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🦋 Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk

I read to the end of McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk today -- it is a good book and I think especially useful to the non-Turkish reader (i.e. myself) approaching Pamuk's books for the second time, to clarify cultural and historical references that might otherwise be lost. Does a really good job of drawing out common threads in Pamuk's books which the disparity of voices and styles can obscure. In short -- I would strongly recommend it if you have read all or most of Pamuk's novels to date and are thinking about rereading them. It also makes brief reference to the forthcoming Museum of Innocence, which will be translated by Erdağ Göknar -- in his application for a grant to do the translation, Göknar says,

the protagonist "comes from an upper-class Instanbul family who, after two failed relationships, goes on an obsessive journey in search of places and objects that remind him of his lost loves and that, once assembled, constitute the bulk of a museum of his obsessions"
which is more than I had heard about the content of the book before now.

McGaha ends by saying,

Orhan Pamuk is only fifty-five years old and is at the peak of his creative powers. There is every reason to believe that his best work still lies ahead of him. I look forward to reading his novels for many years to come.
which -- Wow! What a lovely thought! I can't wait for Museum of Innocence. (Which not that it means anything, but I'm finding kind of charming the parallelism between its title and Robyn Hitchcock's song, "Museum of Sex".)

Note: apparently Göknar's application did not pan out; Freely is doing the translation, which will be published in October '09.

posted evening of August second, 2008: Respond
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