Orhan Pamuk on why he set his novel 'Snow' in Kars

Taken from The Paris Review.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you set it in the small town of Kars?

PAMUK

It is notoriously one of the coldest towns in Turkey. And one of the poorest. In the early eighties, the whole front page of one of the major newspapers was about the poverty of Kars. Someone had calculated that you could buy the entire town for around a million dollars. The political 
climate was difficult when I wanted to go there. The vicinity of the town is mostly populated by Kurds, but the center is a combination of Kurds, people from Azerbaijan, Turks, and all other sorts. There used to be Russians and 
Germans too. There are religious differences as well, Shia and Sunni. The war the Turkish government was waging against the Kurdish guerillas was so fierce that it was impossible to go as a tourist. I knew I could not simply go there as a novelist, so I asked a newspaper editor with whom I’d been in touch for a press pass to visit the area. He is influential and he personally called the mayor and the police chief to let them know I was coming.

As soon as I had arrived I visited the mayor and shook hands with the police chief so that they wouldn’t pick me up on the street. Actually, some of the police who didn’t know I was there did pick me up and carried me off, probably with the intention of torturing me. Immediately I gave names—I know the mayor, I know the chief . . . I was a suspicious character. 
Because even though Turkey is theoretically a free country, any foreigner used to be suspect until about 1999. Hopefully things are much easier today.

*

Sounds to me like he was there mid-late '90s. I passed through Kars in April 1990, travelling east on a bus with a fellow Australian; both of us female, her very blonde, me more pooh-brown. All I remember is how desolate it was; isolated and grim and grey. We stopped for a break, got off the bus, tried to ignore the staring, then tried to find out waht was happening when an unconscious man with blood on his head was carried past and bundled into a car to be driven away.

'What happened?' I gesticulated to a man nearby. (I had no Turkish then.)

He replied with a stream of words, made the shape of a gun with his fingers and said something else which I took for 'bang bang'.

Happy Monday

It's a good day today because:

a) the kids are back at school and I have the house to myself

b) I just bought the following:

I know, I know. It's been out for a while. I've always been a later developer.

And this:

And then this:

My plan is to read the bio, then Infinite Jest but I suspect I will have to intersperse with at least one other book, possibly the Pamuk although I think I'll want to read that exclusively.

I'm also more than half way through The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower. It is interesting, not least because it was published in 1966 I think it was. Good stuff.

*

I'm also still plugging away with my first ms - let's call it The Feeling of Orange although it's had a bunch of other titles, including Moonshadows (there's something just a little too Cat Stevens-y about that.) I have an agent interested in looking at the whole ms - woo hoo. But don't get too excited, even that woo-hoo is possibly premature. I am so careful with the woo-hoos, they can be dangerous. 

And my second one, The Sugar Men I am excited about, that's still first draft stage though (some people call it Draft Zero, which I can kind of come at). Loooong way to go with that one based on how much revision and pottering and tinkering the first one has taken. Who knows?

Recently I bought some books

Quelle surprise, I hear you say.

Well, out of the two novels, I read the first quite easily (Five Bells, beautifully written but there were some jarrings for me within that day depicted on the page) and then Animal People which after the very promising opening couple of pages I struggled with majorly.

And now, I have fallen into the arms of Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence. And like I described to someone else recently it's like falling into a beautifully made bed that has the finest linens, in a gorgeous room. With someone you really want to fuck. But make love is probably the more appropriate term, for there is nothing crass or hurried or fucky about Pamuk. The opening chapter, he is in his beloved's arms in an apartment in a block his mother owns in Istanbul.* She is so beautiful and he is so happy. This chapter lasts less than two pages but it is jammed with the room in which the lovers lie yet not crowded. The writing is not crowded. Then, right at the end the narrator says that within a month he will be formally engaged to another woman, Sibel.

The opening reminded me of another of Pamuk's books - The Black Book - one I was unable to read/finish. It was too dense or something but I will try again one day.

I have just finished Chapter 24 'The Engagement Party' and I don't think I have ever read such a thrilling, fraught, teasing, cleverly written number of pages. Ever. It is amazing and I can't wait for tonight when I climb into my own bed with reasonable linen in a pleasant room with no one to continue reading this book.

* This apartment is like a recurring motif; Pamuk's own mother had an apartment block she owned in Istanbul as well which figured in his memoir of that beautiful city.