Orhan Pamuk

The New Life

I was very eager to read Orhan Pamuk, but I did not find any of his novels in Mosul but "The Snow" and it was very thick, typed with small letters, and the man in charge of the library was not kind, actually he was boorish, so I quit from buying it….

In Syria I found the novel "The New Life" and its title and the words written on the back and the shape of the book and typing of letters were so convincing to make me took it with me to bed that night….

I start reading about 9 p.m. till about 1 a.m. continuously with only some sips of water and some poses when I remembered myself in a state like reading Rachid Bou Jidra, with his obsessional long breath taking concentration exhausting never ending sentences as if all the novel is only one long sentence.

The second day I keep reading and missed for the second day taking the bath I planned to take so my hair became greasy and dandruff found its opportunity to gather with the words gathering in my mind….
The words: (death, kill, book, TV, film, screen, radio) keep repeating themselves in the book…in the novel….like an obsession…but the thing I did not like the most is the too much talking about Turkey and its places and names making the novel not that symbolic for everyone but the Turkish….
Orhan Pamuk was upset when in Egypt there was no Turkish translator so he got to talk in English and he said something like that Arabs and Turkish got many things in common so speaking in English makes me (him, Pamuk) sad…
Orhan Pamuk seems interested in his countries history and changing society…when he writes he keep telling you details….it is a novel and it got to contain details…but he does that in an extreme way…for example he even describes the street his main character walking in having a gun in his hand and planning to kill another character, by giving us the number of the shops in the street, type of shops, and it was all closed (being closed is enough I think), and whether there are lights and their color and the trees…all these detail while we are waiting for a killing to occur…
He seems to enjoy writing, writing with a lust, slowly with great patience, like sipping hot hot coffee from a tiny cup that will always give you the impression that you are still thirsty for more….when he wrote…he meditate while smelling the aroma of the ink passing from his pen which I think he like a lot and took care of…(am just imagining)…while he put his word he treat them like small creature of his invention made them dance in changing complex harmonic Turkish traditional/new age symphony….

Am still in the last pages of the book, but I get little bored so I went to the bath and washed my hair with the antidandruff shampoo twice for a long time….I will swallow my boredom and finish the novel to see what can happen….