Reading between fine minds

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There’s an Indian connection to celebrated Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s latest literary offering. He was invited to deliver a series of lectures in Harvard in 2009 by its Mumbai-born director of humanities, Homi Bhabha, and the book is dedicated to Kiran Desai; Pamuk and Desai have been together for some years now. They were in India recently for the Jaipur Literature Festival where Pamuk was the star of the hour. All his previous eight books have been rooted in Turkey, albeit with a broader allegorical context, and he is possibly more famous here for his India connection (Desai and he live part-time in Goa) than for his literary output and his exalted status as a Nobel laureate. This slim volume is based on six lectures he delivered as part of an annual Harvard event. They revolved around Friedrich Schiller’s famous essay on the distinction between the naive and the sentimental poet/writer — the naive writer hopes his output will adequately “describe and reveal the meaning of the world”, while the sentimental one “is unsure whether his utterances will convey the meaning intended”. The reader, and often the novelist, Pamuk argues, oscillates between the two mindsets.
Though he often referred to his own works and experiences, Pamuk used his lectures primarily to present a theory of the novel — as a writer as well as a reader. He is immensely qualified to conduct this intellectual exercise. Apart from the unalloyed dedication and passion towards his craft, in the 35 years he has been writing, Pamuk has read voraciously and it shows in these pages. He takes us through the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Mann and Naipaul, among others, in his attempt to explore the novel’s visual and sensual power, what he terms the “sweet illusion” of the fictional world. This is a deeply personal book based around the intimate connection between the writer and the reader. It is an accounting of how a novel works on us: how it makes us feel, makes us think. “The real measure of the novel must be its power to make us think”, he stresses. Pamuk adopts a question and answer sequence to explain some existential literary issues: What happens within us when we read a novel? How does a novel create its unique effects as distinct from a painting, a film or a poem?
This is a departure from what we generally expect from his pen, or laptop, but it takes us into a fascinating universe, a “play of mirrors between writer and reader”. Because it is so personal — his own experiences, his joy in reading the greatest novels ever written, and then, becoming a writer himself — this book can be highly abstruse in parts, even sketchy because lectures, unlike books, have a restriction of time. He describes, for instance, a feature he feels is essential to the literary novel: the “centre”, a “profound opinion or insight about life” whose implications illuminate a particular work. Yet, he goes on to elaborate that a novel can have several centres, or none, and they can shift depending on “the writer’s intentions, the text’s implications, the reader’s tastes, and the time and place in which the novel is read”. Some of it can get a bit mystifying, even metaphysical, as he tries to help us understand why some novels are so much more rewarding than others.
Yet, for all that, Pamuk uses his love for the written word and the subliminal power of fiction to present an intriguing subject for debate. We get to know his favourite novels (Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick, Magic Mountain) and why. We also discover the extraordinary lengths he goes to perfect his craft; scouring antique markets for objects described in a particular novel, a dress, a photo, paintings, and then installing them in his studio while he writes, as he did with The Museum of Innocence. He also takes us through the process which, through the characters he created, made him a richer, more complex person. This is not, however, a purely personal narrative. It is, ultimately, a sweeping history of intellectual thought and literature. It also gives us an insight into a beautiful mind, and why the Noble Prize for Literature was so well deserved.

Dilip Bobb is a Delhi-based senior journalist