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 good book is a piece of writing that explains things that do not exist, a sort of absence, a kind of death.
But it is futile to search outside the book for the country that lies beyond words

.
These are bleak and despairing reflections that seem to lead, by way of literature, to loneliness, to the incommunicability between people and between them and objects, to a world where one shuts oneself away, "hiding the keys" (from The Black Book).
Can narrative be joined with life, or is this possible only in the immobility of the mannequins so brilliantly fabulated in the final chapter of The Black Book? It is with the hope of clarifying what Pamuk truly thinks that one approaches the reading of this short volume, which collects several lectures by the author.
And once again, Pamuk surprises us.
In his Nobel lecture, the author addresses the theme of literature by recounting an emblematic episode from his life—a kind of metaphor, yet real.
He relates how his father had kept in a small suitcase some pages written during a youthful stay in Paris.
For a long time, Pamuk was afraid to open the suitcase

and read his notebooks because I knew he would not have tolerated the hardships I had endured, that it was not solitude he loved, but mingling with friends, the crowd, salons, jokes, company...
In truth, I was angry with my father because he had not lived as I had, had not suffered anxieties, and had spent his life happily, laughing and joking with the people he cared for...
(and only sometimes) my father would stretch out on the sofa before his books, let the volume or magazine in his hand drop, and lose himself for long stretches in his thoughts, in dreams

.
In the differences between the father, reconciled with the world, and the son, at odds with himself and his surrounding context, lies unhappiness—or rather, the pursuit of an unattainable happiness:

to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds we carry inside us, wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, patiently exploring them, studying them, illuminating them, and making these wounds and pains a part of our writing and our identity

.
Writing is like a medicine that "tastes of ink and paper"; if unable to take it,

I feel unhappiness turning me into a kind of concrete man

.
Shutting oneself in a room to write is

managing to find the hope to get through the day, or rather being happy and rejoicing if the book or page that takes you into a new world is good

.
Novels

are shaped to carry with happiness the dreams novelists wish to dream.
Just as they bestow happiness upon the good reader, they offer the good writer a solid and secure new world where he can escape and be happy at every hour of the day

Writing and reading are an escape from reality into a world created by ourselves,

patiently, as if digging a well with a needle, it then appears to me more real than anything else

Now I understand that thousands of miniaturists, in delicate secrecy drawing the very same patterns for centuries, had drawn the secret and delicate transformation of the world into another world

(from My Name Is Red).
Literature is a continual return to the same tender and nostalgic dream: yearning to be happy without truly transforming the world.

Why read it? It clearly illuminates Pamuk’s thought.

My Father's Suitcase