the Black Book

I really buy into the whole definitive-author-for-a-city think. Joyce for Dublin, ummm, O'Toole for New Orleans, (I once thought whimsically about becoming the bard of San Antonio (I am proud of it in a sort of pitying-but-I-have-no-where-else-to-call-home-and-everyone-else-is-so-overly-jingoistic-about-their-hometown kind of way) but that would require me to A) devote my life to the sheepish trade of writing and B) spend the rest of my life in San Antonio) and so I began reading Orhan Pamuk where I first got here to Istanbul. I thought that if nothing else I would enjoy recognizing which streets the protagonist takes and feel special (it was super fun following Ignatius and I was only in New Orleans for like 48 hours).
First of all, Orhan Pamuk clings to existential themes (and don't get me wrong, I like existential themes, but only ones I can actually relate to, but gay things like solitude like, say, fucking everyone in a garcia Marquez novel, and in this book, it revolves around the question "can we ever really be ourselves?" (masterbation hand gesture)) and repeats them without trying out any good synonyms (although I will scapegoat his translator, who makes some truly shitty turns of phrase, which made me almost let go of the handrail on the tram a few times) and then does that boring literary trick where you list a bunch of random brickerbrack. I'll give you an example (that I made up) A room scented with linden and turkish delight and foggy jard of byzantine mud, and old silk gloves, and the various scraps of old books and pamphlets that bla bla bla transformed into the bewildering mystery of receding memory. There is like this stupid plot and this annoying sappy protagonist who pulls a niebla (where the narrator interrupts towards the end, except when Unamuno does it it's the cool type of existential, not the gay post-modern I-only-got-the-nobel-prize-because-I'm-Turkish type of existential)
I finished this book, all 400 pages (exactly 400 pages in some sort of ironic unfunny joke), and that's why I'm pissed. I'm going to try another book, Mark gave me the refreshingly slim "white Castle" but if I'm not utterly satisfied with having the inside scoop into his literary world by having lived in Istanbul for 5 months, I am going to bad mouth Orhan Pamuk worse than the Turkish government.