The Daily Beast

What’s a novelist to do after winning literature’s greatest laurel? In his new ‘A Strangeness in My Mind’ and other works, it seems the Turkish prodigy is edging into early retirement.

When Orhan Pamuk received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, he was 54, the second youngest recipient in the history of the award. Since then he has written two novels that have been published in English, The Museum of Innocence in 2009 and now A Strangeness in My Mind. Reviewing the latter in The Independent, Max Liu spoke for many reviewers of these two works: “Orhan Pamuk is becoming that rare author who writes his best books after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.” Having reviewed three of Pamuk’s pre-Nobel novels—The New Life, My Name Is Red, and Snow, that last the book probably most responsible for the Nobel—I see his recent fiction differently: as premature retirement from stealth cultural critic to curator of nostalgia.

 In those earlier novels and others, Pamuk often used indirect means—Kafkan allegory, Nabokovian games, historical “distant mirrors”—to reflect on the oppressive politics of contemporary Turkey, its suppression of free speech, mistreatment of ethnic minorities such as the Kurds, failing separation of church and state, and denial of historical truth. In Snow, published in 2004, Pamuk summoned the courage to treat religious and political subjects with more directness, though the book also has plenty of alienation effects (a major character is a Brechtian), romantic sentimentalizing, aesthetic debates, and self-referential play including a novelist named Orhan.
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