My name is…

I’ve been so busy lately that I almost missed the news that Orhan Pamuk has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s a personal honour to be writing about it. I love his books.

Not always I have to admit. It seems I like his books in rotation. For example I couldn’t get my head around Black Book. But I know of Turkish people of the generation one before mine who found themselves in it. New Life I loved. They didn’t.

I loved New Life not because I was searching for a new life or the book offered a new life but because it offered an adventure. I read the book in my 20s when I was leading a conventional life by all accounts but I had hopes for a new life: a life spent in pursuit of a dream even if it is impossible to fulfil. The idea of an impossible dream appealed at the time. How can you not like a book the first sentence of which is “I read a book one day and my life was changed”?

Those were the days when life seemed to offer more possibilities. While the hero of that book was after a dream that would end his life, the dream I was after was a loose notion of a better life. What matters is that I shared the dream of a life that’s possible to change. It didn’t matter that what the hero wanted and what I wanted (not that I knew what that was) were two different things. I identified with the desire for change.

Then there is My Name is Red. Possibly the best book I read. I of course remember the overall story. But what I remember most is the pleasure I had reading that book. It took me a long time to finish because I kept going back to sentences, paragraphs to read them again and again, they were so beautiful.

I also liked his very clever idea to juxtapose what is happening in Turkey now with a murder mystery in the 16th century. Murder mystery is simply a tool to tell the story of a quest for an individual identity. Do we carry on as a part of the community and follow the rules instead of what we wish to do or do we make our individual mark on the world? Community offers love and support. But it seems only if you follow the rules unconditionally. Individual identity gives you freedom but at the price of loneliness, at least at times. I think my thirst for freedom is what keeps me in London and what keeps me single but as I grow older loneliness that comes from being an outsider – no matter how well I fit here – and being alone – no matter how many so-called boyfriends I may have - becomes a bigger price to pay. Still I continue.

There seems to be a debate in Turkey whether he would have won the Nobel prize if he didn’t make that infamous political speech about the Armenians and Kurds. I can write loads about this point but I want to believe that he won because he is a great author so I will not honour the doubt by discussing it. In fact, if there is a universal anti-Turkish wave, then the best way to confront it is not to have debates about what someone said or meant, but by trusting ourselves as a nation. I repeat I think he is a great author and like any great author of any nation he deserves this award. End of story.

Pamuk explained this best in an interview he gave to The Guardian a few years ago. He said “when an English language author writes a love story, it’s a universal love story but when I write a love story it’s a Turkish love story”. Here is a great author, undoubtly a product of his culture but global in his appeal and message. Congratulations. I am proud of you. Not just because you are a Turk but because you are an author whose ability to take me into new worlds I admire.