The Guardian Reviews Orhan Pamuk's New Novel

 The Guardian published Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk review – a playful approach to big themes this past weekend. I found Pamuk in prison, and you will find many entries here about him, just use the search the blog function. Of the review, I found the following interesting:

Orhan Pamuk likes to play new games. Every one of his books has differed markedly from the others, yet each shares a capacity for disconcerting the reader. This one is long and intellectually capacious. It tackles big subjects: nationalism and the way nations are imagined into being; ethnic and religious conflict; the decline of an empire; the political repercussions of a pandemic. It includes many deaths.

Yet, for all the weight of its subject matter, its tone is lightly ironic, arch, even flippant. It has many flaws. It is repetitive; it contains far too much exposition. All the same – formally and in terms of content – it is one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year.

*** 

The novel’s chronology is as far from straightforward as its narrative strategy. The clock in Mingheria’s central post office shows two different times simultaneously. Time pleats. People think back to their childhoods. Mina looks forward to their futures, reflecting on what historians will make of the events she is describing. Phrases such as “It would later be revealed” or “Our readers will discover” recur. There are premonitions and spoilers. Strands of the plot are set up as whodunnits, only for the answer to be given offhandedly and too soon. Characters’ back stories are introduced late, sometimes at disproportionate length. Our layered narrators seem to keep forgetting what we know already, or don’t know at all. The Pilgrim Ship Mutiny is referred to several times before we are told about it. Every piece of action is subjected to reprises from different points of view. It is confusing, I think deliberately so. This is a novel whose structure is not like scaffolding, more like a very complex piece of knitting.
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Pamuk (and/or Mina) flout the normal rules of storytelling; the mantra “show, don’t tell” is completely ignored. When a pair of newlyweds are at last alone together, he says to her, “First let me tell you of the state the international quarantine establishment finds itself in’”, and does so, at great length. “Allow me to digress,” says another character. He needn’t have asked permission – in this fictional world, digression is the norm. And yet none of these infringements of literary convention seems to matter much when set against the exuberance of Pamuk’s invention.

Pamuk seems to me to be a most important post-imperial writer. Which should interest those Americans who think we have entered our own post-imperial phase.

sch 9/26/22