Nobel Prize-winner novelist from Turkey, Orhan Pamuk’s latest work Manzaradan Parçalar: Hayat, Sokaklar, Edebiyat (Fragments of the Landscape: Life, Streets, Literature) has found its place on the shelves. The book will delight readers that would like to be closer to the voice of the author than his fiction allows.
Two years after the publishing of Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk presents his readers not with a novel, but a third compilation of his non-fiction writing. Pamuk had first brought together his rough drafts, his interviews that had been published in various places, and his essays in 1999 in Öteki Renkler (Other Colours). Then in 2003, Istanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir(Istanbul, Memories and the City) a magnificent ode to a city revealing highly autobiographic details was published. After seven years and a novel, a book that is similar in tone, Manzaradan Parçalar (Fragments of the Landscape), has been released. When asked to elaborate on the meaning of the word ‘landscape’ in the title, Pamuk says, “Landscape for me is both Turkey and the world.” Pamuk adds, “My young days’ appetite for painting has been revived during the past few years. Landscape painting, its meaning and the elements that make Istanbul’s landscape… I have been interested in these lately.”
“The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy”
Interestingly enough, Pamuk’s Istanbul also opened with a quotation on landscape: “The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy.” The resentment, sorrow and sweet melancholy that dominated this work are replaced with a witty voice in Fragments of the Landscape. For the information of Orhan Pamuk readers, it will probably be apt to say that with Other Colours, we had found the chance to get acquainted with a writer we like outside his novels, through his personal narratives. This book conveyed the excitement and timidity of a newfound acquaintance. In Istanbul, however, while we listened to the childhood memories of a favourite author, he attached us to himself with that warm and mild sense of nostalgia we feel when looking at old photographs. In this book, the sorrow conceptualised by being identified with the unique emotional climate of Istanbul was almost literally pointing to the secret charm of famous Turkish photographer Ara Güler’s snapshots of Istanbul. Fragments of the Landscape, on the other hand, has a relatively wittier and perhaps a fragmented tone. Pamuk comments on the kinship of his three books as follows: “This book rather resembles Other Colours, except I am more sure of myself in this one. I can simultaneously talk about the world and myself much more easily. I believe I have discovered something while writing Istanbul. That book was neither a solid autobiography, nor a fully anthropological essay on writers’ and artists’ discovery of the image of Istanbul; it was something in between. But I like its tone quite a lot and I tried to maintain it in the other essays I wrote afterwards. This book also has that tone.”
Architecture, painting, and literature
What makes Orhan Pamuk’s pen so powerful, delightful, and appealing is his relationship with painting and architecture. In this sense, the author’s enthusiasm for painting when he was younger may help understand his passion for landscapes. Besides, before deciding on becoming a novelist, Pamuk studied architecture at university for three years. It is difficult to believe that painting and architecture were left behind for him, since these two appear not as mere decorative elements in his works, but rather the very motifs that shape them. The narrative that the author weaves layer by layer creates a unique house, a building in each work. The most illustrative example of this exquisite style is in My Name is Red and the most postmodern and eccentric one is in The Black Book. In Fragments of the Landscape, the author this time sheds light on the complex architecture of what we call life. It reminds us of the fragmentation of the landscape we have in front of our eyes and praises the philosophical and literary pleasures of the desire to see the picture in its entirety. “I’m interested in getting a viewpoint from a high spot where you can see everything,” says Pamuk, “This goes hand in hand with the desire to see the significance and the whole of the philosopher, the writer, the thinker, everything.”
Fragments of the Landscape offers an extraordinary reading experience for those who already enjoy Pamuk’s style. The author’s father’s death, his political views, his feelings about football, his observations of cities, and his literary theories are presented both as fragments of autobiographical narratives and as philosophical adventures that set sail with sometimes emotions, at others ideas. What Pamuk meant by “that voice between remembrance and thought” in one of his interviews should be exactly this.
