Long acquaintance with Pamuk’s writing would reveal that “imagining” is not a shortcut — it is the whole point of the reading/writing experience for him. Imagination is not a distancing from reality or a flight into fantasy. This collection is a story of how Pamuk imagined his profile as a writer into being.

These essays on places, people (his immediate family and chance encounters), writers, culture, art and politics are valuable on their own. But placed in this frame, they give us Pamuk’s manifesto as a writer. Here is a version of it, constructed from fragments in assorted essays. A writer, for him, is formed by solitude, application, imagination and impersonation. “When I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid the shadows, he builds a new world with words… with patience, obstinacy and joy.”

Integral to this building of a new world is a deep awareness of where he’s coming from, from a society that is deeply conflicted between East and West. For instance, as he explained in an interview to the Paris Review, in the writing of The Black Book he harnessed “a sophisticated tradition of highly refined ornamental literature”, which had been emptied of its innovative content by an earlier generation of “socially committed writers” in Turkey, in a mind frame suggested by Borges and Calvino.

... contd.