Orhan Pamuk's new novel: A modern epic about dark streets

"A strange feeling in me", a new novel by the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, was published by the publishing house Geopoetika. After the edition in Turkish, this is the first foreign edition of Pamuk's novel. The translator is Mirjana Marinković. The subtitle of the novel "A strange feeling in me" reads: "The story of the life of the master Mevlut Karatash, his experiences, dreams and friends, and a picture of Istanbul life between 1969 and 2012 seen through the eyes of many faces."

"A strange feeling in me" is a love story and a modern epic at the same time. The novel on which the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk worked for six years, published in Turkey in December 2014, tells the story of the life in Istanbul of the boss Mevlut and his love to whom he sent love letters for three years. For more than forty years, between 1969 and 2012, Mevlut has been selling sour milk, boza, pilaf on the streets of Istanbul, and is a parking lot guard. He observes how the streets are filled with different people, how a large part of the city is being demolished and rebuilt, how the world is arriving from Anatolia and acquiring wealth; on the other hand, he witnesses the transformation, political friction and upheaval that the country is going through. He is always wondering what is the source of something that makes him different from the others, that strange feeling in him. But he never stops thinking about selling the bosa in the winter evenings and about who the one he loves really is. Is a man's intention or his destiny more important in love? Does our happiness or unhappiness depend on our choices or do they happen outside of us? In search of answers to these questions, the novel "A strange feeling in me" gives a picture of the confrontation between family life and the life of the city, the anger and helplessness of women inside the home.

The novel deals with the fates of members of the Aktaš and Karataš families. They are connected through two brothers, Hasan and Mustafa, who came to Istanbul in 1970 from the city of Beysehir in central Anatolia. The main protagonist of the novel is Mevlut, Mustafa's son. He grew up and lived with his father in Istanbul, where he attended school but left before finishing. He became a street seller of yogurt - first with his father, and then, after his father's death, on his own. Melvut's love for Samiha and Rahia will create many doubts for him and lead him to many questions. Melvut is torn between his native village and the metropolis, but the main strength of this character lies in the description of his feelings as he wanders the dark streets and recounts his own inner restlessness, the feeling of belonging to the city and the constant search for something else - between reality (the happy life he leads with Rahia) and fantasy (what could have been, if Samiha had received the letters and run away with him).

"My Name is Red" is the most translated and most read book in Turkish history

"A strange feeling in me", Pamuk's ninth novel, is similar to some of the writer's earlier novels. As well as his debut novel, "Dževdet Bey and His Sons", published in 1982, the latest novel is a family saga. But, unlike the novel "Museum of Innocence" (from 2008), the new novel does not take place in the high society of Istanbul in the Nişantaş neighborhood, where Pamuk also comes from, but in the side streets of the Tut metropolis. On this occasion, the writer dedicates his narrative to those from other regions, migrant workers from small towns in Anatolia who are looking for their place in Istanbul. The writing power of this writer is also reflected in his passion to collect fragments of the everyday life of his city. However, in the novel "A strange feeling in me" the characters are not as clearly depicted as the city in which they live.

Orhan Pamuk says that while writing this novel, he talked to street vendors and revised their stories in accordance with the peculiarities of Mevlut's mind. He said that his hero is similar, but also different from himself: "We are not close to each other in terms of our lifestyles, but I share many things with Mevlut such as the thoughts in our minds and the ability and desire to philosophizes about life in a shady street by finding hints in small details”. This novel, as the author emphasized, also deals with the oppression suffered by women in Turkey: "If we were to criticize Turkey from the outside, it would be because of the place of women in society. "Our politicians make reckless statements on this issue, as if they want to start a fight," said Pamuk.

Considering that the novel "A strange feeling in me" was only available to Turkish readers until now, the first criticisms came from there. The critic of Radikal Kitap magazine believes that the novel is an urban fairy tale and that Mevlut is an immortal hero and a symbol of the forgotten Istanbul. The daily "Taraf", however, is critical, and points out that the world that Pamuk is trying to describe seems completely foreign to the author. Because the writer has less affinity for the neighborhood of Tarlabasi, a former lower-class neighborhood. Pamuk is a writer who polarizes opinion and remains a controversial author in Turkey. Back in 2006, a year before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he said in an interview with a Swiss newspaper that 30.000 Kurds and one million Armenians were killed on Turkish soil and that no one but him dared to speak about it. State prosecutors then filed charges against him on charges of “insulting a Turkish being”; secular parts of society accused him of "leading his country backwards". And many Turks still believe that the late Jašar Kemal should have received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ferit Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952. He grew up in the Nişantaş neighborhood of Istanbul, in a family similar to the kind of family he describes in his novels "Dzhevdet Bey and His Sons" and "The Black Book". After finishing high school, he studied architecture, but then decided on journalism. He left his studies at the Technical Faculty, enrolled at the Istanbul University Journalism Institute and graduated in 1976.

Pamuk, who says that in his childhood and youth he fantasized about becoming a painter, actively devoted himself to writing in 1974. He published his first novel "Dževdet-bey and his sons" in 1982. Then followed: "Silent House", "White Fortress", "Black Book", "New Life", "My Name is Red", "Other Colors", "Snow ”, “Istanbul: memories and the city”, “Museum of Innocence”. For his works, he received numerous Turkish and international literary awards, among which the most significant are the IMPAC Dublin Award, Prix Médicis étranger, the German Booksellers' Peace Award, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, and the "Norman Mailer" Lifetime Achievement Award.

Pamuk's book "My Name is Red" is the most translated and most read book in Turkish history. When Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, the Swedish Academy emphasized: "In search of the melancholic soul of his hometown, he discovered new symbols for the conflict and intertwining of cultures." Orhan Pamuk's books have been translated into over sixty world languages ​​and sold in millions of copies.