PositiveFull Stop... the remnants of detective fiction is there, but now that postmodernism is dead and buried for almost two decades, Mr. Pamuk no longer writes as he did back in 1990’s. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because in this age when TV series like The Tudors, movies like The Shape of Water, and novels like Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy opt for what I would call a sincere artificiality, Nights of Plague is proof enough that Mr. Pamuk is ever vigilant, still looking for the new old ways of telling, and telling well. Whatever came after postmodernism — be it metamodernism, performatism, digimodernism, or a cultural logic by any other name — , he is there. His meticulous research prevails, his characters both principal and minor, both real and imaginary, are vivid, his imagining of an island is jaw dropping. But in Nights of Plague these are not postmodernist devices so much as his method of recreating the popular genres of the time that the events of the novel take place. What I have in mind is the so-called “invasion literature,” a literary genre which emerged in the UK during the Belle Époque, and whose birth was, to a large extent, a response to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 ... I feel that the novel’s being declared DOA for the umpteenth time finally left its mark on it and that this is an object lesson on how to stay relevant, how to start a career all over again after settling to a peaceful maturity.