The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk

Philip Hensher is engrossed by the Turkish master Orhan Pamuk’s vision for the novel, The Naive and the Sentimentalist Novelist.

By Philip Hensher, The Telegraph, 18 Mar 2011

 Over the past 50 or so years, literary criticism has abandoned its general duty to say interesting things about books to an ordinary reader. What we have nowadays are online reviews (“I loved this book because I thought it was fantastic”); professional academic criticism which few, unpaid, could want to read (“a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects”); and, of course, a small corner of honest book reviewing in The Daily Telegraph.

It’s left quite an interesting little space for writers, in their different ways, to tell us what they think about their own art form. Until quite recently, you would cast about for extended statements by novelists on their own art. There are Henry James’s prefaces; EM Forster’s wonderful series of lectures; and scattered remarks in letters by Flaubert and Tolstoy.

But recently, many novelists have been taking up the invitation to discourse about how these things are done. There are splendid lectures and essays by Calvino, Kundera, Umberto Eco, Nadine Gordimer and quite a few others.

They might not contain the last word on the novel. On the other hand, they undoubtedly have the merit of being written by people who know how it’s done.

Obviously, Orhan Pamuk knows exactly that. He is the most distinguished Turkish novelist ever. In novels such as My Name Is Red and The Museum of Innocence he has adapted Western traditions to his own ends, drawing heavily on Eastern art forms. His 2006 Nobel Prize was a popular choice.

In these lectures, first delivered at Harvard in its illustrious Charles Eliot Norton series, Pamuk shows himself fascinated by aspects of the novel long neglected by academic study.
He even talks about character, while acknowledging how artificial the traditional notion of literary character is: “People do not actually have as much character as we find portrayed in novels.”

He has little time for Forster’s conviction that a novelist’s characters behave independently of their creator’s will.

Read the full review at The Telegraph online.