(I had caught up with him during the last stages of polishing his new novel, “A Strangeness in My Mind,” to be published in English in 2015, um ano de espera ohdear)
um artigo no ny times com fotos de Ayman Oghanna.
and here: "Right now, I’m sitting in Europe, looking at Asia and watching the world change in between. I fell in love with Istanbul and a young Turkish girl the first night I first visited her. I decided to move here. Its beauty and contrasts- conservative but pluralistic, Middle Eastern yet European, traditional and modern, pious but debauched- are unique. They give the city its energy."
about the hook.
"Not far away was another symbol of Ottoman hubris: the monumental central post office, opened in 1909, shortly after a military cabal of Young Turks seized power. “Now it’s just a local branch,” he said with an ironic laugh, sizing up the arched entryway and the cavernous, nearly empty atrium. It has deep associations for Mr. Pamuk. In 1973, at 21, he had just dropped out of architecture school to devote himself to writing. Afflicted by self-doubt and parental skepticism, he decided to test his abilities by entering a short story in a local magazine competition. The tale was a historical romance set in 15th-century Anatolia, the vast hinterland east of Istanbul. His friends frantically typed sections of the story, and Mr. Pamuk raced to this post office and handed the manuscript to a woman behind the counter just hours before the deadline. “The next day I received a note from her, telling me, ‘You paid me too little,’ ” he said, gazing at the main, gazebo-like kiosk beneath the atrium’s soaring central dome, where the moment played out. “But she’d understood that I was ambitious, submitting a literary work, and she paid the postage on her own.” One month later he learned that he had won the contest. “So I love this place just because of that,” he said."
"A few steps away we ducked into Vefa Bozacisi, another of his favorite places. Founded in 1876, the shop, a cozy establishment with leather banquettes and antique mirrors, specializes in boza, a fermented wheat drink that originated in southern Russia. Mixed with water and sugar and sprinkled with cinnamon, the creamy, butterscotch-colored concoction is served in glasses that were lined up by the dozens on polished wooden counters. Beside shelves of pomegranate vinegar, a case reverently displayed the shop’s most valuable heirloom: a silver boza cup used here in 1927 by Kemal Ataturk."
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In a marble courtyard beside the massive pink sandstone mosque, considered one of the most graceful in the Islamic world, a wall poster caught Mr. Pamuk’s eye. It demanded freedom for Salih Mirzabeyogluna, a radical Islamist and author of incendiary political tracts, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison on a terrorism conviction. Mr. Pamuk — fascinated and disturbed by the rise of political Islam in Turkey and the Middle East — based one of his most memorable characters, the terrorist leader Blue in his novel “Snow,” partly upon Mr. Mirzabeyogluna. Blue is an ambiguous figure: a charismatic intellectual who espouses a violent message, while avoiding direct entanglements in acts of terror. The cases of Mirzabeyogluna and Blue were similar, Mr. Pamuk said. “Some Islamists kill, but he didn’t, but he’s been locked up for a very long time.”
ah, não sabia que esta era a cara de Blue. nem que existia uma chávena de boza de prata usada por Atatürk. quatro horas de Cihangir a Fatih.
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innocence as artlessness, a museum of artlessness.
outra peculiaridade: "the book starts with a sentence that contains the words "life" and "happiest" and end with the words "life" and "happiness."
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