This book should have been better. It had a very good beginning but then really fell off. The fault is most likely both Pamuk’s and Freely’s (the translator). The way Freely described the translation process in the Afterword (which should have been the Foreword, unlike most Forewords, which give away the entire plot and should be Afterwords), it seems as if Turkish is incredibly hard to translate into English. She also relates how beautiful Pamuk’s prose is. That beauty does not come through. In...

One of Pamuk’s first novels. First a sample of some of the wonderful writing from the very first page:“Ruya was lying facedown on the bed, lost to the sweet warm darkness beneath the billowing folds of the blue-checked quilt. The first sounds of a winter morning seeped in from outside: the rumble of a passing car, the clatter of an old bus, the rattle of copper kettles that the salep maker shared with the pastry cook, the whistle of the parking attendant at the dolmus stop. A cold leaden light f...

Who you really are? On the surface, this seems like a question already posed elsewhere with such banality and tedium that some would be happy to declare that they don’t care about the question, let alone a possible answer. However, you can’t help but to think about your identity while riding the roller-coaster that Pamuk manages to pull-off in The Black Book. Like all great minds, Pamuk knows very well that attempting to answer such a question is quite complicated, though he is committed to taki...

The big issue from Orhan Pamuk 's , a Nobel Prize winning writer, novel is identity...who are we ? The setting Istanbul, Turkey, the largest city in the nation, straddling the bright blue waters of the narrow , and rather shallow , but still even today quite ...crucial Bosphorus Strait, on both the continents ofAsia and Europe . This is the ultimate problem for its divided people, do we become westernized or remain with traditional, old customs ... They go see ancient Hollywood films, some 20 ye...

The Black Book is a story of losing and searching… Searching and never finding…The Black Book is a book of memory and oblivion…I thought of the pit which used to be right next to the building, the bottomless pit that had inspired shivers of fear at night, not only in me but in all the pretty children, girls, and adults who lived on all the floors. It seethed with bats, poisonous snakes, rats, and scorpions like a well in a tale of fantasy. I had a feeling it was the very pit described in Şeyh Ga...

this is a rare example of a reread for me. I don't reread books very often, not because I don't want to, blahblahblah.... My experience of reading this one was a good example of a certain kind of reader's disease. The kind where even though you are trying to focus your attention on the story, the language, etc your eyes start to water and you kind of glaze over in your mind, turning pages and sort of dimly registering the story. It's not "reading",per se, but it's not skimming either. It's not b...

Read many years ago, this is one of the top three books by Pamuk which I love the most. The other two being My Name Is Red and Snow - obvious choices.No one makes old and modern Turkey come alive on page like Pamuk.A re-read is on the horizon.

A post-modern masterpiece in the vein of the best of Calvino or Borges, ‘The Black Book’ is the novel in which Pamuk was able to force his literary star and create a work of art luminosity blazed forth and heralded a new star of Turkish literature; Kemal had poetry, but Pamuk has something even more important-originality.The dominant themes in the novel are ones which often recur in Pamuk’s novels; identity, Westernisation and Istanbul, combined with a sense of playfulness and erudition. Let’s s...

His wife has left him and he is roaming the streets of his big elusive city trying to decipher the mystery of her departure, to read the answers on the streets and in the faces of the strangers. And he suspects from the start that solving the mystery would not bring him any relief. However, it might just get him closer to understanding who he is. This novel is like a city it is devoted to. It cannot be easily put into a box of any categorisation. It is a love story or maybe more the story of

I hope that Orhan Pamuk really enjoyed writing The Black Book, because I definitely did not enjoy reading it. It is ostensibly the story of Celal, a columnist for a major Turkish daily who has disappeared or ran away, told through the eyes of the his friend and brother-in-law, Galip. When Galip’s pulp detective novel-loving wife (Celal’s sister) disappears as well, Galip turns into something of a detective himself, and the plot thickens. And then, it slows to a tedious crawl.Whatever the story i...

A man’s search for his wife and her journalist ex-husband becomes intertwined with the latter’s bizarre articles/columns turning this book into a bewildering hall of mirrors of Dostoevsky styled feverish monologues, storytelling sessions like a Dinesen or Potocki tale, and Borgesian labyrinths of history and literature (and fake detective tale). Each chapter is its own unit; a short story, mock essay, or monologue. This book is exasperating, annoying, thrilling, and provocative at different poin...

*Available from KOBOBOOKSThe book, in a nutshell, traces the protagonist’s search for his wife and, subsequently, also his cousin. There is indeed a vague plot resembling a detective novel here, but that is hardly the point of the novel. The real point of the novel is Turkey, as Galip’s search for Ruya takes him around Istanbul meeting various people who he thinks might help him find her, and via this process the novel morphs into an examination of identity, both individual and national. On one

[…] the dividing line between Being and Nothingness was sound, because everything that passed from the spiritual to the material world had its own sound; even the ‘most silent’ objects made a distinct sound when knocked together. The most advanced sounds were, of course, words; words were the magic building blocks of the exalted thing we called speech and they were made up of letters. Those wishing to understanding the meaning of existence and the sanctity of life and see God’s manifestations he...

To what degree can we be ourselves? “To be or not to be oneself” , considers Pamuk, is life’s ultimate question. A roller-coaster which is alike in many aspects with a detective novel, this story is suffused with possible answers to the question above and explorations of how, only by telling stories, a man can really be himself. Through hypotheses developed in stories with a prince embarking on quests of finding his real self in order to be able to guide his people if he would come next in li...

In this brilliant tour de force, Orhan Pamuk discusses language, writing, and the meaning of identity over a backdrop story of love and mystery. This being the 3rd book of his after having read My Name is Red and Snow, I am in awe of his story-telling agility. It is as beguiling as the stories inside of stories inside of stories inside 1001 Nights. I especially loved the famous "When the Bosphorus Dried Up" story and the one about the mural and the mirror. The history of Hurufism sent me to wiki...

Plotless in Istanbul,---but intriguing nonethelessNobody could say THE BLACK BOOK is a thriller, but it is thrilling writing. An Istanbul lawyer's wife disappears. A related columnist also disappears. The lawyer looks for them. That's about it. But the search and the thinking is the thing. Pamuk's style blends Proust with Borges. If you find that intriguing, read the book. Pamuk manages to combine intimate details of life in the modern city of Istanbul with tales of Sufi masters, long ago execut...

I get it. Not all authors write in the same style, the same proficiency, the same genre, nor the same level of whatever readers want in each of their books. That is why there are novels that are more successful than others within their work. Perhaps, therefore, there should be no real sympathy for me here, but Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence was by far one of my all-time-favorites, a definite 5 Star. Sadly, I have read the more if guys works, increasingly desperately trying to find one tha...

Remember those Magic Eye pictures that were popular back in the 90’s? If you stared at what looked like random dots or patterns in just the right way, forcing your eyes apart from their usual angled focus, a hidden 3-D image would suddenly pop into view. Some of them were pretty cool. If you were like me, though, it took a while to get it right. I remember moving the picture back and forth, commanding my eyes not to cross as it got closer to my nose and trying to hold that same angle as I moved

Memory is a gardenThe rain in his dream was the deepest blueNothing can ever be as shocking as life — Except writingI remember, I remember so as not to forget!These are the immortal tales I’ve always longed to tellRüya seemed haunted by the joys and pleasures that had slipped beyond her graspGalip still felt the terrible eye gazing down at himSighs rising and trembling through the timeless airThe life we live is someone else’s dreamThere were young people who at certain times in their lives fell...

One day I read this book, and my life fell lopsided.