"The novel of ambiguity
Are the transformations effected in Orhan Pamuk's novels an extension of their author's own positioning, asks Elias Khoury*
Last year, at the Göteborg Book Fair, where dozens of writers from the four corners of the globe meet at the Swedish dining table that offers a main course called the Nobel Prize, I sat down to breakfast at my hotel with Orhan Pamuk. The Turkish novelist looked distracted, worn down with waiting. The newspapers were full of the news of the legal charges brought against him on account of his statements about the genocide of Armenians and rumours were rife among journalists and other gossips that he was a likely candidate for the Nobel. I jokingly said that anxiety did no good and that waiting for the award may mean that it will never come. I went over the well-known story concerning the prominent Turkish novelist Yashar Kemal who was led to believe that renting a house in Stockholm would place him on the scene and the award jury would, as a consequence, find him hard to overlook. The result was that the prize eluded him; he became a prime example of miscalculation."
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