Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009–2022

“Pamuk compels the reader to gaze at his colorful drawings and, almost like an afterthought or footnote, offer a paragraph or line of wisdom or autobiographical insight on each page . . .”

Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006, for what the committee described as his ability to “discover new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures” and his investigations of the melancholic soul of his country, Turkey, and in particular his home city, Istanbul. For some authors, the Nobel Prize can become a prison. The writer gets lost in celebrity and an inimical brand of writer’s block becomes the curse of fame. Not so for Pamuk. Of his ten novels, five came post-Nobel. And four works of nonfiction, as well.

Pamuk is the Proust of Istanbul, the Cervantes of Turkey. The way Faulkner imagined Mississippi or Dickens England, Pamuk has reinvented  the only locus of his imagination, a city that stands in both Europe and Asia, the only city that can lay claim to such a bifurcation.

Pamuk’s complex but stunningly readable novels twist and turn in a reflexive, postmodern ballet that explores politics, culture, identity, history, and art. At the heart of much of Pamuk’s work is a form of negative capability that Keats would have admired. In much of Pamuk’s fiction and nonfiction, mysteries, doubts, and apparent contradictions share the same landscape and force characters and readers to explore the uncertainties together.

Some of the greatest novels ever to come out of Turkey—Snow, My Name is Red, The Black Book—came from Pamuk’s pen. Therefore, it’s fair to say that any new work by Pamuk is an event. Memories of Distant Mountains has a unique place in Pamuk’s oeuvre. Between the ages of seven and twenty-two-years-old, Pamuk thought he would be a painter and went to college to study architecture because that practical filed was close to his real passion: painting. But after three years he dropped out of school for architecture to become a full-time writer. And that he did, after a long apprenticeship, with monumental success. In 2008, he bought pencils, paints, and brushes and started to fill notebooks in order to bring the visual artist in him back to life.

What the reader is left with in Pamuk’s Illustrated Notebooks, 2009–2022, is a strange and compelling blend of arresting paintings and drawings with the writer’s diary entries, meditations on everything from his swimming routine and sleep habits to Leo Tolstoy and Woody Allen. The odd, somewhat surrealistic drawings, vibrating with black, green, orange, blue, yellow, red, purple, and gray compel the reader to become, in a sense, Pamuk. Pamuk presses the reader to follow in his footsteps. Pamuk is an obsessive observer, gazing out the window of his home in Istanbul at the ships sailing across the Bosporus. Wherever he is, he seems to gaze intently out a window—be it in India, Italy, Greece, Miami, or Spain. 

Pamuk compels the reader to gaze at his colorful drawings and, almost like an afterthought or footnote, offer a paragraph or line of wisdom or autobiographical insight on each page— “We love books not because they remind us of the world, but because they allow us to forget about it. . . .”  Or “For Thoreau, diaries are meant to be read, written over, cut up, reassembled.  What Thoreau did for Walden, I am doing for Istanbul.”

Any writer listening to Pamuk’s description of his work ethic will either vow to be more conscientious or quit and take up another profession—“I finished Nights of Plague in this room in Cihangit, writing for 12 hours every day. At night I would sleep for three hours, then write for an hour, then back to sleep for another hour.”

And, true to the reflexive postmodern instinct that often drives Pamuk, in the middle of his new book, he writes this: “Before I die—I would like to write a book called distant mountains. A book about painting and imagining distant realms and misty mountain landscapes.” Pamuk has done just that. It might not be a book for every reader, but for anyone interested in the genius of Pamuk or the way an artist’s mind works, it will be a precious find.