Reviews
Touted as one of Orhan Pamuk's best novels 'The Black Book' takes the idea of a detective novel and turns it into an almost 500 page novel about Istanbul and identity. This wasn't a bad book by any means but it's less a thriller and more of a discussion with one chapter a column by Galip/Celal and the other follows the story. If you're used to Orhan's musings then you'll enjoy this novel like I did but if not then be prepared for less action and more exposition. The actual story told on the blurb really only starts halfway through the novel and the ending was kind of predictable but it was really more about the journey. This was my second novel by Orhan Pamuk and having adored 'A Strangeness In my Mind' I wasn't floored by this but I'm eager to read more by Orhan Pamuk.
While the only thing I've known about author was only through his two other books My Name Is Red and The Innocence of Memories, and nowhere in these two I could feel his postmodern penchant. It's only deep inside it (some 80%) that I was trying to convince myself that it was not some Nabokov I was reading! Not Despair I was convincing myself ! Although ironically, and if not that I found the Hurufism farce déplacée, maybe it wasn't a coincidence after all... Since the stories within the story denoted some sort of Hüzün and gloominess... A despair of being oneself ! However, and ever since I opened it I was keeping an eye on finding the common things with his previous books, what his style was about ? Apart from the languished, long, and occasionally tiring paragraphs... His verbosity shocked me and took me back to the French classics such as : Chateaubriand, Zola, Balzac, or sometimes Camus ( Painful Memory L'homme révolté)... At times I thought that if I wasn't familiar with the continuous literary strands - that were inter-knitted in a deconstructionist manner, that you wouldn't know what to do with the final outcome! - I would have given up ! A bizarroïde shape that took you some 500 pages to construct but was there, meaningless, the journey was interesting nevertheless and included roaming Istanbul streets at unusual night hours, dwelling on antique shopfronts,... And again, I wonder what if Orhan Pamuk became an architect, his empathy for space is something I envy him a lot now ! The ease with which he navigates through Istanbul, which is now almost impossible without a GPS, kept me wondering if there's someone else aside from him with similar skills. And that pretty sums up what I liked in this book, the endless family scenes, the mundane daily Turkish life, a life of serenity, of patriotism, besides the intricacies of the Turkish language itself: I felt sad not being able to read it in its original language: "Translator’s Afterword ▪ A translation that is utterly faithful to that inner logic will, in their view, open up like a flower to reveal its inner truth." This was a story about Being, as much as it had sterile digressions about finding oneself, and if one can be oneself after all, it was filled with references going back to Rumi and digging symbols everywhere that it was dizzying... What does it all mean to Be ? It occurred to me to halt at the ambiguity, and yet incongruity of these tirades, that were nonsensical, I was more confused than illuminated, but wasn't this the confusion that was sought after in writing these postmodern pieces ? “To be oneself,” said the Prince, “a person must hear only his own voice, his own stories, his own thoughts!”
