Literature works with intentionally well-meaning readers. We’re not cynical or sarcastic or suspicious about it. Why read novels? Because we believe in the power of literature. In the end there is a very old-fashioned side to reading novels in our age – blogs, internet, so much information and so much humanity. If you’re a cynical person, if you are not a sincere believer in the strength of literature, then you should avoid reading books. Because literature, whether it is fantastic or realistic, works with what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called suspension of disbelief. Why is it so important to believe in what you are reading?Īnswer. You say in this book that we have to believe in the novel when we are reading it. He looks happy, as if he’s fallen in love, and not only with literature. Before we talked he offered us watermelon and apricots. He still spends his summers there, writing in a peace that’s only disturbed by “the soft passing of time,” marked by the shadows the sun throws over his bare balcony. We talk in the house Pamuk lives in, in Bujukada, the beautiful island his parents would take him to from the day he was born.

While reading it, it’s impossible not to feel that its protagonist, Mevlut, embodies the very Istanbul he describes, and, in fact, when one travels to Istanbul and listens to its racket and rejoicing, it seems obvious that Pamuk has made any and all of these characters stand up in his fiction on these old streets. It’s a book about happiness (or the lack of it), and about time. With intelligent and moving meticulousness, the Turkish Nobel Prize-winner tells of 40 years in the life of a humble Istanbul street vendor.

Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul, 1952) has written another monumental novel, A Strangeness in My Mind, which comes after The Museum of Innocence, published in 2009. One of the author’s illustrations that accompanies his latest novel.

Orhan pamuk barcelona