It should be duly noted that in a 2005 interview with the Paris Review, Pamuk said to his interviewer, “I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions.” We think he managed to escape the clenches of the pointless here. Together, they take on Orientalism, the author’s previous life as a visual artist, and the pitfalls of being called upon to represent Turkey. Here, the author engages in a conversation with Lex ter Braak, director of the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. Charges were dropped in early 2006, though only after a hate campaign against him was initiated by ultra-nationalist voices. In 2005, criminal charges were brought against Pamuk for having “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.” The author had raised the issue of the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1917, as well as the massacre of Kurds in Anatolia, to a Swiss publication, complaining that both issues, in the end, were taboo in his native Turkey. In this tale of a poet and political refugee who has spent twelve years in Germany, Pamuk lets neither the secular nor the religious off the hook. And then there is Kar (Snow, 2000), often deemed Pamuk’s most political work.

This story, set in sixteenth century Istanbul, begins when an Ottoman sultan commissions an illustrated book to celebrate his formidable dominion - an act of representation that is deemed an affront to sacred Islam.When one of the commissioned miniaturists disappears, a mystery ensues that smacks of true crime. Benim Adim Kirmizi (My Name is Red, 2000) is doubtless Pamuk’s most widely read novel.

A young man whose life is one day changed forever by an encounter with a book is the subject of his fourth novel, Yeni Hayat (New Life, 1995), a tale at once Borgesian in its premise and trademark Pamuk in the roundabout manner in which he navigates readers to a non-point. Though its ambiguous politics and overwrought style have irked some, its verbal haze doubles as a rapt tour through a city’s back streets. Kara Kitap (The Black Book, 1990), for example, recounts the tale of a lawyer whose wife goes missing. Pamuk’s novels, quintessentially postmodern, provide for intricately woven, serpentine fabrics in which the dead speak, omniscient narrators play tricks on unassuming readers and impersonation is an art. He is the author of seven novels, a collection of short stories, one screenplay, and a memoir based on Istanbul, the city in which he was raised and continues to live to this day. Orhan Pamuk is Turkey’s most prominent novelist.

My name is red