by RICHARD ABOWITZ
On the strangeness in the author’s mind, a bildungsroman (or not), and the beauty of the everyman
Orhan Pamuk is one of the world’s best-known novelists. The Nobel Prize-winning author’s fictions often focus on the lives, times, and people of his native Istanbul. His latest novel, A Strangeness in My Mind, was six years in the writing and tells of the life of one street vendor in the city. TSS editor Richard Abowitz reached Pamuk by phone in New York where he teaches at Columbia University.
TSS: The title of your new novel, A Strangeness in My Mind, comes, of course, from a Wordsworth poem — a massive work, The Prelude — but I’m struck by the way you use it, because, you know, we think of Wordsworth as a poet that loved nature, and, while he was pre-industrial revolution, he wasn’t exactly a fan of what he saw coming. You use it, in your new book: “In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.” How did you think of applying Wordsworth to a city and as the title for your book?
OP: The great thing about poetry, and in fact literature, is that we don’t only read it in the context that it’s written. Wordsworth and his friends invented what we today in an exaggerated way call “romantic poetry.” If with that we mean that imagination — capacity to see strange things that mean more than the physical — goes beyond what’s given to us, beyond the reality of the present, I agree with Wordsworth. Actually, my character, Mevlut Karata?, is not a rich kid, but a street vendor who sells boza, a fermented Ottoman beverage, in the streets of Istanbul between 1970 and today, but his imagination is alert. I gave six years to render the humanity of a lower-class character who has a great imagination. Though my character, by class and by culture, is unlike me, he has some parts of my imagination and my mind. In my childhood, even in my early 20s, my friends used to tell me, “Orhan, you have a strange mind.” And then, years later, when I was reading Wordsworth, I came across this line, and I said to myself, “One day, I am going to write a novel and make the title A Strangeness in My Mind.” Then, many, many years later, I wrote Mevlut Karata?, this lower-class character, who I did my best to identify with, to deserve this title, so to speak. It both alludes to the character’s imagination and also to the city that he is walking around and working, working, walking, walking, all the time.
TSS: I think of Dickens or I think of Horatio Alger Jr., where you meet a poor street vendor and you expect him to rise up in the world — the bildungsroman, the coming-of-age novel. Your street vendor doesn’t quite have that; it’s not the story of his economic rise in the way that maybe a reader might be trained to expect.
OP: A Strangeness in My Mind, yes, has intentionally Dickensian characters, but it’s not melodramatic. I love Dickens. I love his language and humor, but then, I don’t like his melodrama, and I am also sometimes upset by the way he makes his characters funny by making them alliterative and one-sided.
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