours and follies

Weeks ago, I dipped into Orhan Pamuk's Other Colors: Essays and a Story, as I said I would. I start in the middle and find myself driven forward, wondering what happens next, and finally it occurs to me to ask what came before.

Sampling these essays at random, it turns out, is not the best approach. The preface holds the key. (Sadly I was not forced to read the preface when first I opened the book.) Pamuk has arranged these ideas and fragments deliberately, into a continuous narrative.

I have always believed there to be a greedy and almost implacable graphomaniac inside me — a creature who can never write enough, who is forever setting life in words — and that to make him happy I need to keep writing. But when I was putting this book together, I discovered that the graphomaniac would be much happier, and less pained by his writing illness, if he worked with an editor who gave his writing a center, a frame, and a meaning. I would like the sensitive reader to pay as much attention to my creative editing as to the effort I put into the writing itself.

So I start again from the beginning. And there is a story to be told here.

I don't remember why I turned over the corner of this page in "On My Name Is Red." Maybe for some realization regarding Pamuk's relationship to painting — he grew up wanting to be a painter. Or maybe for this: "My fragility, my filth, my depravity, and my shortcomings — they are not in the fabric of the book, in its language or its structure, but they can be made out in the characters' lives and stories."

I've come to like Pamuk less than I like his novels. He refers often to going through rough times, loneliness, depression. His taking refuge in books quickly loses the sheen of romanticization; his escape into books feels quite desperate. But then I think: this too, this whole book, is contrived to manipulate me. There are essays on and insights into Istanbul, a childhood lived therein, earthquakes, Nabokov, literature in general, and more. They are if sincere, as first I thought, depressing; if not sincere, then a little more awesome for the force of their combined structure, but disillusioning. I'm not sure which state I prefer.

*****

If ever again I turn to freelancing and work from home, I might follow Pamuk's example in establishing routine and discipline: dress and prepare in the morning as if for the office, leave the house, walk round the block, re-enter one's house-as-office, and then at the end of the day pack up and leave to walk back to the same space this time home.

*****

Just before Christmas I picked up Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies. My expectations were low, as most reviews, both published and personal, were lukewarm about it.

As it turns out, it was, for me, the perfect book at the perfect time, lifting me out of the noise of Christmas, and out of the depressing funk Pamuk had cast, to float just beyond the reach of stress.

For all their outlandish behaviour, grand gestures, and bold words, there was something so perfectly ordinary and believable and interesting about all the characters, which I suspect I may not perceive in this way at any other time of year. I'm losing the details of the story already, but certain observations and characterizations (what kind of man where's a white shirt and tie around the house in the afternoon?) have left a mark.

What lucky fools we all are.

*****

Christmastime is the time of the annual jigsaw puzzle. This year I would initiate Helena into the family tradition — where by family, in this case I mean me and my sister, and it was never really planned so much as it just worked out that way, that we would one or the other of us receive a puzzle at Christmas and have to start it straight away, hunching over the dining room table, squinting, for one, maybe two, near-sleepless nights, our mother pleading with us can we move the puzzle please, where are we going to eat, it's so dusty, but we did this for years, every year, I don't remember how it started, now we have to plan a little because we are less likely to spend sufficiently long periods of time together under the same roof.

I'm surprised at how geeky the whole puzzle endeavour is this year. That I should build up the significance and the fun of the puzzle is one thing, but I was compelled to plan, to consider the initiation — that Helena is capable of 100 pieces on her own but I would not want her to feel daunted at the sight of, say, 3000 pieces each the size of one of her fingers, not her whole hand, that I lit on the perfect enticement: a Doctor Who theme, bearing a geek factor all its own, which I researched and special-ordered, settling on a product not dated by a specific Doctor's face nor that of a specific companion, and a modest piece count, well in advance, and wrapped and put under the tree.

I keep thinking of The Gold Bug Variations: she watches the 2 men puzzle together at the cabin, one of them searching the board to find a fit for the piece in his hand, the other searching the table to find the piece that fits a chosen spot.

For years, forever, I was of the first type. I'm shocked by the realization that I am now the latter. I'm certain that the attitude must reflect one's philosophical approach to life, but I struggle with what exactly that might mean.

*****

Thursday, Helena (age 5), after years(!) of denying her father's teasing suggestions that she has a daycare amoureux — Poilly is the only one, she insists (they do sleep together after all) — announces that Emile est son prince, and they're going to marry — Emile is her amoureux, and today they kissed on the mouth!

She interrupts our occasional stolen moments, in the car, at the grocery: "Why are you doing that? Why are you doing what Emile and I do?"

*****

Friday at lunch I gather myself up to go the post office and discover I must've lost my sister's birthday present on my way into work. This distresses me to tears. The website of the metro's lost and found advises it can take 48 hours for an object to reach the central office; they're closed on the weekend; my sister's present will never reach her in time — and these revised timelines rely on the fact that there is kindness in strangers, to turn in a small plastic bag containing a box and a scrap of wrapping paper sized to cover it, but untaped because we ran out of tape at home. I let myself cry over this, because I can't be seen to be phased by the $5000 mistake I made at work, which was uncovered earlier this week, for which my stomach is in knots, over which I've lost sleep. I spend the afternoon obsessing over what I might give my sister instead, though still late, and fixing other people's faulty graphs and references so they might obtain FDA approval. My way home I scour the ground — the corners of the metro station, and outdoors, the shapes of fresh snow mounds — for that small white plastic bag. I console myself, that this is the cosmos taking a little something back for all the free books and door prizes I've received lately, that someone else may benefit by this.

My sister's birthday present is sitting on the shelf inside my front door.

*****

For the umpteenth time we watch the Doctor Who episode "Utopia," and this umpteenth time it occurs to Helena to ask me, "What does 'utopia' I mean?" I summarize the concept as best as I can, but before I get round to explaining how Thomas More coined the term, she is laughing. "Me-topia, Me-topia, Me-topia!"

I record this here not as an instance of the cute things the child says, per se, but because I marvel at how her brain works.

*****

Saturday we stop for gas. As J-F is pulling back out onto the service road, he asks me for his gloves. "I don't have them." "Where are my gloves?" I make a joke, but as soon as I say it, I know it to be true: "You probably left them on the roof of the car." The car has turned, it's too late to stop, and dangerous now to slow down. We watch in the rearview mirror as one glove flops onto the road. We're halfway into the curve of the exit ramp when the wind lifts glove number two and throws it into a snowbank. I laugh, or else I would cry. The gloves I gave him for Christmas.

We track back through the parking lot that's on the other side of the ditch, only it's winter and the ditch is a 20-foot high pile of snow, the length of... I don't know how to measure length in the suburbs, but it must be about 4 city blocks. J-F stops the car and goes over the top.

Just as I start imagining what terrible accident might've transpired on the other side of that white wall, I notice the dark speck ahead running toward us, waving one black leather glove overhead.

We drive forward, just outside the gas station we'd started from. Repeat.

My unoriginal gift. His gallant grand gesture.

(I think he's lost them since.)

*****

The snow had been falling like oobleck. I take respite in thinking that Montreal that night bore a striking resemblance to a magical Persia of centuries ago.

"The following night it suddenly snowed so hard and became so bitingly cold that tongues froze inside people's mouths." (From The Adventures of Amir Hamza: Lord of the Auspicious Planetary Conjunction.)