His country’s dilemmas are also his as a writer. For a writer who has been exposed to the Western literary canon and can still only speculate the contents of an Eastern canon, he must confront the idea of being an intellectual on the periphery: “For people like me, who live uncertainly on the edge of Europe with only our books to keep us company, Europe has always figured as a dream, a vision of what is to come; an apparition at times desired and at times feared; a goal to achieve or a danger. A future — but never a memory.”

But Turkey, he says in a revealing insight into his own imagination, should not worry about “having two spirits, belonging to two different cultures, having two souls. Schizophrenia makes you intelligent.”

In any case it is by allowing contradictions — and shame and anxieties — to breathe life into imagined, impersonated characters, that novelists achieve their aim. As writers and readers. “For it is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled by our families, our schools and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are.”

And from this process of the writer imagining the “other” comes a kaleidoscope: “Sometimes I conjure up, one by one, a multitude of readers hidden away in corners, nestled in their armchairs with their novels; I try also to imagine the geography of their everyday lives. Then, before my eyes, thousands — tens of thousands — of readers will take shape, stretching far and wide across the streets of the city, and as they read they dream the author’s dreams, imagine his heroes into being, and see his world. So now these readers, like the author himself, try to imagine the other; they too are putting themselves in another’s place.”
Carry this book with you for a while, it will take you to so many places and people. And books.