Penguin, 2013, 349 p.

When you start to read a book written by someone raised in a Muslim country and its title is Honour, you will most likely have a certain expectation of what will be in store. That expectation isn’t disappointed here. But this novel is written by Elif Shafak. Things are a bit more nuanced.

The novel does not have a linear structure. It starts in 1992, well after the main event it is concerned with exploring, before flipping back to a village near the River Euphrates in 1945, where the twin Kurdish girls Pink Destiny (Pembe) and Enough Beauty (Jamila) are born to a family already overburdened with daughters but still striving for a son. Its succeeding chapters stray unchronologically over the times in between those dates. Most of the scenes are rendered in third person past tense but there is a first-person account by Esma, Pembe’s daughter, and a journal written by her brother – “He a murderer” as Esma tells us in Chapter One, so not a spoiler – Iskender/Askander (the Kurdish and Turkish renderings of the name equivalent to Alexander) as he serves time in Shrewsbury Prison for that murder.

The plot gets in train when a man called Adem visits relatives in the Euphrates village and falls for Jamila. Unfortunately, she had been kidnapped in a dispute some while before and held hostage so her purity is in doubt. In such a place, “Men – even schoolboys – had honour. Women did not have honour. Instead they had shame.” Whether that is warranted or not.

Knowing his family would therefore not agree to a union with Jamila, Adem agrees to marry Pembe instead, eventually taking her to London while Jamila stays and becomes a sought-after midwife. Unsurprisingly Adem’s and Pembe’s marriage is not overly happy. When he leaves home to take up with an exotic dancer their eldest son Iskender takes on himself the mantle of protector of the family’s honour. However, Esma and younger brother Yunus are more liberal in their outlook. Pembe meanwhile muses on the way in which British people say of something minor, “It’s a shame.” To her, shame is a burning thing; not to be thought of as anything trivial.

Like Adem’s brother, Tafiq, Iskender is heavily under the influence of his traditional past. A Muslim known as the Orator tells a gathering Iskender has arranged that, “The two major industries in the West are the machine of war and the machine of beauty. With the machine of war they attack, imprison, torture and kill. But the machine of beauty is no less evil. All those glittery dresses, fashion magazines, androgynous men and butch women. Everything is blurred. The machine of beauty is controlling your minds.” Maybe so, but it illustrates the Orator’s blind spot. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that the machine of religion also does that – usually far more effectively.

Tafiq reflects that, “Their honour was all some men had in this world.” For the rich it didn’t matter as they could buy influence. But; “the less means a man had, the higher was the worth of his honour.” His hint to Iskender that Pembe might be seeing another man (innocently enough, but Tafiq and Iskender don’t know that) sets the central tragedy in motion.

Honour is inflected with magic realism, but with a light touch. The twist towards the end which alters the perspective is signalled in the book’s first sentence and inherent in the plot, which is elegantly constructed with incidents and relationships which are seemingly peripheral turning out to be carefully inserted.

Shafak displays empathy with her characters, not condemnation. Despite the act of violence around which it revolves Honour is an intricate and ultimately humane read.

Pedant’s corner:- “The undeveloped baby had remained joined to her twin” (the undeveloped baby was previously described as a boy; so ‘had remained joined to his twin’.)

Faber and Faber, 2023, p. Translated from the Turkish, Veba Geceleri, by Rekin Oklap.

This is not a typical Pamuk novel. For a start it’s not set in Istanbul which has been pretty much a major character in most of his books. Instead, it deals with the fictional Mediterranean island of Mingheria during a 1901 outbreak of bubonic plague which provided the opportunity for its revolt against Ottoman rule. Also, unlike most Pamuk novels. it’s largely told rather than shown. Part of this is that the narration is couched partly as a historical record of the revolution.

Mingheria is supposedly located somewhere northeast of Crete. Its main city, Arkaz, is dominated by a castle on a hill at one side of the harbour entrance but there isn’t adequate anchorage for large modern ships and landfall has to be made by rowing boat.

The present Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid, who was installed as Sultan by a palace coup in which he replaced his brother Murad V, has sent Bonkowski Pasha to combat the outbreak. On the same ship but en route to China as envoys are Murad’s daughter (and therefore Abdul Hamid’s niece) Princess Pakize, until recently kept in seclusion in Istanbul until she married the husband Abdul Hamid procured for her, Doctor Nuri. Hence Nuri is often referred to in the text as “the Doctor and Prince Consort.”

A few days later, after Bonkowski Pasha is murdered having inadvisedly gone walkabout, Princess Pakize and Doctor Nuri are ordered back to Mingheria to investigate his death using the methods of Sherlock Holmes. (Abdul Hamid is an avid consumer of detective fiction.)

Many locals, especially devout Muslims, resist the attempts by the authorities to enforce quarantine. The ensuing confusion allows a Major Kâmil to institute a revolution which overthrows Ottoman rule. The Major (soon Commander) becomes the first leader of independent Mingheria.

Much of the supposed history here is said to be taken from the letters of Princess Pakize to her sister Princess Hatice back in Istanbul, letters which she wrote daily even when the postal service had been suspended. An emphasis on the relationships between Princess Hatice and Nuri and Major Kâmil and his wife Zeynep (nostalgic legends in Mingheria) are a corollary to this.

Several narratorial interpolations reveal that this retrospective history of the founding of the Mingherian state has been written by a descendant of Princess Hatice and Nuri. The final chapter is an envoi from that point of view.

The means by which a new state establishes itself and the myths it comes to believe are subtly portrayed (as are the parallels with the decline of the Ottoman state,) but like most revolutions the Mingherian one soon begins to eat itself. In short order Kâmil and Zeynep are dead due to plague; his successor, the Muslim sect leader and quarantine opposer Sheik Hamdullah, also succumbs to the disease; Princess Hatice is made Mingheria’s Queen but pushed into the background by Nimetullah Effendi with the felt hat; and so on. Relations with the Great Powers, who blockade the island to prevent the plague reaching Europe, are critical to Mingheria’s future.

Pamuk is consummate and always in control but to my mind in Nights of Plague, though there is plenty of story (you could almost say too much) some of the rewards of reading fiction are missing. There is not much here to allow the exploration of character, most of whom are sketched rather than fleshed out, or indeed character development. It is certainly unusually structured for a novel. It is however an exemplary way of writing a critique of Turkish society without going at it head-on; an approach arguably necessary for a writer from a state sensitive to any hint of criticism.

Since he started writing this book in 2016 it is also unlikely to be a reflection on the Covid pandemic, though of course that does now hang over any reading.

Mention of football (albeit only in one sentence) and of the author Orhan Pamuk as being an acquaintance of the narrator – both are museum enthusiasts – are typical Pamuk touches.

It is of course essential reading for Pamuk completists but has enough to recommend it to the merely curious.

Pedant’s corner:- Translated into USian. “the hoi polloi” (hoi means ‘the’; it’s just ‘hoi polloi’, then, no ‘the’,) enormity (employed here to mean ‘hugeness’. It doesn’t; it means ‘monstrousness’,) “off of” (no ‘of’, just ‘off’,) “a particularly tough contingent who was known to mistrust” (a particularly tough contingent which was known to mistrust,) “that he was going be punished” (going to be punished,) a chapter beginning with a sentence of dialogue with no starting quotation mark (I know this is a publisher’s convention but it annoys me,) “the Halifiye sect were being goaded” (the Halifiye sect was being goaded,) “landscapes …. that Sami Pasha had hanged on the walls” (I doubt this meant they were executed: ‘had hung on the walls’,) “arrival to the island” (arrival on the island,) Cretian (Cretan,) “moored to the docks” (moored at the docks,) “was I was finally” (the second ‘was’ is superfluous.)

Penguin Essentials, 2019, 365 p. First published 2007.

Addressing as it does the Armenian genocide of 1916 (though only in a historical sense,) this was the book that saw the author put on trial for “denigrating Turkishness,” but the charges were eventually dropped.

The novel’s main focus is on the Kazancı family, one with an unfortunate history of its male members dying at a young age. There is a hint of magical realism here, the more sweeping kind of narrative more or less alien to the Anglophone tradition, in any case a nod to the supernatural elements which often appear in fiction from other literary backgrounds. The Kazancıs have a cat named Sultan. (They’re now on Sultan the Fifth. This naming system though, did remind me of Mad Jack’s burro in The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams.)

The chapter titles all relate to foodstuffs – or at least substances which can be ingested; cinnamon, pine nuts, orange peels, etc, though one is water and the last potassium cyanide. For the Kazancıs are a family for which food occupies a central nurturing role. Many Turkish dishes are named or described during the course of the novel.

In the first chapter the then nineteen-year-old Zeliha Kazancı strides the streets of Istanbul wearing her trademark short skirt – which she will not relinquish even in later years. Under harassment she recites to herself “The Golden Rule of Prudence for an Istanbulite woman: When harassed on the street never respond” as that only fires up the enthusiasm of the harasser. (There are also Silver and Copper Rules of Prudence.)

Zeliha is on her way to a clinic to seek an abortion but, perhaps due to hallucinations brought on by anæsthetic or else a subliminal wish to carry the child – though the latter seems unlikely – becomes over-agitated and makes it impossible for the procedure to continue. The bastard of the title (though there is one other metaphorical candidate) could thus be Zeliha’s daughter, Asya, who is brought up among her aunts Banu, Feride and Cevriye, their mother, Grandmother Gülsüm, and the matriarch Petite-Ma. Acknowledging the unusual circumstances of Asya’s origins (in her late teens of the novel’s main timeline her father’s identity has still not been disclosed,) Zeliha is also known as aunty. The only son of the family, Mustafa, long ago left Istanbul for the US and has never returned. The aunts’ father had of course when still young succumbed to the curse on the family males. Even so, by the age of sixteen Asya had discovered that “other families weren’t like hers and some families could be normal,” a twist to that quote from Tolstoy. [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7142-all-happy-families-are-alike-each-unhappy-family-is-unhappy]

Asya is fixated on Johnny Cash and spends time in Café Kundera, associating with characters identified only by their attributes, the Non-Nationalist Scenarist of Ultranational Movies, the Closeted-Gay Communist, the Exceptionally Untalented Poet and the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, who says the real civilization gap is not between East and West but between Turks and the Turks. “‘We are a bunch of cultured urbanites surrounded by hillbillies and bumpkins on all sides. They have conquered the whole city.’” The Exceptionally Untalented Poet says, “‘We are stuck between East and West …. the past and the future … the secular modernists … and the conventional traditionalists.’” In its own way this is a signal that the book could be read as a ‘condition of Turkey’ novel.* When one of them brings along a new girlfriend we are told of Asya that “When she met a new female she could do one of two things: either wait to see when she would start hating her or take the shortcut and hate her right away.”

Mustafa, in the US, has taken up with Rose, who was divorced from Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, a first generation Armenian American. Barsam and Rose’s daughter Armanoush (Amy,) is the second pivot of the plot, brought up as she was with her father’s family’s constant reinforcement of Armenian memories and attitudes vis-à-vis the Turks. Shafak has some fun depicting Amy’s date with a man she soon finds unsuitable, where they both contemplate plates of food whose arrangements are based on expressionist paintings. To resolve the conflict she feels between her US and Armenian heritages Amy decides to travel to Istanbul to visit her stepfather’s family, where her revelations about the treatment of her ancestors creates at first bewilderment.

“She, as an Armenian, embodied the spirits of her people generations and generations earlier, whereas the average Turk had no such continuity with his or her ancestors. The Armenians and the Turks lived in different time frames.” For Armenians “time was a cycle, the past incarnated in the present and the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between.” Even Aunt Cerviye, as a history teacher, was unaware of the details or extent of the Armenians’ tribulations. For the aunts, the history of Turkey only began in 1923, with Atatürk’s reforms. (Such historical forgettings, or forgettings of history, are by no means confined to Turkey, though.)

In another expression of literary apartness, that rebuff to Western fiction’s conventional realism, Aunty Banu has – or claims to have – control of two invisible djinn, one on each shoulder; the good one, whom she calls Mrs Sweet, on the right, the bad one, Mr Bitter, on the left. It is from Mr Bitter she learns the truth about the Armenians’ sufferings. And about Asya’s father, news which she keeps to herself, though his identity is revealed later.

Shafak has her characters make more general observations too. Asya tells Amy, “When women survive an awful marriage or love affair … they generally avoid another relationship for quite some time. With men, however … the moment they finish a catastrophe they start looking for another one. Men are incapable of being alone.”

Curiously, Shafak at least twice used the word wee in the Scottish sense of small, as in “a wee bit.”

Some reviews I have seen online of The Bastard of Istanbul have been a bit sniffy, one even going so far as to say that on this evidence Shafak isn’t a good novelist. I suspect this means that reader had not had a wide experience of fiction from outwith the Anglosphere. Shafak’s writing has a brio, an exuberance, too often missing from that more staid inheritance.

Pedant’s corner:- *Turkey is now officially known as Türkiye; “wrack your nerves” (rack your nerves,) “and her cheeks sunk in” (sank in. There were other examples of ‘sunk’ for ‘sank’,) “as she laid still on a table” (as she lay still,) “phyllo pastry” (filo pastry,) “always on demand” (always in demand,) no introductory quotation mark when one chapter began with a piece of dialogue but there was with other chapters.

Penguin, 2010, 366 p, including 2 p Glossary.

Here we have two novels in one. Or actually, it is more like a short story (actually perhaps a short novella) containing a novel within it. That novel has each chapter begin with a word which starts with the letter B as does The Forty Rules of Love as a whole.

The framing device is set in 2008 where Ella Rubinstein is a Jewish housewife in Pennsylvania, married to a philandering husband and, with her children more or less grown, beginning to wonder if she is wasting her life, but not really considering the nature of the experience of love. She has just secured a job reading manuscripts submitted to a publisher, the first of which is a novel titled Sweet Blasphemy written by an Aziz Z Zahara. When the oldest of her three children, Jeanette, suddenly announces she and her boyfriend Scott want to get married it precipitates a crisis in Ella’s life. The meat of The Forty Rules of Love, though, is in that submitted manuscript, which is the tale of the effect exerted on the life of the thirteenth century preacher Rumi by the Sufi mystic, Shams of Tabriz. So taken by Sweet Blasphemy is Ella that she emails its author (without letting him know she is reading it for the publisher.) Through the ensuing correspondence she and Aziz fall for each other.

Sweet Blasphemy is told with a variety of viewpoint characters, each of whose voices Shafak renders superbly: the Killer, Shams, Rumi, The Novice, the Master, the Zealot, Suleiman the Drunk, Desert Rose the Harlot, Hasan the Beggar, Aladdin (not the pantomime character,) Kerra – Rumi’s Christian wife, who sees little difference between Christians and Muslims as people – Kimya (who falls in love with Shams,) Baybars the Warrior, Sultan Walad and Husam the Student, all adding up to a convincing picture of life in thirteenth century Anatolia.

In his encounters with others Shams shows himself fond of illuminating his philosophy with either a parable or else one of his Forty Rules of Love. (Whether there are forty of Shams’s rules given to us in the book I didn’t bother to count.)

His preference for the loving aspects of religious teaching does not enamour him to adherents of a more fundamental bent.

For Shams, “It’s easy to love a perfect God. ….. What is far more difficult is to love fellow human beings with all their imperfections and defects.” Moreover, “Sufis do not go to extremes. A Sufi always remains mild and moderate.” He is also wise. “How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together.”

Of religious zealots he says, “Looking at the whole universe with fear-tinted eyes it is no wonder they see a plethora of things to be afraid of,” they pick and choose only those verses of their holy book which conform to their inclinations and so ignore its totality.

In a passage that speaks to the similarities between fundamental Muslims and Calvinists he says, “By and large, the narrow minded say that dancing is sacrilege.” But when you think about it that attitude could be taken to be blasphemy. “They think God gave us music … then forbade us to listen to it.”

It is possible this thought may allude to the background of ‘Aziz Z Zahara’. It turns out he was born as one Craig Richardson in Kinlochbervie! His own story is not without misfortune, though.

Love, along with sex and death, is of course one the three main preoccupations of the novel as a form. With Shams, Shafak’s focus on it here is more on the religious ideal but it is counterpoised with Ella’s relationship with ‘Aziz’. But Shams himself is incapable of extending his general love for humans with the more intense feelings a married man ought to have for his wife. Kimya reflects on her love for him that “Little did I know that I was making the most common mistake women have made throughout the ages: to naïvely think that with their love they can change the men they love.”

In his own way too, Shams is a fundamentalist.

Is there slight imbalance here, though? Would the novel succeed as well without the framing device? Possibly.

Nevertheless, this is a wonderful, complex and compassionate book. As an author Shafak is certainly the real deal.

Pedant’s corner:- “on my doorsill” (usually it’s a doorstep,) strived (strove,) caravanseries (caravanserais,) “portabella mushrooms” (Portobello mushrooms,) bookstore (in an email from “Aziz”. As a Scot, he would surely say ‘bookshop’,) “like a broken faucet” (ditto; ‘like a broken tap’, but then, the book is written in USian,) “off of” (I know it’s USian but it annoys me. Just ‘off’, please,) “no other” (none other.)

Penguin, 2018, 265 p. Translated from the Turkish, Mahrem, by Brendan Freely

Shafak has been called by no less an authority than Orhan Pamuk “the best author to come out of Turkey in the last decade.” Her background is a little more than simply Turkish though, as she has lived in Turkey, the US and now London. Her later books have been written in English, though her afterword here says she has these latter works translated into Turkish by professional translators which she then rewrites with “my rhythm, my energy and my vocabulary.” Then, presumably, they are translated back into English otherwise why would Brendan Freely have been required? This is the first book of hers that I have read. I doubt it could have been written by someone whose only experience of culture is anglophile. There are various flights of fancy more akin to magic realism than straightforward representational fiction or excursions into faery.

Our (unnamed) female narrator lives with her lover – only ever named B-C – in the Hayalifener Apartments in Istanbul. Whenever they appear in public they attract attention because she is obese and he is a dwarf. Their story is interspersed with that of Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi whose birth killed his mother. He was born smelling of wax, with a transparent face and his waxy body had to be shaped by his aunt before he hardened into shape but time ran out before she could complete his eyes. In Pera in 1885 he sets up an entertainment complex in a huge cherry coloured tent. Here women can observe all the ugliness of the world including Sable Girl, descendant of the offspring of a sable and a human in Siberia in 1648, and who have bred true hybrids ever since. In a separate show men can contemplate all that is beautiful; such as La Belle Annabelle whose equally incredible origin story originates from Paris in 1868. Keramet Mumî Keşke Memiş Efendi “knew well that women were each other’s enemies above all,” and that “There were rules that all women knew but never mentioned.”

The narrator bites her cuticles raw, an unsavoury incident from her past gives a possible psychological explanation both for this and her compulsion to eat. It continues to haunt her. “When people commit sins, they can’t stand to be in the same place with someone who has witnessed this,” and “If there are no witnesses a person can forget the past.”

One of her observations is that when dieting, “with just one bite of chocolate, the will power that the person has with time and effort wrapped around the spool begins to unravel. And it’s too late to reel it back in. After you’ve eaten chocolate you can eat anything. Just as a sinner who has once committed the gravest sin considers other sins too insignificant to cause suffering, so any kind of food seems harmless after you’ve eaten a box of chocolates.” Another states “The stomach is a mythical land. Guards made of chocolate wait all along the borders. Once you’ve eaten the guards there’s nothing left to prevent you from breaking your diet.”

Lover B-C thinks that “our lives are based on seeing and being seen” and begins to compile a Dictionary of Gazes. This, especially the tenor of the extracts from it, reminded me a bit of Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence. B-C says its entries are secretly linked to each other “‘a shaman’s cloak of forty patches and a single thread.’” Its entry for hallucination reads: “For thousands of years people had been drinking infusions of mushrooms in order to see what they hadn’t seen. Later they became frightened of what they could see.”

The text builds up its effect with various repetitions and references back. When the narrator finally reads the Dictionary of Gazes she realises B-C’s true intentions. “What he wanted was to take bits and pieces of my stories and other people’s stories and mix them all together. When he’d done this there’d only be a single thread holding it all together; himself!” This is of course as true of Shafak as the writer of this book while also describing it pretty well.

In a final twist that resembles Kate Atkinson’s in A God in Ruins but isn’t quite as stark our narrator imagines how all that came before might have been altered. “Everything could have worked out differently. That means every story can be told differently.”

Shafak tells this one very well indeed.

Pedant’s corner:-“off of” (just ‘off’, no ‘of’,) “that wouldn’t fit into their sleds behind them was they went” (as they went,) “nourished not only by his mother’s blood but the also by time itself” (no need for that ‘the’,) canvasses (canvases,) “he greeted me with either with” has one ‘with’ too many,) “make up stories, and kneed coloured clay” (knead,) “had showed me” (shown me,) “and me and my warmly dripping fat had been flung for miles” (and I and my warmly dripping fat,) “Fames’ breath” (Fames’s,) “didn’t take its eyes of the East” (off the East,) “trying to loose weight” (lose; plus three more instances of ‘loose’ for ‘lose’,) “but when something large become smaller” (becomes,) “she emptied bowl of pigeon feed” (the bowl of pigeon feed,) chaise-longe (x 2, chaise-longue,) “a  few grams less” (a few grams fewer,) “it makes it’s own way” (its own way,) “a Cyclops’ cave” (Cyclops’s,) Odysseus’ (Odysseus’s,) “before it has” (rest of sentence is in past tense; so ‘before it had’,) “because there were still something that had stayed inside me” (because there was still,) a missing space between a colon and what followed.) “At that moment the moment the fish began jumping” (no need for ‘the moment’,) “the Two Scillies” (the Two Sicilies that would be,) “and flung in at the cat” (flung it at the cat,) one new paragraph was unindented, “who has a issue with” (an issue,) “it was as he was looking” (as if he was looking,) “and I not only hadn’t I eaten anything” (No need for the second ‘I’,) “to sacrifice itself on the wet mother-of-pearl alter” (altar.) “I was getting light-ter” (I’ve no idea why this was hyphenated in such a way,) “does humanity has any privacy at all?” (have any privacy,) “had stepped on the breaks” (brakes.) “The crowd are holding their breath” (crowd here is singular, the crowd is holding.)

faber and faber, 2015, 613 p including v p Contents, ii p Aktaş and Karataş family tree, v p Index of characters and vii p Chronology. Translated from the Turkish Kafamda bir tuhaflik by Ekin Orlap.

This is the story of Mevlut Karataş who wanders the streets of Istanbul at night selling boza – a kind of fermented drink concocted so as Turks could believe they were not actually drinking alcohol even though they were – from the panniers hung from the pole across his shoulders. While the narrative is mainly carried by a third person account of Mevlut’s life and thoughts, the viewpoints of many of the individuals connected to Mevlut are interpolated into the text. All of these are written in the first person and introduced by that narrator’s name. Though all the details of Mevlut’s life from his arrival in Istanbul to help his father on his boza rounds, through his prolonged and ultimately unfruitful sojourn at the Atatürk Secondary School for Boys, his years conscripted in the army, the attempts to sell yoghurt, ice cream and cooked rice, the other ventures into employment, cashier in a café, car park guard, electricity inspector – residents of Istanbul seem to have been very creative in the ways they could steal electricity from the supply company – it is his love life which provides the book’s main thrust.

The first chapter depicts the defining incident in Mevlut’s life, and it is as magic realist as you could wish – only not magical at all. For three years Mevlut had been writing letters to Rayiha, a girl whose eyes he had stared into at the wedding of his cousin Korkut. Korkut’s brother Süleyman agrees to help Mevlut elope with Rayiha and arranges the deed. When Mevlut glimpses the girl in the back of Süleyman’s van that night he is bewildered to discover she is not the one he thought he had been writing to. Nevertheless, he marries her, comes to love her and have two daughters with her. Süleyman’s deception, of course, (he had designs on the girl with the eyes, Rayiha’s sister, Sadiha, himself,) has ramifications throughout the book.

Many observations about love are made within the text. Hadji Hamit Vural avows, “‘if you’re going to love a girl as deeply as your brother here … you’ve got to make sure to start loving her after you’re married …… but if you fall in love before that .. and you sit down to discuss the bride price with the girl’s father, then those cunning, crafty fathers will ask you for the moon … Most couples would not fall in love if they got to know each other even just a little bit before getting married …. There is also the kind that happens when two people get married and fall in love after that … and that can only happen when you marry someone you don’t know.’” Süleyman’s later lover Melahat (a stage performer under the name Mahinur Mehrem) lets us know that, “‘I could write a book about all the men I’ve known, and then I would also end up on trial for insulting Turkishness.’”

The changing face of the city into whose nooks and crannies Mevlut wanders plying his wares and the evolution of Turkish life become major themes, with the political ups and downs a background never fully occupying Mevlut’s mind; but a sense of the role played by emphasising the nation is never far away, “in this night, pure and everlasting, like an old fairy tale, being Turkish felt infinitely better than being poor.”

The more you read Pamuk the more it becomes clear that his real subject, his true love, is Istanbul; though Turkishness in the wider sense is also important and affairs of the heart never far away. Here Mevlut’s friend Ferhat tells us that, “What makes city life so meaningful is the things we hide.” Pamuk’s œuvre has probed into those hidden places – more so in A Strangeness in my Mind as his previous books have tended to concentrate more on middle class Istanbul, whereas here our hero (as Pamuk refers to Mevlut several times, this is a knowing type of narration) is one of those for whom getting on in the world has always been difficult, he does not know enough of the right people, never accumulates sufficient capital to become affluent.

Again in a Pamuk novel set in modern times there is an acute consciousness of football, but here no hint of anyone called Orhan Pamuk. If Istanbul itself were not enough, allusions to a journalist character from The Black Book would tie this novel in with previous works.

Through all his modern novels – and arguably in those set in historical times – Pamuk has been picking away at the threads of Turkish life, the tensions between religion and the secular sphere, the restrictions set on the people by political, societal and religious dictats. It is almost possible having read enough Pamuk to feel you know something about Turkey, and especially about Istanbul. This may be a delusion but it’s closer to the truth than those without that experience can ever have.

Pedant’s corner:- no start quotation mark when a chapter begins with a piece of dialogue, shopwindows (shop windows. Is it one word in Turkish?) “enormous billboards that look up one whole side of a six- or seven story [sic] building” (took up makes more sense,) “thirty two liras” (isn’t the plural of lira just ‘lira’? Many instances of liras,) “he would open at random to a page” (‘he would open a page at random’ sounds a more natural construction,) the text refers to Argentina and England being at war, and to ‘English’ ships (that of course should be Britain and British respectively,) occasional omitted commas before and after direct speech, “provide the overhead” (in British English it’s ‘overheads’,) “the lay of all the neighbourhoods” (the lie.)

faber and faber, 2006, 476 p, including iv p Translator’s Afterword.
Translated from the Turkish Kara Kitap (published by Can Yayinlavi Ltd, 1990) by Maureen Freely.

Galip comes home to find his wife Rüya (with whom he has been besotted since childhood and who is also his cousin – apparently this last is a custom widespread in Turkey) has left him. He spends the rest of the novel trying to find out where she has gone. Back to her first husband, once a left-wing firebrand? Or to live with her half-brother Celâl, a famous columnist for the newspaper Milliyet, who has also disappeared?

The chapters written from Galip’s point of view alternate with those in which Celâl’s columns are reproduced, a device which allows Pamuk to ruminate on Turkish and Istanbul history, customs and predilections. It is slightly more complicated than that as just over halfway through, with Celâl’s stock of columns and reprints beginning to run out, Galip takes to writing them himself and presenting them as Celâl’s, so it is possible that all such extracts may in fact be Galip’s thoughts. Indeed one telephone caller to Galip in the guise of Celâl asks if these columns contain the signs that would lead to life’s secret meaning -even if that secret meant nothing. He adds his insight that, “‘No one in this country can ever be himself.’”

In search of Rüya, Galip wanders the streets of Istanbul, especially at night. (A habit also attributed to Ibn Rashid, Sultan Selim, and Mehmet the Conqueror.) This is “the endless fascination afforded to those who wander a city in disguise.” In this novel the presence of the city as in effect a character in its own right – as are all big cities to be fair – is extremely pronounced. After reading the book it’s as if I could walk the place blindfolded. Istanbul also loomed large in the author’s later novel, The Museum of Innocence, and that book’s preoccupation with mementos of a life is prefigured here in The Black Book. What Rüya has left behind, Galip’s memories of Rüya and the remnants of Celâl’s existence are described in loving detail. Again prevalent is the habit of smoking. Everyone in this seems surrounded by clouds of blue tobacco smoke. Once more football as an important factor in Turkish life makes its appearance. (Imagine the reception a British “literary” novel would receive if it mentioned the game at all.)

Rüya was an avid reader of detective novels (which is to say Western detective novels, as the Turkish variant barely existed at the time of writing) and The Black Book has been described as a detective, or at least a mystery, novel. There is a mystery, the disappearances, but the usual preoccupations of a detective novel are absent and, as a detective, Galip is spectacularly ineffective even if, ‘murders that explain books and books that explain murders have a universal appeal, because it is only when a man believes himself to be someone else that he can bring the cudgel down on the victim’s head….. We learn all the rituals and telling details of murder from others, in other words, from legends, stories, reminiscences, and newspapers. In short, we learn about murder from literature….. Even the simplest murder … is an imitation, a literary imitation, even if its perpetrator doesn’t know it.’

Rather than a mystery The Black Book is more an examination of Turkey/Istanbul as seen through the apparently random reflections of Galip on his travels through the city or Celâl in his columns. To an outsider at least, Pamuk appears to have captured his city and culture in the round by focusing on the particular. It is also a rumination on the nature of life and story (or stories within stories inside stories.) “Each story led to another story in an infinite chain,” and, “no matter where they were set …. the love stories were sad and moving.”

In one of these a character pleads, “If people would only just be themselves. If only they would stop telling stories!” In another an heir apparent comes to believe, ‘A sultan’s duty is not to be happy – it is to be himself… it is everyone’s duty – everyone’s.’

The novel is a thinking writer’s work. Galip ponders on the second meanings that might be lurking inside pieces of writing – inviting us to speculate on what he might be hiding in plain sight. As the novel progresses so too does Galip develop a belief about the letters of the alphabet to be discerned on people’s faces and that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were [sic] about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words. That a text provides insights about its author is suggested by the thought, “What did it mean to read a text if it did not mean entering into the garden of its author’s memory?”

Galip (who, a very short passage intimates, may be Pamuk himself, an intimation which might itself constitute a misdirection) comes to the notion that nothing is as surprising as life. Except for writing, the only consolation.

Pedant’s corner:- Unfortunately the translation is into USian so that we get “soccer” (it’s football,) “a corner shot” (a corner,) “a head shot” (a header,) and “soccer uniform” (a football kit is called a strip.) One actual phrase used was, “after countering a corner shot with a head shot”. This may be how it’s expressed in Turkish but the English term would be “after heading a corner”. Otherwise: dilipidated (dilapidated – used later!) syphillis (syphilis,) “true to our ourselves” (an extraneous “our”,) Trabizon (now more usually rendered Trabzon,) caravansaries/caravansary (caravanserais/caravanserai,) “that I was on to something” (onto.) “Everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams,” (everything was about dreams,) “whenever writing about about real life” (remove one of those “about”s,) “it is is located” (ditto one “is”,) Averroes’ (Averroes’s – this was in a chapter epigraph so may be original to that.) “He up and left me” (upped and left me,) cul-de-sacs (culs-de-sac,) a lightbulb (light bulb,) “illumination than never came” (that never came,) imposter (impostor – used once, though imposter appeared several times,) “who it was who had beat him” (beaten him – it was a game of chess,) “left- and ring-wing splinter groups” (left- and right-wing,) reptutation (reputation,) “‘He asked me come here’” (to come here,) telerium (tellurium,) sawed-off (sawn-off,) “both staring Bruce Lee” (starring.) “‘These amusing little signs you sent out to your poor deceived readers’” (the rest of this tirade is in present tense so, send,) pedestrals (pedestals.) “The only sound to be heard in the hunting lodge were the cries of the crows” (the only sounds were the cries, or, the only sound was the cries,) “because the city could not afford to keep their generators running” (its generators,) ““destabilize”” (destabilize, preferably destabilise; however, the word is in inverted commas so may be a representation of an original deliberate misspelling in the Turkish.)

Vintage International, 1998? 176 p. Translated from the Turkish, Beyaz Kale, by Victoria Holbrook.

Apart from a present day introduction which frames the tale within as a found manuscript, The White Castle, Pamuk’s first novel, is set in the 17^th century, narrated by an educated man from Empoli who is captured by the Turks and taken to Istanbul where he is given into the care of someone called Hoja (‘master’) who could be his double. The intention is that his learning will help Hoja in his efforts to produce better fireworks. Hoja also uses his captive’s knowledge to impress the Sultan, eventually gaining the post of royal astrologer. The two become involved in the question of why they are the way they are, the narrator confessing his past faults (which Hoja cannot.) In the process Hoja learns all about the narrator’s past. This makes the narrator increasingly uneasy, imagining Hoja, armed with this knowledge, being able to travel to Italy and take his place there, though of course in the meantime also learning about Hoja. They work for years on an “incredible” weapon – a wheeled, armoured contraption that gets bogged down when attacking the white castle of the title. This failure leads to Hoja vanishing (to Italy?) and the narrator taking his place as court astrologer, even marrying and having children. The subtlety of this is that it is possible that it is either of them who is actually narrating the story, the Italian – or Hoja. Have they really swapped places, or merely pretended to? If someone can give a realistic, convincing, appearance of being someone else, living as that person, do they actually become so? And does it matter if they are not?