Orhan Pamuk and the Poetics of Fiction

Book excerpt: This volume marks an exhilarating tour through the mesmerizing and labyrinthine fictional world of the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. Despite being ranked alongside Marquez, Cortazar, Calvino, Borges and Eco, Pamuk is yet to receive due critical attention in the Anglophone world, where he has millions of readers. This book takes the reader on a fascinating ride through Pamuk’s novels from The Silent House, written in the early Eighties, to the recently published The Red Haired Woman. The nine novels that form the focus of this study straddle a period of more than three decades that witnessed the emergence of Pamuk as Turkey’s foremost novelist and a master fabulist. The book details the chemistry of the thematics and architectonics of Pamuk’s craft in a style shorn of dry pedantry and jargon trotting. Examining the intricate pattern of his creative topography in the light of theories ranging from psychoanalysis to spectral criticism, it represents a timely and illuminating contribution to the study of contemporary fiction.