says Ka

como diria o autor: "Even as I come to understand as things work here, I'm beginning to think I'll never be able to make it clear to anyone on the outside. My heart breaks to see these people's fragile livelihoods, and their needless suffering.

a resposta, um certo superego e contraditório, é típica do autor: "The only people who worry about needless suffering are atheist who've never suffered a thing,' said Kadife. 'Because, after all, it takes only the tiniest discomfort for atheist to decide that they can't bear life without faith any more, and the next thing you know they've returned to the fold.'

Pamuk em Snow.

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WRR: Freely translated your novel Snow to great acclaim, sensitively portraying your main character, Ka. Is he based on you?

Pamuk: He is based on a friend who left Turkey and now lives in England, a writer living with loneliness trying to make it in England. He is married to an English girl and missing his home, having second thoughts. He is a very literary person, someone I like and respect. I spent a week in London and told him, "In fact this book is based on you. Let’s do a bit of a post-modern trick. Let’s put your name in the book, but the character will be from Germany so it will confuse the reader." He didn't like that I wanted to use his name so I picked Ka, which is an allusion to Kafka: a man becoming detached from all of his surroundings.

Ka is so lonely that it looks Kafkaesque. The mind he carries, the logic, the western outlook is so different from the parochial nationalism and the political troubles of my country. He feels strange, an outsider. But, of course Ka is me after all. All the things that happened to him in Kars (a city on Turkey’s eastern border with Georgia) are word for word copies of my experience in Kars.

Like Ka, I was also followed by the police; and like in the book there really was a newspaper with a circulation of 250. Most of the people Ka met in the poor neighborhoods, I have met too. When I wrote the book, I kept my friend’s name in it all the way to the end. Only when I finished did I remove it.

WRR: What kind of reception did Snow receive in Kars?

Pamuk: My book had a good reception in Kars. The ultra-nationalists organized a press conference saying I wrote Armenian propaganda trashing their wonderful city of Kars. They said I created a character that embraced political Islam and that there is not that much political Islam in Kars, which is slightly true. But then I exaggerated that because I wanted to turn the city of Kars into a microcosm of Turkey.

More heavily in the making of the Turkish public opinion was the response of people who said they were from Kars, but had been there maybe thirty to forty years ago, or that their grandparents were from Kars. These people had invented a sugary Kars. I say in the book that once Kars was a rather sophisticated place with the Russian influence. Troops from Istanbul would come. Literary magazines were published there. There was an emerging secular middle class. These were golden days, but those days are gone and Kars is now a small and poor city with so much of its beauty destroyed. People want to live in the past and they don't want to see what's happened to their beautiful little town. They don’t want to hear it and they want to reduce our culture to a simplistic level.

WRR: You created a nemesis for Ka. A person named Blue. He seems more like an antihero to me. Who is he?

Pamuk: Some people in Turkish newspapers wrote that he is a bad guy. But so many women loved him and have said that the problem with my novel is that Ka is so weak. Women honestly don't like Ka. Ka might be the commercially weak point of the book, but maybe I am that kind of person and I like to write those kinds of books.

You know even though I have written eight books, I am very hard on myself and I don't consider myself to be prolific. But, in all my books I identify with the main character. It's always hard to give them a name so I simply call them something simple like Ka.

WRR: When did you begin doing this?

Pamuk: It began with The Black Book. In My Name is Red, the character was called Ka for quite a length of time. In my newest novel whose name is The Museum of Innocence, again the main character is called Ka. But I finally made him Kemal, which is a perfectly regular Turkish name. I feel uncomfortable if I begin a book with a central character who does not have this letter K.

daqui.