BookJack talks about Orkhan Pamuk's novel "Nights of Plague", which consists of three works at once: a historical detective story in a pandemic setting, a melancholic meditation novel, and a political and philosophical parable. And also an attempt by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk to build a historical alternative for Turkey, which, in his opinion, turned the wrong way at the beginning of the last century.
Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in a large family similar to those which he describes in his novels Cevdet Bey and His Sons and The Black Book, in the wealthy westernised district of Nisantasi. As he writes in his autobiographical book Istanbul, from his childhood until the age of 22 he devoted himself largely to painting and dreamed of becoming an artist.
The first in five years and perhaps the most voluminous of all time (almost seven hundred pages) novel by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk is a book that, as you move from the plot to the denouement, will disorient and confuse the reader at least three times. Starting as a traditional and unhurried historical prose, developing and exploring the “fashionable” theme of the epidemic in the context of the past, Plague Nights, along the way, strangely transforms into a political-philosophical parable or, if you like, an alternative history.
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the decrepit Ottoman Empire, the notorious “sick man of Europe” (later on, this metaphor will gradually materialize in Pamuk, acquiring a completely literal meaning), is actually no longer able to manage on the ground. And in this situation, the plague that came from the East to the picturesque Mediterranean island of Minger (fictitious, but quite clearly localized on the map - east of Crete, north of Cyprus), becomes a problem for the most part of its inhabitants themselves, its governor, and the young metropolitan epidemiologist Nuri Pasha, who almost accidentally ended up here with his wife Pakize-Sultan - the native niece of Sultan Abdul-Hamid, the daughter of his deposed and life-imprisoned brother.
Helping the plague-stricken island from the capital comes down for the most part to neurotic pulling and prodding, and meanwhile the Mingers are in no hurry to comply with quarantine regulations. Those who are richer are trying to sneak off the island, bypassing the cordons. Christians (there are exactly half of them on the island) are sure that Muslims are spreading the infection, while Muslims see a bearded priest who scatters rat corpses around the city every night. Rival gangs of bandits operate in the mountains, and in the city, treacherous dervish sheikhs plot in the shadow of their gloomy tekke abodes. The situation is already worse than ever, but suddenly a new misfortune is added to the plague: influential people begin to be killed in the city, and political overtones are clearly traced behind these murders.
The first third of the novel, dynamic, almost detective, will remind the reader of Orhan Pamuk's early, almost Umberto-Ek in nature things, such as The Black Book or My Name is Red. However, as the epidemic develops, and the islanders finally realize that their fate is the last thing the empire cares about (noticeably less than the opinion of the Western powers or the security of the capital), the reader's perception will begin to shift. Minger is beautiful, flourishing, multicultural and multinational, simply created for a happy and prosperous life, torn apart by exactly the same contradictions, the same corruption, the same petty feuds as the whole empire, and the plague serves only as a catalyst for them. An island isolated from the rest of the world by a plague thus turns into a miniature model of the Ottoman Empire. And in Pamuk's story about him, the motifs already familiar to us, first of all from Istanbul - the City of Memories, begin to sound - melancholic and nostalgic. The author simultaneously admires the beauty of the doomed "old Turkey", embodied this time in Minger, and mourns its imminent and inevitable, historically predetermined end.
After graduating from the secular American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years, but abandoned the course when he gave up his ambition to become an architect and artist. He went on to graduate in journalism from Istanbul University, but never worked as a journalist. At the age of 23 Pamuk decided to become a novelist, and giving up everything else retreated into his flat and began to write.
The detective investigation (the role of a detective - however, not too active - is unexpectedly taken over by Princess Pakize-Sultan, locked in her chambers and learning about everything that is happening outside only from her husband and servants) stops and gets stuck in endless bureaucratic delays. The fight against the epidemic is turning into an undercover struggle of rival factions, sectarian intrigues, unfortunate mistakes, stupid and ineffective attempts to oppose brute force to prejudice and ignorance. And the plot itself, so cheerful and coherent at first, is lost somewhere in the interweaving of crooked alleys of the Minger capital, leaving behind a pile of dreams, fears, memories and vague, underformed feelings.
However, at the moment when it seems to the reader that the aching resentment, the sweet and painful longing for the departed forever is the only thing that Pamuk has prepared for him, Plague Nights will make another, quite unexpected turn. Minger's story will suddenly spin off from the history of the rest of the Ottoman Empire (the discovery of the murders - somewhat sudden, but quite logical and convincing - will be an important milestone along the way), and will turn out to be, in fact, a rival version of it. The isolated Greek-Turkish island will follow a path different from the path of the mother country that abandoned it to the mercy of the plague. And this path will turn out to be, perhaps not the easiest, but ultimately more productive than the one that Turkey will actually choose.
Starting as a historical detective story in a pandemic setting and continuing as Pamuk’s traditional unsteady and melancholic meditation novel, in its last third, Plague Nights turns out to be a parable novel in the tradition of the writer’s previous novel, The Red-Haired Woman. An attempt to build a historical alternative for Turkey, at the fork at the beginning of the last century, which, according to the author, turned somewhere in the wrong direction. The main question that Orhan Pamuk answers in this way in his new novel is the question “What would happen if…”. And the answer he arrives at is difficult to classify as unambiguously optimistic or, on the contrary, pessimistic. Yes, everything in the history of Turkey could have turned out differently. No, now there is nothing to return and not win back.
The idea of an island as an embodiment, as an active model, or at least a metaphor for an entire country, is not new - only in recent decades it has been used by Julian Barnes in England, England, Michel Welbeck in Lanzarote, and our Evgeny Vodolazkin in his last today the novel "Justification of the Island". Moreover, even if we look at Pamuk's "Plague Nights" exclusively through the prism of his own work, we will not see anything new either: the beginning of the novel is stylistically borrowed from his early works, the middle - from the middle ones, the finale - from the later ones. Well, and perhaps, starting to read a novel about living, real people, it is difficult to avoid some disappointment at the end, when all those with whom you empathized, sympathized, whom you managed to fall in love with (or, on the contrary, dislike) will turn out to be nothing more than functions, mechanical constructs necessary for the author in order to more clearly illustrate his idea.
Nevertheless, it would be unfair to call "Plague Nights" a creative failure of Orkhan Pamuk: some straightforwardness of the author's idea is compensated by the non-trivial complexity of the way he leads his reader to it. And the nature of Pamuk's talent is such that even trying to reduce his heroes to a primitive planar scan, he still seems to involuntarily endow them with a much larger supply of human depth and halftones than the simple conditions of the problem require. As a result, the idea of "Plague Nights" seems to be working against its creator. But the methods for implementing this plan more than pay for the initial constructive precariousness.
This article was sponsored by Simona Serban
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