Is Orhan Pamuk’s Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022 the most embarrassing book published in modern times by a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature? Or is it just an innocuous, rainbow-hued collection of tree, boat, city, sea and mountain paintings, overlaid with text, that might look good on a coffee table? The angel on my right shoulder and the devil on my left are deadlocked. Ties go to the devil.
What rescues these diary entries from being just the cathartic musings of a jet-setting celebrity author are the paintings that inscribe every page ... Gaps and silences are everywhere ... The book lacks a robust narrative tissue, the self-incriminating bits that make reading someone else’s diary invariably riveting.
Beautifully produced ... Revealing an intensely visual writing practice and a distinctly painterly sensibility. Ekin Oklap’s translations swarm playfully around the reproductions of the notebook pages.
The pages of this beautiful book, which reproduces journal entries alongside translations and some commentary, include Pamuk’s sketches of landscapes, houses, trees, seas, ships, squares, mountains, roads, gardens, monuments, skies, cities, people, his desires and dreams ... Perhaps this is where all writers belong – in a land of dreams, images and words where we feel both fearless and sentimental; at home only when we write.
A strange and compelling blend of arresting paintings and drawings with the writer’s diary entries, meditations on everything from his swimming routine and sleep habits to Leo Tolstoy and Woody Allen ... Surrealist ... It might not be a book for every reader, but for anyone interested in the genius of Pamuk or the way an artist’s mind works, it will be a precious find.
Surely one of the Turkish Nobel laureate’s strangest and most remarkable works ... The pictures themselves, though often sketchily executed, bring pleasure ... Reveals the inner workings, and oversized ego, of an immensely talented writer. It is an enthralling, maddening and challenging read — each page visually enchanting and arresting.
