In My Father's Suitcase, his Nobel lecture, Pamuk writes that as a child and as a young writer, he felt as if he lived far from the center. That has changed.
"For me the center of the world is Istanbul," he writes. "This is not just because I have lived there all my life, but because for the last 33 years I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days and its nights, making them part of me, embracing them all."
The Istanbul essays in Other Colors - which amplify his 2005 memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City - draw their strength from the same sources as his fiction, and their comedy, too, notably the little gem on watching the film Cleopatra in the 1960s.
At the same time, Pamuk instantly picks up the frequency of writers who feel themselves to be on the periphery, like Mario Vargas Llosa, or Dostoyevsky, the subject of three essays in this collection. The cultural predicament of Dostoyevsky is Pamuk's own, and he zeroes right in on it. The true subject of Notes From Underground, he writes, is "the jealousy, anger and pride of a man who cannot make himself into a European."
Pamuk understands cultural isolation more deeply than most writers, perhaps, because he regards reading as a profoundly isolating experience. The writers he most admires speak to him with frightening intimacy.
"I felt as if Dostoyevsky were whispering arcane things about life and humanity, things no one knew, for my ears only," he writes. Almost in passing he offers a probing, quite personal analysis of degradation as a perverse pleasure in the world of Dostoyevsky's novels.
The linked sequence of essays about New York counts as a bonus. Having been mugged, Pamuk spends a day with the police. He ponders the mysteries of cinnamon rolls, runs into a long-lost Turkish friend in a subway station and finally figures out why New Yorkers hate smoking so much.
"They were not running away from the cancer that smoking might cause, but from the smoker," he concludes. "I would only gradually come to understand that my cigarette to them represented a lack of willpower and of culture, a disordered life, indifference and (America's worst nightmare) failure."
When let loose, Pamuk drops observations like this with deceptive ease. An expert reader of Istanbul's multilayered text, he must have found New York's embedded meanings child's play to extract. It's such a small town, after all, by comparison.
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