The New Life by Orhan Pamuk -- Book Review

by Carmen Nge


“I read a book one day, and my whole life was changed.” In two years, this opening line propelled 200,000 copies of The New Life off the shelves and into the hands of a ravenous Turkish reading public, hungry for the words of their only Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, newly crowned last year. For a nation not known for its readers of literature, this statistic is staggering.
Since then, Pamuk has steadily gained international notoriety—for his prose as well as his politics. Outspoken against the atrocities committed by the Turks against the Kurds and the Armenians in the last century, Pamuk has been hauled to court, his books burned and his life under threat.

Critics have labeled his work “self-absorbed”, “cerebral” and “difficult”. But literary luminaries like Salman Rushdie and John Updike, as well as scores of book reviewers, have compared Pamuk to Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Franz Kafka. And to think, were it not for Pamuk’s own dogged persistence, he would have become an engineer—a career legacy of his wealthy, industrialist family.

The New Life, an earlier work, is the exemplar of the kind of postmodern text Pamuk has been praised for. It is complex and challenging, demanding a reading rigor that frustrates as much as it satisfies because the book is not a fast-paced, Dan Brown-esque page turner, even though it contains all the necessary elements of a bestseller: murder, mystery, mercenaries. Pamuk intentionally leaves gaps in the narrative, questions without answers, confusion that remains rather than gets resolved. Students and aficionados of literature and philosophy will most appreciate this highly enigmatic and symbolically rich novel. Others may find it tough because it requires something rare in readers of contemporary fiction: continuous contemplation.

At the heart of the novel is a book. Like most self-referential texts, this is a book about another, and both with the same title: The New Life. The protagonist is a young engineering student, Osman, who becomes obsessed with a book, his reading of which completely transforms him, rendering him incapable of continuing his present existence. To assuage his restlessness, Osman leaves his hometown and goes on a long journey lasting many months and passing numerous small Turkish towns on different buses.

Other than to discover the secret of the book through his journeying, part of Osman’s quest also involves a beautiful young woman. Janan, a fellow student, is the one who initially caught his eye with the book she carried: The New Life. Osman is inexplicably drawn to the book; through a series of co-incidences and accidents, he manages to secure a copy for himself and thereupon begins his intellectual and soul-searching quest.

On the surface, Pamuk’s novel appears starkly simple. It is a story of a search, a mystery encased in a book that is similarly mysterious because its contents are only alluded to, never revealed. It is a puzzle within a puzzle, a story within a story within another story and another, ad infinitum. To understand Osman is to understand the connectivity of the stories, and to follow the trail of literary clues left behind.

But more than just a personal quest, The New Life is also a well-crafted allegory of Turkey. On the outskirts of secular, modern Istanbul, lives the rural, poor periphery who struggles to make ends meet in the onslaught of globalization. As foreign consumer products invade the country, local goods and small businesses die out, unable to compete with the cash cow of Western capitalism. The despondency and subsequent rage of the people eking out a meager living are manifest in their religious fundamentalism and retrograde conservatism.

Turkey is a nation rife with contradictions—on the one hand, it desires to be part of the European Union and to partake in the attendant financial and political profits; on the other hand, it still represses freedom of expression and curtails opinion critical of the government and its policies. Caught in the cusp between religion and secularism, parochial and globalized modernity, this is a country that has been unable to reconcile its many strands and sects of Islam. Kemal Ataturk’s republic instead preached a different identity: secularism sans tradition and largely disconnected from the rich history of Turkish Islam and Ottoman culture.

Pamuk’s meditation on the complexity of being Turkish is mirrored by a narrative structure that detracts from a standard novel. Osman’s life is his own but his meditations on it are ours as well. As readers, we share in the protagonist’s point of view because we live in his shoes and see through his eyes. At the same time, by using narrative devices such as direct address and second-person pronouns in his novel, Pamuk wants us to know that he is aware of our presence in his text. In fact, he writes to speak to us; his anticipation of our responses assist in his storytelling.

The genius of Pamuk lies in his ability to disturb our novel-reading conventions. Osman’s quest in the book is our quest as we read The New Life: our journey of self, life, death, love. Though particular to the context of Turkey, the themes in the book are relevant to us in Malaysia, and hence, also universal. Pamuk never delivers clichés, even though the ideas he abstracts may appear to be so. Instead, he writes a book that invites us in, changes us and by so doing, changes the meaning of the book for us. As Osman puts it: “So it was that as I read my point of view was transformed by the book, and the book was transformed by my point of view.”

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This review was first published in Off The Edge, February 2007 issue.