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🦋 Some disorganized thoughts on The New Life

I've been reading Pamuk's The New Life, four chapters in now; here are a couple of headings.

• Wonder about class. Osman is an engineering student; does this mark his family (in 1990s Turkey) as wealthy? or at least as whatever the 1990s Turkey equivalent of upper-middle-class is? I'm wondering how he has the wherewithal to disappear for weeks of riding busses around Turkey, presumably eating and staying in hotels... In Chapter 4 he takes some money from his dead seatmate after the bus crashes, but this is after a long period in which money has not been mentioned. (Possibly this is the wrong approach, or not a useful approach, to an allegorical story.)
• The fascination with crashes and death is noteworthy. Wondering if it would be worth going back to Weisel's The Accident (which I read as a young man and have practically no memory of). This is a point of identification for me, my "new life" began after surviving an accident as a 13-year-old.
• The fascination with death is a point of comparison to Dante. Janan is comparable in some ways to Beatrice but her role is much different.

posted morning of Saturday, March 24th, 2018
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