Is Orhan Pamuk’s “Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022” the most embarrassing book published in modern times by a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Or is it just an innocuous, rainbow-hued collection of tree, boat, city, sea and mountain paintings, overlaid with text, that might look good on a coffee table?
The angel on my right shoulder and the devil on my left are deadlocked.
Ties go to the devil.
“I sometimes wonder why I keep a diary at all,” the English bon vivant Henry Channon wrote, speaking for all journal keepers. “Is it to relieve my feelings? Console my old age? Or dazzle my descendants?”
Pamuk, the Turkish writer whose novels include “My Name Is Red” (1998) and “Snow” (2004), began keeping illustrated notebooks to return to his first love: painting. This is a tall and thin book. Its colorful two-page spreads open like the splayed halves of a trout.
Pamuk’s pen, ink and watercolor images have a low-key outsider art vibe. Some are lush; others have an antic hint of Roz Chast’s cartoons in The New Yorker.
Diaries and notebooks from writers (and others with a gift for language) matter because they’re forums for observations on manners and morals and art and food and sex and politics; they track another human being’s impulses, appetites and philosophies. They’re a groovy back door into a mind.
Pamuk’s notebooks lead us to such a door, then ask us to remain outside. His text is so breezy and frictionless that if J.M. Coetzee or Doris Lessing or Harold Pinter — to name a few Nobelists from this century — had published it, one would worry they’d been kicked in the head by a horse and were still in convalescence.
Pamuk’s text, in his native Turkish, floods the margins of his images. In this book, an English translation by Ekin Oklap runs like ticker tape across the tops and bottoms and sides of the pages.
Much of this book is concerned with elite travel. Literature’s Nobel laureates (Pamuk received his in 2006) are asked to speak worldwide and live well. They bask in the most premium of freebies. Pamuk goes to Berlin, Bombay (Mumbai), Bursa, Beverly Hills, Barcelona, the island of Buyukada and onto a cruise ship on the Bosporus. That’s just the B’s. When he is running late, commercial jet liners wait for him.
He likes swimming. He likes to eat fish. He likes to sit in the front seat of cars. He is always working on, or chiding himself for not working on, a new novel. Here is his idea of a spilled confidence: “Confession: There’s something about American airports, about traveling, about going from one city to the next, that I love.”
His wife warned him not to publish “anything too personal” in this book, and he has succeeded all too well. Sometimes the prose is gnomic: “If you follow the river you will reach the valley where words and images are one,” he writes. Duly noted. At many other times, he displays a tiresome sort of mock innocence. At a reading: “Lots of people! A large, jam-packed hall!”
He spends time with major world writers and delivers the blandest reports imaginable. Amitav Ghosh and his wife are “good company.” About Elif Batuman and her girlfriend: “We drank, we laughed, we had a good time.”
The slightness of the commentary would be less puzzling were Pamuk not so clearly a writer, at his best, of startling power. To be fair, some entries are somewhat weightier and mention the Arab Spring, Islam, democracy and his own security concerns in Turkey.
He has arranged these notebook pages “not in chronological but in emotional order.” This works except when he appears to be with one woman on one page and another on the next. Not until the endnotes do we discover that Pamuk broke up with his girlfriend Kiran Desai in 2011 and began a relationship with Asli Akyavas, whom he later married. A word or two about how all this came to pass might have been worthwhile.
“Memories of Distant Mountains” is a book of paintbox colors and pastel moods. It’s a kiddie pool when one is hoping to body surf. If this is the kind of thing you like, you will like it a lot.
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