“I was troubled by my family for revealing too much of the family history,” said Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk at the launch of his new book, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Hamish Hamilton), at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi on Thursday evening. Pamuk was talking about his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City in a conversation with journalist and TV presenter Sunil Sethi.
“Each city has its sound, feeling and philosophy. In Istanbul, I argued that Turkish melancholy is different from European melancholy. I wanted to combine autobiography with history,” he said.
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist talks about how the art of the novel operates on its writer and its readers. “I argue that our minds are capable of entertaining, without much trouble, contradictory ideas,” he said.
Pamuk is known for his novels, like Snow and My Name Is Red, but the novelist says he found his “voice” with The Black Book, in which he deals with the “anxieties of identity”.