Istanbul, with the Bosphoros in the distance. Photograph: WestEnd61/Rex
Whatever this means, his portrait of Mevlut has an utterly convincing, even documentary feel. (Pamuk also has the ability to make the banal compelling – a description of the intricacies of electricity-meter reading, for example, keeps the reader entertained for far longer than it has any right to.) Yet the social gulf between the author and his protagonist is enormous. “It’s not my life,” he says, “but it’s a life that I have seen from my childhood home, very close by. Shanty towns here are not as in, say, Rio de Janeiro, separated by clear lines from the town. When immigration to Istanbul started in the 50s and 60s, there was much empty land inside the town, on which people built their own houses.” Even so, he conducted extensive research. “Reading books doesn’t help much, but talking to people with a recorder – I did this endlessly.” The goodwill he encountered on the streets helped him along. “Boza sellers are still around in Istanbul. You buy boza and then you have a conversation and you say, ‘I’m actually so-and-so and thinking of a novel, would you like to talk?’ And people talk.”
He was invited into their homes, talking to the women who came to the city from villages with their husbands and nothing else. He quizzed waiters, men who sold rice and chicken, fried liver and stuffed mussels. The authenticity of the book comes from these conversations. But is it right that a rich, westernised man should tell the stories of Istanbul’s poor? Pamuk is clear on this point: “If being a novelist has any moral, political side, it is identifying with people who are not like you. It’s not that we make political statements or show our party cards; it’s seeing the world through the eyes of someone who is different.” This is one part of the duty of being a writer, he explains. Another is the need to examine unflinchingly one’s own experiences. He told an interviewer in 2005 that Istanbul: Memories and the City, an account of his early life, rich in family incident, “destroyed my relationship with my mother – we don’t see each other any more”. I ask if the estrangement is ongoing. “No, we made up. In fact, I’m going to see her tonight!” That’s good news, I say. “She was angry, but then it’s the eternal problem of the writer – telling the intimate truth. It begins with your partner, then it goes to your family, then it goes to your nation,” he says. “I accept the burden.” But all this emotional trawling has a practical application, too: “Intimate detail most of the time equals convincing detail.”
But will the immense detail of Mevlut’s story, which has sold 230,000 copies in Turkey after only nine months (prompting commentators to wonder whether boza sales will also shoot up), grip readers elsewhere? He tells me that, at gatherings of his editors and translators, “I would ask exactly the same question. I would shyly say, ‘this is a bit of a Turkish story.’ And the Spanish answer to that was, ‘Well, my mother’s kitchen was exactly like this.’ The Italian answer, ‘This is just like people from the south, from Sicily, moving to Milan.’ Maybe they were being kind.” But the site-specific nature of Pamuk’s work has never limited his appeal in the past: he tells me that international sales are usually between five and eight times the Turkish total.
His next project is “a novel of ideas”. “I’m working on a short book, but my short books end up being 250 pages,” he jokes. What’s it about? “You know in the Shahnameh” – a Persian epic – “there is the story of Rostam and Sohrab, the father killing the child. And then there is this famous Oedipus of Sophocles, the son killing the father. I’m writing a short, in a way experimental, novel about these ideas.” So it’s a murder story? “Yes,” he says hesitantly, “but let’s talk about it when it’s published!”
Orhan Pamuk receives the Nobel prize for literature from King Carl Gustaf of Sweden in 2006. Photograph: Henrik Montgomery/EPA In 2005, Pamuk was prosecuted for insulting Turkishness after an interview in which he raised the killings of Armenians and Kurds. The quote in question was first published in a Swiss magazine (under Article 301 of the penal code as it stood at the time, the crime of denigrating Turkishness was deemed more serious if committed by a Turkish citizen abroad). Unbowed, he repeated the comments at a lecture in Germany. Charges against him were dropped in 2006. Later that year, he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature: the committee stated that “in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city he has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”
Recalling the episode now, he says: “I expend extra effort not to have feelings of anger. I may have troubled times, I still have a bodyguard, I still sometimes feel pressured. But the fact is that I am a happy man.” His bodyguard is provided by the Turkish state, and I ask him who he thinks his enemies are now, particularly given that his books don’t obviously bang the drum for either side in the great debate over secularism and the role of Islam.
“The guy who would attack you in the street is not the guy who reads your novel,” he tells me. And then, a convivial warning: “He only reads the tabloid representation of what you say to a Guardian interviewer. So the journalist in London will change it a bit, then the editor would add a bit of spice and sugar, and the tabloid would pick it up.”
“All the troubles I had were not because of my books but because of Turkey’s problems. In fact, my political problems came with the fact that I was getting translated into many languages ... And then sometimes – I wouldn’t say most of the time – I don’t know how to shut my mouth. And also, you get angry, you want to tell the truth, you don’t want to do a little bit of a circling around the problem.” In any case, he says, “it’s impossible to avoid politics and be a famous Turkish writer, even if you only write about roses and butterflies.”
Changes in the law since 2008 mean it is now harder to prosecute someone for denigrating Turkishness. The question of what the nation’s essential qualities are, however, remains far from settled. Pamuk is clear on one thing: it doesn’t reside in the Ottoman empire, a world that he wrote about so gorgeously in My Name is Red and The White Castle, and the epicentre of which we can see from his desk. “I sometimes say that I’m the only historical novelist in the world who writes his novel and can point out where the action takes place,” he jokes. The idea of the good old Ottoman years as some kind of a model for contemporary Turkey have arisen recently, he argues, under the current Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. But to equate Turkishness with the empire is false – back then Turks were, at most, a ruling Muslim elite. Society was extremely plural, and economic and military interests were spread far and wide. “Ottoman rhetoric” is, Pamuk says, a function of the country’s economic growth, and its ability to look outwards once more. But “it’s not realistic; it’s not down to earth”. He believes that if Turkey has energy for reform, it should be directed inwards, at human rights, the question of free speech and respect for minorities.
Is it Istanbul, then, that holds the secret to Turkishness? I wonder whether, as with New York and London, the great city has relatively little in common with the rest of the country. When I ask what the capital Ankara is like, he quotes the poet Yahya Kemal Beyatlı: “The best thing about Ankara is the way back to Istanbul.” It is this city, he says, that’s the real capital. “I’ve been living here 63 years, so for me it’s the capital of the world in a way.” And, indeed, “most of the meaning of Turkishness is also invented here”.
What about the pace of change, the kind of reconstruction that leaves Mevlut bewildered, and me staring in wonder at the abyss outside my hotel. “When I was born here, it was a city of a million, and all the hills that we see from here, there were no buildings there, they were sometimes empty, sometimes woods. All of this has been destroyed. Another 14 million came to live here. I feel extremely privileged to have been a sort of storyteller of these people. I belong to them. But on the other hand [there has been] immense change.” He says that the past 13 years easily eclipsed the previous 50 in terms of development. Is the heritage of the city being put at risk? “I worried about that and it got political in the Gezi uprising. But I do my best to balance it – ‘Orhan, remember that 14 million were added to your city’. It would be cruel and selfish if only my buildings should be around.”
Flying into Istanbul – seeing the clusters of apartment buildings spreading like a sea foam over the land, the impression is less of an old imperial capital than an emerging 21st-century powerhouse – a Shanghai, or São Paulo. I tell Pamuk that, if asked to name a global city, westerners would be unlikely to mention his home – and that this is probably now an error. He grins. “As an Istanbulite, I thank you for the sweet words.”
