The Black Book

"After being subjected to asymmetrical and meaningless curves in the first four pages, Galip solved the mystery of the trails on the fifth page. He figured out that an ant had been placed in the middle of a blank page, then the haphazard trail of the harried insect had been traced by the ballpoint pen hard on its heels. In the middle of the fifth page, where the exhausted ant had made a trail going in circles indecisively, its dried corpse had been fixed by being pressed into the notebook." This snippet from Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book seems, in a small way, to illuminate the ordering principle of the work. The book might appear, for its first few pages, to be haphazard, but as one sinks deeper into Pamuk's Istanbul, one realizes that the mysteries of this text can be, if not solved, then at least grappled with. One feels, upon finishing the novel, that one has ingested a 1001 nights worth of stories, and not only that, enjoyed an exhibition of a substantial number of the tricks a postmodern novelist at the top of his game can play. At times one feels overwhelmed by the digressions which form, in fact, the meat of the novel, but then, before one knows it one has been sucked back in. That an author who writes novels such as this one can win the Nobel Prize for literature makes one wonder whether that prize—which Joyce, Proust, and Borges did not win—might be worth something after all. (I read the novel in its first English incarnation, Güneli Gün's translation. Pamuk, apparently dissatisfied with Gün's work, had the novel retranslated and republished later.)