Orhan Pamuk: An ironic writer

Orhan Pamuk is a literary force whose work explores the complexities of identity, culture, and history, offering a nuanced perspective on the intersection of East and West. As the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, his writing has reached far beyond Turkey, offering readers insights into the soul of his homeland. His novels—Snow, My Name Is Red, and The Museum of Innocence—are not just stories, but explorations of the ways in which time, memory, and love shape the urban fabric of Istanbul.

Through his evocative storytelling, Pamuk presents Istanbul as an entity that is as vivid and complex as any of his characters. Just a month after our conversation, I found myself walking the city’s streets and felt its timeless beauty and the pulse of its contradictions—just as his books had promised.

We spoke with Pamuk ahead of the release of his latest novel, Memories of Distant Mountains. Accompanying our interview are sketches from his beloved Moleskine notebooks, where he has been capturing the world for the past 16 years. Once aspiring to be a painter, Pamuk stepped away from art for reasons he “still can’t explain.” These small, intimate canvases reflect a passion for painting that Pamuk has quietly sustained alongside his writing over the past 16 years.

Sasha Kovaleva

hube: A hero’s literary life can fit within a single novel or a single page. Does the novel liberate characters from the pain of everyday reality? Are readers seeking the same thing?

Orhan Pamuk: No, not at all. Novels present everyday reality, but in an edited form—readers look to characters to see something meaningful in the familiar pain of daily life. We shape reality to suggest meaning, though we don’t actually escape from it.

There are two approaches to literature: one seeks to capture the world by reducing it, telling stories that distill life down to dramatic moments, almost like Borges’ map, which covers the world completely, as vast as the world itself. This is the epic approach. The other is the dramatic approach, focusing on smaller, more immediate experiences. A novelist, I believe, should hold both perspectives.

The joy of writing isn’t in escaping the “boring” surfaces of reality but in reworking them, creating new surfaces that suggest deeper layers beneath. Unlike the epics of the past, filled with battles and grand adventures, modernity has given us a desire to examine the surfaces of ordinary life and find unique tastes, styles, and qualities in them. The goal of literature and art, for me, isn’t to flee from these surfaces, but to reveal a new meaning, a new structure—a creation that resonates with the pattern of life.

h: When you create your characters and assign them roles, you imbue them with purpose. Do you believe that everyone has a purpose in life?

OP: We all have purposes, but we’re rarely fully aware of them. In The Red and the Black, Julien Sorel has one clear, perhaps shallow, purpose: to rise in the social hierarchy. The reader, the character, and even the author all know this. He’s intelligent, good-looking, and cunning, but what keeps us reading isn’t this obvious goal. It’s the style of his ambition—the details of his social manoeuvres, his love affairs, his cynicism, his lies, his devotion, and his romantic entanglements.

Novels shouldn’t focus on grand purposes or sweeping narratives. In fact, they’re often best when they embrace purposelessness. Our lives may seem superficial, yet novels lend them a meaning and purpose. A life without conscious purpose isn’t meaningless. A powerful political novel, for instance, doesn’t need to amplify its characters’ political goals. Instead, it reveals that the texture of these characters’ lives diverges from their politics. The drama lies in the tension between a character’s purpose and the texture of their life. This difference—this contradiction—between personal and political goals shows us the true essence of the novel.

I’m not writing novels to glorify political heroes or villains. My aim isn’t to propagate ideas about good and bad. I write novels to reveal the intricate texture of life, where grand purposes clash with the simple, detailed fabric of daily existence.

h: In your works, the city often possesses subjectivity, capable of shaping the destinies of those who live there. Where do you think the boundary lies between the utilitarian and the metaphysical?

OP: To live in a city, we have to be practical. But in a large, complex city like Istanbul, we also need to be metaphysical. With tongue-in-cheek, I say that in the mornings in Istanbul, I’m purely utilitarian—I buy food, walk through the streets, watch people, check the sun, read the news, go to shops, note prices and details. But at night, when the city sleeps, or when I’ve perhaps had a glass of wine, I turn metaphysical. My mind starts conjuring the city’s colours, its history, its density, the way it stirs memories.

For nearly 30 years, I’ve been known as an “Istanbul writer,” though I didn’t start out intending to write about Istanbul itself. At first, I wrote about my friends, people I knew. Then, when my work began to be translated, critics abroad—in England, France, and Germany—started to call me an “Istanbul writer” rather than simply a Turkish writer. So I be- came more self-conscious of Istanbul, and it became my purpose to represent the city.

But truly writing about a city means capturing its utilitarian side—daily realities like money, time, distances, costs—and its deeper essence. I pay close attention to these practical details, yet I’m equally drawn to the city’s backstreets, where there are no shops, no lights—where people are simply struggling. Wandering in these hidden streets and discovering the metaphysical side of the city has also become part of my mission.

h: The relationship between a person’s inner world and outer expression, between what is concealed and what is visible, is both a central conflict and a key theme in art. Is literature the primary medium for exploring this?

OP: My answer is no. This is how people thought a hundred years ago—a philosophical duality, dividing appearances and essences. The philosopher looks at appearances, at phenomena, and seeks out the noumena, the hidden essence. Immanuel Kant, classical philosophy—it’s partly true, partly misleading. But this isn’t how I see the art of the novel, as if there’s a hidden truth in the world that I probe by pushing my nose up against the surface to decode it. No, that’s not what I’m doing.

Maybe you’re reducing the world to a duality of appearance and essence, implying that by studying appearances, you’ll reach some inner truth. I disagree. What I do is compose— an orchestration of essence and appearance, blending them to create a living reality. This duality—appearances versus essences, surfaces versus inner mysteries—was once popular, but I think it’s misleading now. It’s not how we experience the world, and it’s certainly not how novelists operate today. As Oscar Wilde famously said, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances” [laughs]. In that sense, I am like Wilde: the joy is in writing about appearances, suggesting the existence of a hidden truth without necessarily “revealing” it. Writing solely to hint at hidden truths is itself a cliché.

What interests me more is intertwining reality with illusion, realistic description with metaphysical intuition—creating a complex texture where truth and fantasy, intuition and irony, coexist. This is my aim. My master in this is William Faulkner, who said there’s no present; it’s always filled with the past. There’s no past that doesn’t live in the present. There is no surface separate from “something deeper”; they are all bound together here and now.

h: For centuries, the East and West have been perceived as opposing forces, both ethically and aesthetically. Can you imagine a future where these divisions no longer exist?

OP: If you’ve read my novels, you know I explore this theme often. To some, Turkish identity is rooted in Islam and a traditional Asian society. Yet, Turkey, especially through the Ottoman Empire, also has deep historical ties to Europe, making it natural for Turks to feel connected to both worlds. Are these opposing worlds fundamental to how I see things? No, not really. I’m aware of the many Orientalist ideas and stereotypes tied to this East-West divide, and I sometimes play with these illusions. In a way, I am a victim of them too, perhaps even complicit in Orientalising my own country. My characters often believe in this duality, but I don’t present it as an absolute truth.

Can I imagine a future without these rigid ideas of East and West? Both yes and no. Istanbul, for instance, has changed enormously, especially with recent waves of immigration. The Istanbul I knew 20 years ago was more oriented toward Europe, with people dreaming of a European life. Today, immigration from Asia and North Africa is reshaping the city’s demographics and sense of identity. Istanbul is more “Asian” in a demographic sense, with many immigrants bringing their own cultures, expectations, and traditions. It’s a challenge to understand and depict this evolving city in my novels, but it’s also a fascination. When I write about Istanbul now, I try to capture not just the classic East- West duality, but the rich, complex lives of those who’ve come here with dreams and hardships.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve interviewed countless immigrants and newcomers to Istanbul, from Anatolia and beyond. Many of them come from places like Afghanistan, where they once had middle-class lives, but now struggle as labourers, grateful for any opportunity, happy just to afford blue jeans to send back to family. This reality often makes abstract ideas about East and West feel shallow. If a novel becomes too fixated on such grand narratives, it risks turning into a superficial manifesto.

In my novels about the Istanbul bourgeoisie, such as The Museum of Innocence and The Black Book, I focus on objects, daily life, and the small stories that make up our lives. But when I write about the “new” Istanbul, I look at the experiences of both local and international immigrants who’ve reshaped the city. Istanbul’s population has grown from two and a half million to over 17 million in my lifetime—a scale of change few writers in history have witnessed in their hometowns. I feel privileged to have lived through this transformation, which occurred here in just one lifetime, while other major cities took centuries to evolve. So, these are the points on my East-West map—constantly shifting, always complex, and far from outdated.