Memories of Distant Mountains by Orhan Pamuk review ? journal of a private dreamworld
At the age of 22, Orhan Pamuk dropped out of architecture school to become a writer. His mother used to open his door in the middle of the night to check on him, and would find him smoking and working. ?Are you writing?? she would ask. ?At least don?t smoke that much.?
This anecdote, which appeared in Other Colours, an earlier collection of essays, shows him as an aspiring young man whose position as one of the most distinguished authors of our age was yet to be secured.
In Memories of Distant Mountains, a selection from the illustrated notebooks he kept between 2009 and 2022, we are thrown deep deep into the mind of a mature writer, a Nobel Laureate. Even so, it reveals what he might describe as a naive and sentimental passion for both writing and painting.
The pages of this beautiful book, which reproduces journal entries alongside translations and some commentary, include Pamuk?s sketches of landscapes, houses, trees, seas, ships, squares, mountains, roads, gardens, monuments, skies, cities, people, his desires and dreams. Sometimes he writes first and draws on the same pages later; sometimes the opposite. The entries are not chronological but, as he puts it, in ?emotional order?.
?Everything begins with landscape,? Pamuk writes. ?Landscape? here means the mind of the writer-painter, but also takes in his house, his relationship, his country, his travels and his demons. ?I like showing the darker side of people and of the city,? he writes above a drawing of a blue sea with islands. The city is Istanbul, the anchor in his wide imagination and an indispensable protagonist in his work. And though he travels to Goa, Granada, New York and beyond, he is often happiest at his desk.
View image in fullscreen An illustration from Pamuk?s notebook. Photograph: Mehmet Yilmazer/Orhan Pamuk
Pamuk, who identifies with William Blake, conducts conversations between the painter and the writer within him. Ultimately he favours writing because ?novels mean being able to feel the world in a deeper way than painting can portray?.
His diaries also reflect a frustration with the increasingly autocratic political climate of Turkey. In a discussion of how Edward Said is perceived in the developing world, Pamuk writes that ?third world writers who live in the west should criticise, should be able to criticise their own countries, their people, their everyday culture?. He has needed a bodyguard for years due to the reaction to comments he made in 2005, when he said ?a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in this country and I?m the only one who dares to talk about it?.
After those remarks, he was charged for ?publicly insulting Turkishness? under Article 301 of Turkey?s penal code, in a case that was only dropped after international outrage. His bodyguard appears several times in these notebooks, accompanying Pamuk when he goes out. In one of his drawings, he writes: ?Here is the court where I stood trial in 2005 for talking about the Armenian genocide. People threw stones at us on the way out.?
His efforts to set up a real-life Museum of Innocence, based on his novel of the same name, take up many of these pages. The museum itself is both a metaphor and something more substantial. ?I realise that behind my interest in building a museum ? setting up a charitable trust etc ? there is a wish to maintain a foothold in Turkey, to resist the destruction of my home, to weather time and to feel like I genuinely belong in Turkey,? he writes.
In its own way, Memories of Distant Mountains is also a museum of Pamuk, a collection of his words and images, thoughts and impressions. I particularly enjoyed looking at drawings of his rooms and the desks where he writes. The one in New York, where he was lecturing at Columbia, is magnetic: his ?ugly lamp?, his notebooks on the shelves, his chair, the ?noisy old radiator?, the view of the Hudson River ? these immediately pulled me into his private writing world.
On that page I felt a sudden affinity with Pamuk, not because we are both from Turkey, but because we are both writers who carry novels like strange countries inside us. Perhaps this is where all writers belong ? in a land of dreams, images and words where we feel both fearless and sentimental; at home only when we write.
