LAHORE: The literati could not have asked for a better way to start the weekend than a chance to attend an engaging session with Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk in the eighth edition of the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF).

Despite being a work day, the litfest managed to attract a significant crowd on Friday to listen to the famous novelist. Hall 1 of the Alhmara Art Centre was jam-packed with the admirers of Pamuk who been translated into more than 60 languages, including Urdu.

The session was preceded by a short opening ceremony for the LLF 2020, beginning with an uplifting Qawwali performance that set the mood for the day.

LLF founder and CEO Razi Ahmed, EU Ambassador in Pakistan Androulla Kaminara, chairperson of the Lahore Arts Council Moneeza Hashmi and Chief Executive Serena Hotels, Aziz Boolani spoke briefly about the festival and its journey since its start in 2013.

While sharing his views about his visit to Lahore and participation in the LLF, Mr Pamuk said he was glad that Lahore was the first city he was visiting in his first-ever tour to Pakistan as all his life, whenever he thought about Pakistan, he thought of visiting Lahore.

Turkish Nobel laureate draws crowds, gives befitting opening to LLF

During his session, My Name is Red, titled after his popular novel, Mr Pamuk replied to the questions asked by Ahmed Rashid who started off the session while inquiring about the novelist’s association with Istanbul.

Mr Pamuk said he had started writing about his city, Istanbul, by writing stories on the familiar surroundings and his family and friends. This encouraged him to write more and explore other subjects while the city he knew (Istanbul) so well grew from a population of 2m to 17m in his lifetime, opening up an array of themes to write about, he said while talking about his subject.

When asked about his profound interest in art and architecture, also reflected in his work, Mr Pamuk revealed that he belonged to a family of engineers as his grandfather, father and uncles were engineers due to which everyone expected him to study engineering. Given his interest in drawing and painting, he was later encouraged to join architecture school, which he left in the middle and decided to become a writer.

According to him, writing ‘psychologically killed the painter in him’ but the same painter was resurrected in his books, such as My Name is Red and The Museum of Innocence.

While commenting on the inclusion of multiple characters in his novels, Pamuk gave the example of his novel Snow. For his novel, he had spent time with actual people he wanted to write about before creating characters. He believes use of characters in a novel is an exaggerated concept in Europe where they are given a lot of importance. For him, a novelist’s job is not to pass ethical judgments on characters but make them as convincing as possible since the clash of these characters is the real power of the novel rather than dependence on them to make the story worthwhile.

For My Name is Red, he conducted extensive research by reading a lot about the Ottoman Empire before writing the novel, which drew on the literature and art of early modern Ottoman society. His research, combined with his interest in painting, motivated him to create a detective story and he used Ottoman miniature paintings to tell the story just like the use of objects in his other novel, The Museum of Innocence.

One of the reasons of his interest in visual descriptions is his love with colours, which he feels is the most appealing way to capture the strangeness of the world as they bring attention to details in storytelling.

Talking about women characters in his work, Mr Pamuk claimed, he had not been sensitive while writing about women characters when he wrote his first novel; however, over the course of his career as an author, he learned incorporating feminist criticism in his work. He termed it important to represent women because they were not represented, especially as a writer who grew up in Istanbul, observing women, particularly from his family and their fascinating conversations about the men in their lives.

He revealed his upcoming work consisted of a photobook, featuring photographs of Istanbul’s night views, narrating how they had changed over the years and a novel called the Nights of Plague which would talk about the Ottoman experience of plague. He has been working on the book for four years and it is based on his cultural knowledge of plague gained from over 30 years of reading and research.

When asked about The Museum of Innocence, one of most popular novels as well as an actual museum related to the novel that he has designed himself, he revealed that it was his love for art and museums that inspired him to write the novel that was like a catalogue of the museum, comprising objects, which were a part of the story.

Unfortunately, there was no book signing after the session, which was disappointing for many fans of the Nobel laureate as they had bought books of the author to get signed. Mr Pamuk will speak in another session on Sunday (tomorrow).

Published in Dawn, February 22nd, 2020