Volume 54, Number 17 · November 8, 2007
Locked in the Writer's Room
By Colin Thubron
Other Colors: Essays and a Story
by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely
Knopf, 433 pp., $27.95
It is an irony that the reputation of Orhan Pamuk should rest as much on his political prominence as on his books. The Turkish Nobel laureate is the most private and recondite of writers. For over thirty years he has occupied a lonely apartment in Istanbul, writing for ten hours a day, in misanthropic love with this most melancholy of cities. He is the poet of the labyrinth of his own thoughts and conceits, of the fabulous and the gently ambiguous. His literary heroes are not Gorky or Solzhenitsyn, but Borges and Calvino.
Review, 3457 words
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