Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952. He initially dreamed of becoming a painter but turned to writing in his early 20s and published his first novel in Turkish in 1982. Best known for My Name Is Red and Snow, he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2006 and praised for discovering “new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures” in Turkey. Pamuk teaches writing and comparative literature at Columbia in New York and is married to Aslı Akyavaş, with a daughter from a previous marriage. His latest novel, Nights of Plague, about a fictional island in the Ottoman empire beset by disease, is out in paperback now (Faber).
1. Museum
This May, I gave four lectures at Collège de France in Paris, and my accommodation was 10 minutes’ walk from the Louvre. I spent about 27 hours there in total. It was such a joy. I’m a museum lover, you might even say a museum maniac. They make my romantic imagination work. And the Louvre is the museum. It’s so big and so astounding and I loved getting lost in it. One of my happiest encounters was with a self-portrait by Albrecht Dürer that he painted in his early 20s. I was all alone with it. It was so beautiful.
2. Film
Happening (dir Audrey Diwan, 2021)
This is a wonderful adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s memoir of the same name. The camera stays very close to the lead actor, Anamaria Vartolomei, and you immediately understand the loneliness of a person who has to have an abortion in a country where abortion is illegal, as it was in France in the early 60s. Vartolomei’s character wants to be a writer – we see her reading Sartre, whose The Age of Reason is also about someone trying to find an abortion doctor. It captures the dirty backstreets, the horrible people, the loneliness. It’s a very good film, and I’m happy that they finally gave Ernaux the Nobel prize.
3. Art
Tacita Dean: Geography Biography
In Paris, I was invited to Tacita Dean’s magical and beautiful film installation Geography Biography. When I see something new [in a gallery], I don’t read anything at first, I just enjoy, and here I was enchanted by the beauty of the images. Dean was showing things that are dear to her from her life and career. The images and films slowly revolve around you, so you have to move with them. I was mesmerised.
4. Novel
Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad
Solstad is a great Norwegian novelist who is being translated into Turkish for the first time. Shyness and Dignity hooked me from the beginning. It’s an addictive read full of tiny details that I found very convincing – you wonder if the author experienced these things or did he invent them, and that ambiguity is very compelling. It’s about a high school professor teaching Ibsen and feeling that his students are disconnected, or else they treat his lectures as a sort of insult. I intend to read more Solstad: he has many other novels and they’re all very short. I also like discovering an author who is older than me.
5. TV
Chernobyl (HBO, 2019)
Somebody advised me to watch this TV series. It’s very political, and timely now that we are all worried about Vladimir Putin’s bluff [threatening to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine] turning out to be real. It’s about the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 and the clean-up – and the political cover-up – that followed. It has the qualities of a horror movie, but it’s very realistic. And it makes you a bit depressed. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but it’s very well done.
6. Theatre
The Time Regulation Institute at Zorlu PSM, Istanbul
I am an admirer of [Turkish novelist and poet Ahmet Hamdi] Tanpınar. His novel The Time Regulation Institute, which I saw in Istanbul [and which is playing again tonight], is now a Penguin Modern Classic. It’s the dreamy narration of a man who is telling us his failures in life. It’s partly about the Turkish republic and its aspirations to be modern, with all the clocks telling western time, but the allegory is quite vague. It’s a very loose book, and in the theatre adaptation – by Serdar Biliş, with Serkan Keskin playing dozens of roles – all the bad bits are taken out. It’s a superior work of art to the book.
