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Why The Black Book Is Black
| Article
# : |
19296 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
3,014 Words |
| Author
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Jale Parla
Jale Parla is professor of English and comparative literature
at Bogazici University in Istanbul. |
KARA KITAP
(The black book)
Orhan Pamuk
Istanbul
428 pp., $8
Orhan Pamuk's four novels display a thematic continuum: He has preoccupied himself with the themes from his first novel on and has developed them into more complicated narrative modes with each new book. His first novel, Cevdet Bey ve Ogullani (Cevdet Bey and his sons), was a combination art novel and family saga; his second, Sessiz Ev (The quiet house), experimented with polyphonic narrative and anticipated the third and fourth books. Sessiz Ev is haunted by the memories and, actually, the memoirs of an obsessed empiricist, one of those Turkish Pioneers of westernization who believed they could singlehandedly bring about an epistemological revolution. Pamuk returned to the theme of epistemological fissure between the Eastern and the Western systems of thought in his third novel, The White Castle, and transformed it into a doppelganger story of a captive Venetian scholar in opposition to Hoja, a Turkish savant. The two take turns in playing now the first, then the second selves to each other, and this relationship becomes for each double a search for identity. Just as the encounter in The White Castle goes beyond the historical moment, so the context of The Quiet House is just a pretext for Pamuk's experimentation with a new narrative mode, the unreliable, polyvalent, polyphonic narrative that he will totally ahistoricize and depersonalize in The Black Book, with its now-familiar themes of the artist, reality, illusion, and identity.
Mysterious disappearance
The plot of The Black Book is simple, almost diagrammatic. Galip, a lawyer, who is married to his cousin, the beautiful Ruya, is abandoned by her and begins a search. His first guesses about her whereabouts take him to people and places of Ruya's past until he decides she must have gone to live with Celal, a newspaper columnist, who is her half brother and Galip's cousin. Reading Celal's column in the newspaper has been a habitual way of beginning the day for Galip, and it continues to be so throughout his search. As a loyal reader, he realizes that old columns are being reprinted, and, on checking with the newspaper, he finds out that Celal has not been there for a week. He then begins to search the articles for clues about Celal, Ruya, himself, and life in general.
Galip decides that Ruya and Celal are hiding in the
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