"Ottoman of his time
By Jason Goodwin
In Turkey his novels, chronicling the country�s upheavals, have made him as famous as a footballer. But Orhan Pamuk says it�s time to stop speaking for the nation and tell his own stories
Remember angst? Germans produced it, where the French had anomie; and we all know melancholy and tristesse. Now Orhan Pamuk, Turkey�s leading novelist, and in Istanbul the chronicler of the inescapable decline of the great Ottoman metropolis and the disintegration of the Pamuk family within it, has given us h�z�n. It�s h�z�n when wealth ebbs away; when the lovely wooden mansions of the pashas burn to the ground; when Pamuk�s mother sits up late, smoking and half-watching the TV, waiting for her erring husband to get home. Even love is doomed, for old-fashioned reasons: Pamuk wants to become an artist, and a nice girl won�t marry one in 1960s Istanbul. In Istanbul Pamuk writes: �I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul�s fate is my fate: I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.� "
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