''Who could resist the charms, or doubt the importance, of a liberal,
secular, Turkish Muslim writing formally adventurous, learned novels
about the passionate collision of East and West? Orhan Pamuk is
frequently described as a bridge between two great civilisations, and
his major theme – the persistence of memory and tradition in
Westernising, secular Turkey – is of a topicality, a significance, that
it seems churlish to deny. His eight novels, the most recent of which, The Museum of Innocence,
has just appeared in English, perform formal variations on that theme.
Though his work fits into a Turkish tradition most closely associated
with the mid-20th-century novelist Ahmet Tanpinar, one needn’t know
anything about Tanpinar, or even about Turkish literature, to appreciate
Pamuk, who writes in the Esperanto of international literary fiction,
employing a playful postmodernism that freely mixes genres, from
detective fiction to historical romance. Much of Pamuk’s fiction reads
like a homage to his Western models: Mann, Faulkner, Borges, Joyce,
Dostoevsky, Proust and – in The Museum of Innocence, the tale
of a doomed, obsessional love affair between a man in his thirties and
an 18-year-old shop girl – Nabokov. Indeed, his affection for the
European tradition is as crucial to his appeal as his Turkishness, and
his books pay tribute to values deeply embedded in the liberal
imagination: romantic love freed from the fetters of tradition;
individual creativity; freedom and tolerance; respect for difference...''
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