Pamuk, Orhan
Entry updated 16 January 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1952- ) Turkish author, almost exclusively of nonfantastic works whose comprehensive and penetrating focus on the culture and history and politics of his native land have won him praise from the world at large, and oppressive threats from the powers that be. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007; and was persecuted, off and on, for referring to the Turkish genocide of its Armenian population in 1915. Pamuk has substantially lived and worked in America since 2006.
Nothing he has written may have any close relationship to the genres of the fantastic, including his most recent novel, Veba Geceleri (2021; trans Ekin Oklap as Nights of Plague 2022). But in utilizing some of the world-facing implements of Fantastika this tale can be seen nakedly to address the position and plight of contemporary Homo sapiens in a world no longer understandable through mundane tools of discourse. The initial setting is the imaginary Island of Mingheria, the soon-to-be freed twenty-ninth province of the Ottoman Empire in 1901, as a Pandemic threatens to cripple civilization there, the loss of this world evoking saudade in those who survive. The detailed interactions of Mingheria with the rest of the planet over the following century or so inch Nights of Plague towards topoi of the Alternate History mode, though not quite explicitly; just as bureaucratic entities like the Department of Scrutinia and the Translation Bureau evoke slantwise Satirists like Italo Calvino or Stanisław Lem (see Absurdist SF). But explicit or not, a flow of idea and action between imagined and consensual worlds seems powerfully and freely enabled; the tale reads as a narrative properly arrayed to engage with cusp times in the history of the planet. [JC]
Ferit Orhan Pamuk
born Istanbul, Turkey: 7 June 1952
works (highly selected)
- Veba Geceleri (Istanbul, Turkey: Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 2021) [pb/]
- Nights of Plague (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2022) [trans by Ekin Oklap of the above: hb/Chip Kidd]
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