Painting with words

TURKEY honors its pashas, saints and policemen, Orhan Pamuk writes, but refuses to honor its writers until they have gone to jail. So when the Nobelist was put on trial for denouncing the officially enforced silence about the Armenian massacres in World War I, a friend congratulated him on at last becoming a real Turkish writer. Pamuk took it in good humor, but with the hint of a wince. Not because of the jail joke (the charges were set aside) but because of the worldwide tumult of literary protest that had blown up. He found it “embarrassing,” he writes in “Other Colors,” a collection of essays and sketches.

The partly autobiographical portrait they assemble is not that of a crusader. No role as prisoner of conscience for him. Conscience is something he can’t escape, but given his druthers he might do without. The fearless-protester narrative is the world’s version, not his. Pamuk’s version -- the one that lets him live, breathe and write -- is of the absorbed artificer. He is after Yeats’ jeweled nightingale. Can he help it if what emerges from his three best works -- “The Black Book,” “Snow” and above all “My Name Is Red” -- is a voice, part playful and part deadly, whose refracted reality a real nightingale might envy?

“Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than ‘seeing the world with words,’ ” he writes in his preface. For Pamuk, it is a matter of using words “like colors in a painting.” No wonder the heart of “Red” was a series of variations on the art of the Ottomans’ Persian-trained miniaturists and that out of these variations the stories -- erotic, cultural, philosophical and darkly mysterious -- came spiraling. No wonder Pamuk recalls that when he revisited the city of Kars, where “Snow” was set, the aura he’d seen was gone. It had disappeared into his words.

When the Paris Review performed one of its literary dissections on Pamuk, he curled away from grand concepts to pinpoint what making literature means to him. “More than a commitment to the art or to the craft, which I am devoted to, it is a commitment to being alone in a room.” That room reappears from time to time in these pages: as refuge from heat, crowds, demands of all kinds. But above all, from the swirl of pressures on a Turkish writer who is trying to reconcile his place in a cosmopolitan literary tradition -- running through modernist to postmodern -- with his roots in Turkey’s gnarled, and sometimes repressively violent, rival identities: the secular and the Islamist.

Some parts of the collection take up this internal conflict. One of his literary heroes is Dostoevsky; Pamuk sees in him someone bred to Western rationalism but with literary instincts that drew on his sense of affront at the West’s blindness to the spirituality of the Russian people. Pamuk feels a kinship.

In a talk delivered in Germany, he warns that Western anti-Islamist feeling and the opposition to Turkish membership in the European Community can only inflame nationalist reaction in his country, and it ignores what Turkey might contribute to the world. Peace, that is -- “the security and strength that will come from a Muslim country’s desire to join Europe, and this peaceable desire’s ratification.” Politics occupies a minor place, though, in a varied collection that displays all manner of soaring lightnesses amid what could be termed -- opposite to Milan Kundera -- the unbearable heaviness of being (being Turkish, among other things).

Brought up immersed in Western literature, Pamuk writes of having always regarded that Eastern classic “The Thousand and One Nights” as inert and retrograde. Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino opened his eyes to how such things could be fractured and transformed: “Red” is the result. In his catalog of writers, Pamuk pays tribute to the disjointed splendor of “Tristram Shandy.” “To have no purpose is not a failing but a purpose in and of itself,” he writes, hailing “the impossibility of ever getting to the point.” Laurence Sterne, another ally against the heaviness of being. As is the most unheavy butterfly-netting Vladimir Nabokov, whose books Pamuk packs on journeys as if they were medicine.

Best of all, in a collection whose essays include some that are tedious or vague, are samples of Pamuk’s imaginative writing. There is a lovely set of quicksilver Istanbul sketches: barbers, the solitude of street food (an escape from the gregarious ponderousness of family meals), giving up smoking (“I no longer feel the chemical craving. . . . I just miss my old self”), and his young daughter (a portrait he illustrates with touching Thurber-like drawings).

The single story in the book, light and heartbreaking, is about a mother shattered by her husband’s desertion. It is based on a long flight to Paris of Pamuk’s dilettante father, whom he depicts in another piece as a man at once inconsequent, kind and painfully self-aware. “I feel like a bullet that’s been fired for no reason,” he’d told his son, who continued to love him.

Pamuk’s Nobel lecture is titled “My Father’s Suitcase.” Quite apart from the usual lofty Nobelisms, it recalls a valise of story notes that the old man, hoping but not believing they would amount to anything, shyly entrusted to his now-famous writer son shortly before he died.