Other Colors Essays and a Story Author:Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (Translator) Orhan Pamuk’s first book since winning the Nobel Prize, Other Colors is a dazzling collection of essays on his life, his city, his work, and the example of other writers. — Over the last three decades, Pamuk has written, in addition to his seven novels, scores of pieces -- personal, critical, and meditative -- the finest of which he ... more »has brilliantly woven together here. He opens a window on his private life, from his boyhood dislike of school to his daughter’s precocious melancholy, from his successful struggle to quit smoking to his anxiety at the prospect of testifying against some clumsy muggers who fell upon him during a visit to New York City. From ordinary obligations such as applying for a passport or sharing a holiday meal with relatives, he takes extraordinary flights of imagination; in extreme moments, such as the terrifying days following a cataclysmic earthquake in Istanbul, he lays bare our most basic hopes and fears. Again and again Pamuk declares his faith in fiction, engaging the work of such predecessors as Laurence Sterne and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, sharing fragments from his notebooks, and commenting on his own novels. He contemplates his mysterious compulsion to sit alone at a desk and dream, always returning to the rich deliverance that is reading and writing.
By turns witty, moving, playful, and provocative, Other Colors glows with the energy of a master at work and gives us the world through his eyes, assigning every radiant theme and shifting mood its precise shade in the spectrum of significance.
The implied author --
My father --
Notes on April 19, 1994 --
Spring afternoons --
Dead tired in the evening --
Out of bed, in the silence of night --
When the furniture is talking, how can you sleep? --
Giving up smoking --
Seagull in the rain --
A seagull lies dying on the shore --
To be happy --
My wristwatches --
I'm not going to school --
Ruya and us --
When Ruya is sad --
The view --
What I know about dogs --
A note on poetic justice --
After the storm --
In this place long ago --
The house of the man who has no one --
Barbers --
Fires and ruins --
Frankfurter --
Bosphorus ferries --
The islands --
Earthquake --
Earthquake angst in Istanbul --
How I got rid of some of my books --
On reading: words or images --
The pleasures of reading --
Nine notes on book covers --
To read or not to read : the thousand and one nights --
Foreword to Tristram Shandy: everyone should have an uncle like this --
Victor Hugo's passion for greatness --
Dostoyevsky's Notes from underground : the joys of degradation --
Dostoyevsky's fearsome demons --
The brothers Karamazov --
Cruelty, beauty, and time : on Nabokov's Ada and Lolita --
Albert Camus --
Reading Thomas Bernhard at a time of unhappiness --
The world of Thomas Bernhard's novels --
Mario Vargas Llosa and third world literature --
Salman Rushdie : The satanic verses and the freedom of the writer --
PEN Arthur Miller speech --
No entry --
Where is Europe? --
A guide to being Mediterranean --
My first passport and other European journeys --
Andre Gide --
Family meals and politics on religious holidays --
The anger of the damned --
Traffic and religion --
In Kars and Frankfurt --
On trial --
Who do you write for? --
The white castle afterword --
The black book : ten years on --
A selection from interviews on The new life --
A selection from interviews on My name is Red --
On My name is Red--
From the snow in Kars notebooks --
Sirin's surprise --
In the forest and as old as the world --
Murders by unknown assailants and detective novels --