Istanbul seen from Orhan Pamuk’s window (El País)
This year Turkey is the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and to mark the occasion, the literary supplement of El País, Babelia, asked Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk to show readers his personal Turkish library.
When I was just over twenty, I didn’t buy books as a collector would, but rather like someone eager to understand the world as quickly as possible, reading everything: the reasons for the houses in the folktales of Gümüshane; the backstage of Ethem the Circassian’s rebellion against Atatürk; a list of political murders during the constitutional period; the story of Abdülhamit’s cockatoo, bought by the ambassador in London on the Sultan’s orders and sent from England to Turkey; examples of love letters for shy people; the history of the introduction of Marseille tiles in Turkey; the political memoirs of the doctor who founded the first tuberculosis hospital; a 150-page Western Art History written in the 1930s; class notes of a police commissioner teaching students how to catch small-time street criminals like pickpockets and swindlers; six volumes of memoirs of a former president filled with documents; the influence of Ottoman guild ethics on modern small businesses; the history, secrets, and genealogy of the sheikhs of the Cerrahi brotherhood; memoirs of a painter from 1930s Paris forgotten by everyone; traders’ intrigues to raise the price of hazelnuts; five hundred pages of harsh criticism from a pro-Soviet Turkish Marxist movement against a pro-China and pro-Albanian movement; the transformation of Ereğli after the opening of iron and steel factories; the children’s book titled One Hundred Famous Turks; the story of the Aksaray fire; a selection of interwar columns by a journalist completely forgotten for thirty years; the two-thousand-year history of a small city in Central Anatolia compressed into two hundred pages, a city one could not locate on a map at a glance; and the claim of a retired teacher who, despite not knowing English, claimed to have solved the mystery of who killed Kennedy by reading only the Turkish press.
Pamuk provides an unexpected explanation for this eclectic curiosity. Although he was born into a bourgeois family with an impressive library belonging to his father and grandfather—fondly described in Istanbul—that library was already, as he puts it, more of a “museum” for him. In 1928, Arabic script was officially replaced by Latin letters, and for generations educated after that, the entire earlier literary heritage became inaccessible. Over time, older authors were gradually republished in Latin transcription, but without continuity, the highly refined Ottoman literary style became obsolete. In fact, for some older authors, modern Turkish translations had to be provided alongside the Latin transliteration of the original text. The established canon thus lost its authority, and Pamuk, like his contemporaries, had to assemble a new one from what he could find. Hence the impatience, the disregard for literary hierarchies, the joy of discovery, and the freedom of heterogeneity.
It’s no coincidence that Pamuk’s personal canon includes several Istanbul authors who, from the turn of the century onwards, pursued similarly eclectic, collecting life-works—from Reşat Ekrem Koçu, the author of the endlessly serialized and ultimately unfinished one-man Encyclopedia of Istanbul, to Ahmet Rasim, who lived in the late nineteenth century and who, in his “letters,”
over half a century, wrote endlessly about everything related to Istanbul: from different types of drunks to street vendors in the suburbs; from grocery store owners to street jugglers; from musicians to beggars; from the beauty of Bosphorus neighborhoods to local taverns; from daily news to lottery results; from parks, squares, and entertainment venues to weekly markets; from individual beauties of each season to the crowds; from snowball games and sledding to the history of the press; from gossip to restaurant menus. (Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul)
Sébah and Joaillier, court photographers of the Sultan: an Istanbul coffeehouse, late 19th century
Something similar is recounted by Rimbaud in The Alchemy of the Word, on the collapse of the accepted canon and the sudden appreciation of genres that were previously relegated to the lowest levels of hierarchy:
I found the famous names of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved simple paintings, carved lintels, stage sets, clown canvases, shop signs, folk engravings; outdated literature, church Latin, erotic books with poor spelling, novels of our ancestors, fairy tales, children’s booklets, old operas, silly refrains, naïve rhythms.
And I remember something similar myself—how, as a teenager, the books at home, school readings, and various official publishing canons gradually lost their appeal; how I increasingly lost interest in what one was “supposed to read”; and how I roamed antiquarian shops, flea markets, clearance sales, Transylvanian and Slovak bookshops, and old libraries, fishing out texts from the rubble or unknown order—works only important to me, texts I discovered for myself.
All that has passed. Today I know how to greet beauty. — Rimbaud concludes. But he is only half right. Over time, one assembles a personal canon and learns to appreciate the values—or at least the perspective—of other canons. Yet the joy and freedom of treasure-hunting, exploring in the shadows, discovering the small and forgotten and making it personal, never truly disappears once one has tasted it.
Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul, cover of the Spanish edition
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