Falling Between the Pages

THE NEW LIFE

By OrhanPamuk

Translated from the Turkish by Guneli Gun

Farrar Straus Giroux. 296 pp. $24

THE IMAGE is beguiling, indeed devastating. Istanbul, sometime after midnight, the neighborhood streets empty but for the lonely boza vendor on his way home, a distant freight train clattering along its sad tracks. And a young man -- a university student whose father is dead and whose mother, having tired of her evening television, has gone to bed -- is alone in his room, so thoroughly enraptured by the book he is reading that his whole life is revolutionized, his past cut off, his future transfigured.

Thus begins OrhanPamuk's stylish, allegorical evocation of contemporary Turkey which -- like its native son, Osman -- is poised at the brink of transformation. Entranced, the youthful narrator stops attending classes and devotes himself more and more to reading the book, even copying out passages into his notebook. "This magical object" entitled "The New Life" has not only assailed his intellect but also infiltrated his very soul, so that he concludes that everything he has ever known, done, been, must be abandoned, in order to wander "in a land of light" and reach the world conjured in those quasi-scriptural pages.

He happens also to fall in love with another disciple of "The New Life," an inscrutable and beautiful architecture student named Janan, in whose hands he first saw the book. One day he witnesses from a window the (apparent) murder of her boyfriend, Mehmet -- in many ways Osman's doppelganger -- who had likewise fallen under the book's indomitable spell. Having decided that Janan is his "guiding spirit," he leaves family and friends behind, and sets out on a quest to discover his new identity somewhere on the evanescent horizon.

Arbitrary destinations and bizarre strangers figure in Osman's journey. He is joined, for a time, by Janan, who is searching for Mehmet (as it happens, he was not murdered after all, but has disappeared, after having renamed himself Osman), and begins to discover the myriad intricacies of "The New Life," its true authorship, its deeper message. Time, like the night itself, becomes indistinct. Osman begins subtly to learn about the relativity of longing, and the road's inevitable circularity, which brings him back to himself, where the sweet cruelties of self-knowledge and metamorphosis abide.

This is a book of paradoxes; it has its simplicities and difficulties, its serenities and brutalities. Everything has resonance, everything has meanings. Even the caramels that Osman loved as a boy contribute to the deeper understanding of the new life, the word itself having roots not in any Indo-European language, as might be surmised, but in Turkish -- kara being "the most basic word in the language of the people who have lived here for ten thousand years . . . meaning things that are dark, both good and bad."

IN SUCH subtle ways this novel, Pamuk's third to be published in English (The White Castle and The Black Book earned him favorable comparisons with Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie), ambitiously undertakes to tell not only Osman's story but also that of his volatile culture. By merging a variety of Western genres -- bildungsroman, picaresque, mystery, Gothic -- Pamuk achieves something fresh: a kind of visionary inquiry in the form of road confession.

What Osman discovers at the end of his road is as enigmatic as the journey itself. In lieu of describing the fate of Pamuk's relentless pilgrim, another koan of sorts will have to suffice: "What is life? A period of time. What is time? An accident. What is accident? A life. A new life." So goes Osman's refrain near the end of his narration. Ablaze with significance, these are the riddles that linger in the reader's memory long after the bright light of this remarkable novel has darkened into disquietude.

Bradford Morrow is the editor of Conjunctions; his latest novel is "Giovanni's Gift."