Turkish Novelist Wins Nobel Prize

Freely said she was translating "Snow" -- which Pamuk has called "my first and last political novel" -- just as the United States was preparing its assault on Baghdad. She sees it as "prophetic" book that "takes everything that's gone wrong in Turkish politics since World War II and has it all happen in one snowbound city in three days" and in the process, "predicts a lot of the problems we're seeing in Iraq."

The snow becomes a metaphor for any kind of chaos, Freely said -- "a blizzard, a half-finalized invasion" -- under cover of which a nation's political players proceed to "get business done and scores settled."

Freely also noted that writing the book influenced Pamuk's own political behavior.

His protagonist, Ka, is a man who "shirks his duty" by choosing private happiness over political conscience, Freely said. And "when Orhan was charged with insulting Turkishness, he was very aware" that he had written about someone who'd made the wrong choice.

To think of "Snow" as wholly political, however, would be to miss the literary flair Pamuk has brought to his work.

He is "gifted with a light, absurdist touch," wrote John Updike in a 2004 New Yorker review, "spinning out farcical plot developments to the point of implying that any plot, in this indifferent and chaotic universe, is farcical." Updike then went on to do a bit of successful prophecy himself, calling Pamuk Turkey's "most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize."

"The thing about Orhan's novels," said Andrew Finkel, a London-based journalist who has worked in Istanbul for many years, "is that he wasn't afraid of being an intellectual." By moving away from the kind of social realism that had previously dominated Turkish literature, Finkel said, Pamuk "changed what people thought a Turkish novel would be."

Beyond his stylistic innovations, Finkel said, Pamuk has tried to show that "the Turkish soul is a lot more complex than people in the West think" -- or some in Turkey itself wish to believe.

In the early 20th century, Finkel explained, the Turkish drive for westernization involved a deliberate denial of the country's Ottoman past. Yet the reality was that East had met West long before: After all, "the Ottomans were in Europe and the Turks were part of Europe." It has been Pamuk's role to show that "these cultures are far more intermingled" than the leaders of his parents' generation would admit.

Younger Turks, who buy Pamuk's books in droves, "see themselves as embracing a complex modernity," Finkel said.

Or as Pamuk put it yesterday, "My work is an exploration of having two souls" -- of the evidence that "East and West do combine."

It's a viewpoint that should reach many more readers as a result of the Nobel. His U.S. publisher, Knopf, and its paperback arm, Vintage, have announced that nearly 200,000 copies of Pamuk's books will be printed in response to the prize. But as Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards noted yesterday, Pamuk is already far more popular here than most Nobel winners who don't write in English. A total of more than 550,000 copies of five Pamuk novels and a nonfiction book, "Istanbul: Memories and the City," were already in print in American editions.

As for Pamuk himself, he promised that "this prize will not change my working habits." (He's now at work on a novel about obsessive love.) And he told a story about his teenage daughter that could help him keep the honor in perspective.

Early yesterday morning, after he learned he had won, he called his daughter at school to convey the good news. "She said, 'Oh great, Daddy, but the teacher is coming,' " Pamuk said -- and he couldn't persuade her to stay on the line.

Staff writer David Segal in New York contributed to this report.