Orhan Pamuk

> I know that my inspiration draws strength from my attachment to the same house, the same street, the same view, and the same city... this bond of mine with Istanbul means that the fate of a city can become a person’s character . In this book, Pamuk recounts how he became a writer, yet in doing so he cannot help but speak of his Istanbul—the city of the 1950s and 60s, in full decline, not by c

> The culprit is not just that book, the book that deceived my son, but all books pouring from the printing presses; they are all enemies of our time, of our life . So speaks the protagonist’s father in the novel *The New Life*, referring to the book whose pursuit forms the core of the son’s whirlwind journey across Turkey. And in another passage of the same novel, Pamuk clarifies how > a goo

The novel’s protagonist is the book: a book, but also all books. > The culprit is not only that book, the book that deceived my son, but all books pouring from the printing presses; they are all enemies of our time, of our lives . Thus spoke Mehmet’s father menacingly—Mehmet being one of the novel’s central figures, the first to read the book and flee. The other two protagonists are Osman, a

The book unfolds across multiple plotlines, difficult to trace back to a single narrative thread. A first path concerns the decline of the miniature painting technique, which had flourished in the sixteenth century under the influence of Persian and Chinese art. Ottoman miniature art justified the depiction of images to accompany books on the grounds that real individuals were never portrayed an

The novel revolves around two figures: Galip is a young lawyer who has been abandoned by his wife and sets out in search of her, following the clues left behind by the novel’s other character, Celal. The latter is a journalist who has written a column for many years, and is both Galip’s cousin and his wife’s half-brother. The book unfolds across two voices. A third-person voice recounts Galip’s