Featured Company:

The Black Book

Today's shopping tips: "Be wise in purchasing ..... find best value one"

---

Manufacturer: Vintage
List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $6.35
You Save: $ 8.60 ( 58% )
(prices subject to change)
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

Average Ratings:

A New Translation and Afterword by Maureen Freely

Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel–loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband or Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl's identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.

With its cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul, The Black Book is a brilliantly unconventional mystery, and a provocative meditation on identity. For Turkish literary readers it is the cherished cult novel in which Orhan Pamuk found his original voice, but it has largely been neglected by English-language readers. Now, in Maureen Freely’s beautiful new translation, they, too, may encounter all its riches.


DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 894.3533
EAN: 9781400078653
ISBN: 1400078652
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 480
Publication Date: 2006-07-11
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2006-07-11
Studio: Vintage


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• My Name Is Red
• Snow
• Istanbul: Memories and the City
• The White Castle: A Novel
• The New Life


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
Comment: Pamuk's "The Black Book" is the densest of his novels, and probes the mind of a man in the middle of a mystery with startling perception. The actual plot of the novel is paper thin; Galip goes home one day to see his wife gone, and his famous columnist cousin Celal missing as well. In his dazed effort to figure out their whereabouts, he tries to get under Celal's skin. Galip studies every aspect of Celal's life, and in so doing discovers revelations about himself, the dimensions of self, and the release of the self through writing, among man other things. This is at its core (and what a dense, labrynthine core that is) a stark philosophical story about Turkish identity. As such it is oftentimes unremittingly complex, and at others it is a highly intellectual piece of escapism. This is a story full of windy minarets, deep dark underground rooms, jarring phone calls from strangers, and lots of mysterious walks late at night. Pamuk's language is typically brilliant, ensnaring the reader close enough to make him able to wax poetic about the meaning of life without making it too dry. The reviewers below are correct- this is a novel to re-read, possibly many times, in order to understand its many layers. Thankfully it is interesting enough to haunt you into doing just that.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Needs more than 1 reading
Comment: This is the only book that I've ever started reading again immediately after I finished it. Now on my 3rd reading & experiencing the book in still new ways.

There's a very interesting afterword by the translator at the back of the book.

Customer Rating:
Summary: If Walter Benjamin was Turkish and hung out with Jacques Lacan...
Comment: ...I'm rather certain that he would have written something similar to The Black Book. Like Benjamin, Pamuk is an alchemist of the highest order- beneath his gaze, the banalities that surround us are transmuted into expressions of the ineffability of existence. This is the gift that Pamuk offers to all of his readers, this invitation to look at the world afresh, to fix one's stare upon the infinitesimal idiosyncracies that lurk inconspicuously beneath the quotidian. The Black Book is an initiation into the manifold secrets of life, incandescent sparks of truth that flicker instantaneously in gestures, images, figures. To read it is to cultivate a taste for the ephemeral, an eye for the obscure. Like Benjamin, Pamuk favors the storyteller over the literateur- The Black Book is littered with pellucid, Leskov-esque tales that, for all their limpidity, remain depthless and inexhaustible. This book is, in truth, extraordinarily difficult, not because the prose is opaque (it is often clear as springwater), but because it is so polyphonic/polysemic. Of course, the exasperatingly effusive tracts on Turkish history are also a bit off-putting, though many illuminating insights are buried within (eg the mindbending sophistication of Hurufi semiotics). I would be lying if I said that I was not frustrated at various points in the book- often it felt as though I were wading in a mossy mire, and I was tempted to put the book down altogether. Persistence, however, is often rewarded in Pamuk's books, as long as one is prepared to relinquish the expectations one would bring to somebody like Henry James or Balzac.

Which brings me to my next point. It appears to me that people who harbor complaints against the novel take issue with its apparent lack of meaning. Pamuk, of course, has written a pre-emptive response to such folk (Mehmet's excoriation of Celal near the close of the book). Is the novel itself not a protracted lampoon of those who scour novels for meaning, of readers in search of interpretive keys? Pamuk is self-conscious in the best way- I often feel as though he thinks of the novelist as Lacan does the psychoanalyst: stop thinking of the author as the omniscient subject-who-knows, the novel as scripture. The novelist is not the Wizard of Oz, and I often feel as though Pamuk's endlessly convoluted, seemingly irrelevant digressions are subtle indications as to how one should approach his work, and fiction at large. He is trying to demystify the author (dethroning him as the guardian of Truth) while, conversely, underlining the endlessly enigmatic nature of life, an enigma which fiction must be faithful to. This, I think, is what makes Pamuk a Lacanian: all of us are searching for a lost object, that elusive thing that will finally make us whole, that will allow us to truly be ourselves. For all of Pamuk's countrymen, this object assumes a variety of forms- the coming of the Messiah, a proto-Platonic semiotic system that will unveil the truths hidden beneath the veneer of matter, the sanction of a writer one reveres, the love of a woman, the expulsion of the Western infidels (whose intrusion has forcibly deprived us of selfhood and purity), The Book that will, once and for all, dispel the mists that obfuscate the Truth, etcetera etcetera.

Pamuk's point is precisely that there is no whole- there is no Garden of Eden to which we can return, no cosmic glue behind all of the multifarious fragments of everyday life. It is little surprise that Pamuk has so little patience with those who try to excavate some sort of originary Turkish essence behind the contingencies of history- "See! Dante was a plagiarist, so was Dostoevsky!" In this light, history becomes a game of juvenile oneupmanship. Pamuk's tragicomedy stems from this- try as we might, we cannot make a definitive, summative total of it all, we cannot derive an explanatory principle from reviewing our own lives, let alone history at large. This is why nobody can be himself- identity is always fractured, protean, self-differentiating, it will never reach a terminal point. To exacerbate matters, those whom we assume to be in the know (Celal) are no more enlightened than we are (and it is here that Pamuk reminds us to be wary of all demagogues, zealots and soothsayers. a question lingers, however: should we, in good postmodern fashion, be cynical towards all who claim to believe in something?) Listen to Mehmet: "No-one will ever know the secret behind this business." Pamuk is at one with Derrida in this: the significance of literature lies in its dogged refusal to yield the secret. This, I feel, is the thematic thread that leads us out of all of Pamuk's labyrinthine constructions: this mystery must be safeguarded, it must be cared for, and to write is to declare one's fidelity to this care.

As for the continual comparisons to Borges- I am one of the few who finds Borges to be obscenely overrated. Pamuk, of course, exhibits a lot of Borges' cleverness and invention. He also is fascinated by the mutual interpenetration/insemination of text and 'reality' (to the Derridean point where both are indistinguishable from one another), but I find that he is also a much more humane writer- for all of his wordplay, keen irony and textual games/feints, Pamuk can be achingly tender, sometimes embarassingly so (see "The New Life", which can be swooningly, even mawkishly romantic in spots). This sentimentality is what brings him close to Joyce and Proust. As some other readers have pointed out, the novel does bear structural similarities to Ulysses, though, again, I think it is completely different- it does not have the insular, self-referential, symbolistic quality of Ulysses, where a number of signs and leitmotifs accrue/accumulate meaning as the narrative progresses. Ulysses, save for the rapturous monologue by Molly, is a closed system. The Black Book, on the other hand, is an unwieldy, sprawling gamut of discontinuous, radically unstable signs, all of which flash into existence for an instant and then disappear into obscurity (of course, there are exceptions- the beautiful, Benjaminian essay on the mannequin maker who 'freezes' the truth latent in gestures). As Galip discovers (and as so many of Pamuk's protagonists discover), there is no cosmic totality underlying these images, they do not interlock to form some pantheistic whole.


Customer Rating:
Summary: Maybe I just dreamed that I read this novel....
Comment: With his langorous and beautiful prose, Orhan Pamuk has calmed me to the point of oneness with my pillow, filling my head with cloudy surreal images of far-off lands. At least once I scanned a few (or ten) pages ahead to see if anything was going to happen...not much does, but it's an enjoyable ride down a peaceful river of images.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Labyrinthian inquiry into the Turkish identity
Comment: This is a fascinating novel. To be sure, if you have read other books by Pamuk, you will recognize the themes: the void that Attaturk's reforms could not fill (after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire); the continuing crisis of the Turkish identity that plays out in politics; and the extraordinary richness, humor and melancholy of the current culture. These are wonderfully sketched out in Pamuk's memoires, Istanbul, but also in the switching identities and interminable conflicts in his other novels. What makes this book interesting for hard fans like me is that it is his first, hence the source, of these later masterpieces of genius. It is serious, complex literature, that the reader can plumb for years in the imagination.

First, there is the plot and setting. A beloved wife has disappeared, and her seemingly hapless husband embarks on a search for her, grief stricken to the point that his sanity is shaken. This offers a wonderful portrait of the unknown, banal corners of Istanbul, just prior to the coup d'etat in the early 80s. Chaos is mounting, amidst the usual joyous cacophony of people and everyday struggle. It is warm, funny, and moving.

Second, there is the culture and identity. Turks are uncertain if they belong to the East or the West, which they mimic in Pamuk's eyes to an absurd extent. To fill this void, they turn to writers, such as the lawyer's mysterious cousin, a famous columnist. In my reading, his loyal readers are searching for themselves through his eloquence and culture, as he retells old tales as well as finds new ones, which he expresses through his own brand of mimicry (or transmogrification). The Lawyer studies him as the key to the secret of his wife's disappearance, eventually taking on much of his identity.

Third, there are the interactions, both with history and similar people in the present. It all mixes in a kind of Nabokovian dream, where there are real and imagined threats and relationships. The mind of the lawyer, seemingly so mundane, is revealed here with great depth, layers that peel away repeatedly.

My interpretation of the book is that it is about the internal narrative of our lives - the stories we tell ourselves about who we are - that is the basis of personal identity and even cultures. In ascendant, self-obsessed countries like the US, this narrative goes largely unexamined in our presumption that everyone should want to live like us. This novel offers a strikingly different vision of this narrative, one that is wounded by history and in search of words and concepts to re-make itself. I think this is a great human dilemma, from which Americans can learn to better see themselves as well as empathize with other peoples, particularly in the current crisis of the Moslem world.

The translation is very vivid, though of course I cannot read it in the original. There is also a fascinating translator's note, in which she discusses the complexities of Turkish. It makes me wish I had learned Turkish.

Warmly recommended for serious students of literature. This book requires effort, but it is worth every bit of it. I would compare the achievements of this writer with the best work of VS Naipal, full of pathos and empathy for characters unusual for an American or western audience and yet sparkling with humor in the darkest moments.

---

NOTE: All online transactions are processed at Amazon.com's secure server, using the latest technology on internet's secure transactions.
| Blocks | Building Sets | Model Toys | Puzzles | Figures & Playsets | Toys by Age Ranges |