Word: turkish
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thick haze of melancholy floats above every page of the works of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, settling amidst the words like fog over the Bosphorus. In his 2005 memoir “Istanbul,” Pamuk intersperses evocative personal reflections on the neglected city with monochrome images of rainy streets and crumbling minarets; his prose, with its concern for the visual over the intellectual, assumes the nostalgic intimacy of a forgotten postcard. The sadness of his characters merges inseparably with the troubled political and cultural landscape of Turkey: though both characters and nation stand on the brink of happiness...
...extremism, won’t find it here. Pamuk’s name took on a controversial coloring in the wake of that novel—in 2005, his remarks about the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of Armenians and Kurds earned him a much-debated prosecution under Turkish law for “explicitly insulting the Republic,” and a year later he took home the Nobel Prize in Literature amidst accusations by his countrymen that he had sold out to the West. But Pamuk is no activist. In his latest, civil war and sectarian violence...
Stripped to its essence, the plot is an old-fashioned tale of unrequited love. Kemal, a successful middle-aged Turkish businessman, walks into a boutique to buy a handbag for his fiancée and is immediately smitten with an 18-year-old shopgirl named Füsun, who happens to be a distant relative of his. Their affair—initially, a casual one—takes on a special gravity; despite its European affectations, 1970s Istanbul remains deeply wary of women who have sex before marriage. The two eventually do consummate their relationship, however, and the first...
...Istanbul, and the sense of that isolation drifts throughout his painstaking dissection of heartbreak. More than any other novelist today, Pamuk has laid claim to the dispassionate prose style and layered, self-reflective inheritance of Proust. At one point, he follows a numbered list of the ways in which Turkish girls are socially condemned for surrendering their chastity before marriage with a note: “Clever readers will have sensed that I have placed this anthropological lesson here to allow myself a chance to cool off from the jealousy that Füsun’s love stories provoked...
...other side, Turkey is still waiting for Armenia to withdraw its troops from the Azerbaijan territories adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh. The dispute was not addressed by the treaty, despite the delay of the signing ceremony itself due to protests that such remarks were supposed to be part of the Turkish minister’s address; even hours before the signing of the treaty, these unresolved issues threatened to derail the peace process. And the Turkish prime minister still continues to threaten the closing of the country’s borders if Armenia doesn’t peacefully withdraw its forces...