Rating: 
Summary: The Mystery Remains Mysterious: An Excellent Read
Review: What am I to do, oh readers, for I do not recognize myself. I have read the Black Book and am transformed. I am neither nihilist, absorbing the dark fruit of the Black Book's heart-rending conclusion nor anarchist, for surely the Black Book shows the foils of living under half-lit regimes.
I am no modernist; the Black Book details the past's ragged insistence to be recalled. Nor am I traditionalist; the author Orhan Pamuk, here illustrates the folly of doctrinaire belief, be it secular, political, religious or even,(God help us) romantic.
These are some of the themes flowing from Orhan Pamuk's feverish pen. I could be sure if more of his work were translated (hint!). In a magazine article, Mr. Pamuk described Istanbul, the setting of this novel as having "no symmetry, no sense of geometry, no two lines in parallel." The same can be said of the Black Book's plot.
Though I am no hedonist, feminist, satirist or cynic, nor even lotus-eater, I am wistfully numinous. The book (happily for me), is filled with Sufi ("Hurufi") references to Islamic numerology and mystical sensibility. This delicate thread inspires me with the same maniacal passion that one of the book's central characters named Jelal, an elusive essayist, enjoys among his readers in the story. Make no mistake, this is a marvelous fiction.
Jelal's weary dance with the absurd compels him to capture Istanbul's madness in daily columns depicted throughout the book. These essays rightfully become the stuff of national obsession. The chapter entitled, "The Day the Bosphorus Dries Up," is alone worth the price of the book.
Ruya (meaning "dream") is the book's missing link. Her disappearance is the central mystery of the story and to her husband Galip, the book's bemused protagonist. Once again, Mr. Pamuk has made a brilliant play on the nature of identity (see White Castle). Galip mimics Jelal's persona while searching for him and Ruya, his missing wife. When Jelal's column is threatened by his unexplained disappearance, Galip substitutes his own writing for Jelal's. Thusly, Galip fulfills a long held desire to meet Jelal's creative skill.
Something essential is given continuity by Galip's absorption of Jelal's art. While searching for his wife and Jelal (his cousin), Galip sleuths through the unlit corners of Jelal's obsessively private life. In one of my favorite passages, Galip discovers Jelal's hidden apartment secretly furbished with garrulous fixtures from Galip and Jelal's lost childhood.
Sufi themes in Black Book call to mind further notions of identity and a sense of historical estrangement; of how "modern" life is lived with blunted access to a colorful, if interrupted, past. Sufi symbols from Ottoman times abound in the story along with reminders that these Orders were eradicated by the lone decree of Ataturk, Turkey's great modernizer. These mystical references are a clue to an important theme of the author: our right to know what the inheritances of the past are in relation to the present.
Ruya, gone without explanation, is presumed by Galip to be with Jelal, who is her half-brother. While the reader doesn't observe her directly, neither it seems, does Galip, her husband, even when she is fully present. What we observe of her is the awe and wonderment she inspires in him. (She is Jelal's sister and Galip's cousin and wife.)
Ruya manages to simultaneously signify both the feminine spirit and palpable disillusionment with the role. Galip never questions why she leaves him or what she does (and doesn't do). He is simply compelled by love to find her in what becomes a contemporary twist on the classical (Sufi) theme of "search for The Beloved'.
In the Black Book, we see a land we all inhabit as the new millenium injects strange ciphers into our lives. The author appears to say that all the willfulness of our times cannot interpret these signs if they are read out of context. Though dense, the Black Book is brilliantly written for those who prefer a mystery that remains mysterious. It suggests powerfully, that love is the best reason we have to plod on. It is also proof that though we are likely caught in bare subsistence, we are more "alive" when tending our enigmas.
Bravo, Orhan Pamuk, I am so drunken with your prose, though of revelry and Istanbul, I have no tale to tell.
Rating:
Summary: But I Who Write
Review: Why bother reading stories? In part to escape ourselves, maybe in hopes of discovering ourselves. "The Black Book" is an intricate meditation on the act of reading that explores both sides of our urge for stories in obsessive detail. The surface plot involves Galip's search for his missing wife and her half-brother Jelal, a famous Turkish columnist. But the deeper meaning of the story concerns the fact that every story has deeper meanings. As Galip's hunt progresses, the chaos of modern Istanbul promises to organize itself into the key to unlocking a larger mystery whose solution would make every detail of life carry meaning, turning the world itself into literature. As far as I can make out, for Pamuk this literary apocalypse would be equivalent to the Messiah's return and to each of us being reborn at last as ourselves, instead of living as hopeless imitations of our heroes from novels and movies. Just as Galip discovers that Jelal, his own hero, cribbed his columns from older tales, Pamuk's readers gradually realize that Galip's story is a serpentine riff on the Islamic classics, as his search for Jelal and Ruya comes to parallel the Sufi quest for union with God. The Seeker becomes the Sought, Galip becomes Jelal, the reader becomes the author. The burden of postmodernity, Pamuk seems to say, is to realize that we are author, Messiah and reader rolled up in one, with the world as our text to fashion meanings for. My one criticism is that Pamuk's tale feels a little too familiar, built around themes like the flux of identity, the absence of fixed meanings, the illusion of originality and the self-referential nature of literature that have already been ridden pretty hard by writers from Borges to Eco. But I like the way Pamuk annexes these postmodern concerns to the question of Turkish identity. What does it mean to be "ourselves" in a country where Westernization is a form of imitation? (and where the Western original turns out to have pillaged ideas from the East) "The Black Book" reminded me why stories matter, how literature shapes us and how amazing it is to have such great art available so easily at places like amazon.
Rating:
Summary: But I Who Write
Review: Why bother reading stories? In part to escape ourselves, maybe in hopes of discovering ourselves. "The Black Book" is an intricate meditation on the act of reading that explores both sides of our urge for stories in obsessive detail. The surface plot involves Galip's search for his missing wife and her half-brother Jelal, a famous Turkish columnist. But the deeper meaning of the story concerns the fact that every story has deeper meanings. As Galip's hunt progresses, the chaos of modern Istanbul promises to organize itself into the key to unlocking a larger mystery whose solution would make every detail of life carry meaning, turning the world itself into literature. As far as I can make out, for Pamuk this literary apocalypse would be equivalent to the Messiah's return and to each of us being reborn at last as ourselves, instead of living as hopeless imitations of our heroes from novels and movies. Just as Galip discovers that Jelal, his own hero, cribbed his columns from older tales, Pamuk's readers gradually realize that Galip's story is a serpentine riff on the Islamic classics, as his search for Jelal and Ruya comes to parallel the Sufi quest for union with God. The Seeker becomes the Sought, Galip becomes Jelal, the reader becomes the author. The burden of postmodernity, Pamuk seems to say, is to realize that we are author, Messiah and reader rolled up in one, with the world as our text to fashion meanings for. My one criticism is that Pamuk's tale feels a little too familiar, built around themes like the flux of identity, the absence of fixed meanings, the illusion of originality and the self-referential nature of literature that have already been ridden pretty hard by writers from Borges to Eco. But I like the way Pamuk annexes these postmodern concerns to the question of Turkish identity. What does it mean to be "ourselves" in a country where Westernization is a form of imitation? (and where the Western original turns out to have pillaged ideas from the East) "The Black Book" reminded me why stories matter, how literature shapes us and how amazing it is to have such great art available so easily at places like amazon.
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