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A Nobel Laureate’s Journals Offer Much Color but Little Drama
Orhan Pamuk’s illustrated notebooks lead us to the great writer’s mind, then ask us to remain outside.
MEMORIES OF DISTANT MOUNTAINS: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022, by Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Ekin Oklap.
Is Orhan Pamuk’s “Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022” the most embarrassing book published in modern times by a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Or is it just an innocuous, rainbow-hued collection of tree, boat, city, sea and mountain paintings, overlaid with text, that might look good on a coffee table?
The angel on my right shoulder and the devil on my left are deadlocked.
Ties go to the devil.
“I sometimes wonder why I keep a diary at all,” the English bon vivant Henry Channon wrote, speaking for all journal keepers. “Is it to relieve my feelings? Console my old age? Or dazzle my descendants?”
Pamuk, the Turkish writer whose novels include “My Name Is Red” (1998) and “Snow” (2004), began keeping illustrated notebooks to return to his first love: painting. This is a tall and thin book. Its colorful two-page spreads open like the splayed halves of a trout.
Pamuk’s pen, ink and watercolor images have a low-key outsider art vibe. Some are lush; others have an antic hint of Roz Chast’s cartoons in The New Yorker.
