Other Colours: Essays and a StoryOrhan Pamuk, faber and faber, Rs 495

It is possible to read this book as a sequel to Istanbul: Memories of a City, Orhan Pamuk’s book on the city and his own life till he gave up his plans to be a painter and decided to be a writer. He calls the writings collected in Other Colours “ideas, images, and fragments of life that have still not found their way into one of my novels”. Put together, they show how his fiction has been formed — perhaps in ways and with an intensity he himself may not imagined possible while writing individual pieces.

But he is keenly aware of the combined weight of these writings. He writes, “I gathered up these pieces to form a totally new book with an autobiographical center.” These pieces are, as his readers have come to expect from him, laid out with a challenge and a wink: “I am hardly alone in being a great admirer of the German writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin. But to the anger of one friend who is too much in awe of him, I sometimes ask, ‘What is so great about this writer? He managed to finish only a few books, and if he’s famous, it’s not for the work he finished but the work he never managed to complete.’ My friend replies that Benjamin’s oeuvre is, like life itself, boundless and therefore fragmentary, and this was why so many literary critics tried so hard to give the pieces meaning, just as they did with life. And every time I smile and say, ‘One day I’ll write a book that’s made only from fragments too.’ This is that book, set inside a frame to suggest a center that I have tried to hide. I hope that readers will enjoy imagining that center into being.”

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