Orhan Pamuk moves into the genre with masterly assurance ... It’s an opening redolent of Orientalist sensation fiction — and the novel has much more to offer in the same vein: ratsbane in rose-scented biscuits, kidnappings and assassinations, a cruelly curtailed rapturous love affair, bandits in mountain villages, murderously malcontent dervishes in mosques, public executions, and an ironclad ring of battleships dispatched by the Great Powers to blockade the plague-stricken island from the rest of the world ... All this is just one facet of a multi-angled book ... A masterpiece of evocation, it conjures up its imaginary island with superb fullness and immediacy ... Skills displayed in Istanbul (2003), Pamuk’s haunting commemoration of a city steeped in post-imperial melancholy amid crumbling reminders of its Byzantine and Ottoman supremacy, are first gorgeously, then grimly, redeployed. Sensuousness wafts beguilingly from scenes of Mingheria in its healthful prime ... Never a minimalist, Pamuk has sometimes carried copious documentation to unusual extremes ... A murder-mystery sub-plot featuring the deductive techniques of Sherlock Holmes adds to the novel’s rich variety. There is gruesomeness in abundance, but there is also welcome humour, which Ekin Oklap’s supple translation from the Turkish nicely brings out ... The eruption of the Covid crisis towards the end of Pamuk’s five-year writing of his novel has given present pertinence to its tale of past pestilence, long-ago lockdowns, disastrous political dithering, crackpot disease deniers and defiers, recalcitrant resistance to life-saving strategies and heroic medical persistence. But it’s as a magnificent panorama of the last days of the Ottoman Empire that this outstanding addition to Pamuk’s fictional surveys of Turkishness will enthrallingly endure.
... fascinating, wearying, and, dare I say, oddly timeless book, although Pamuk clearly has an eye on the present ... a complex and intriguing amalgam of form and genre. Some passages read like a textbook, others like a murder mystery ... At times, Nights of Plague reads like the work of someone who fell down the well of their own research and imagination, lost to an excess of details, characters, and events. While I do not know Turkish, and am always slightly wary of translations, the prose itself can feel ploddingly academic, clotted with events as if this were truly an exercise in historical documentation ... Elsewhere, there are gorgeous passages of description, surprising moments of lightness, narrative sections full of drama and old-fashioned cliff-hangers, and memorable sentences throughout ... Mostly, I was enthralled by the ways in which the islanders’ crimes, misdemeanors, and fatal missteps mirror those committed during our current worldwide coronavirus and political meltdowns ... Masterfully imagined and relentlessly inventive, Nights of Plague is worthy of the time a prepared reader will need to invest in it. Although it sometimes feels a little homework-y, that can be a virtue, too, encouraging one to rethink the present and bone up on Ottoman history simultaneously. Indeed, asking much of the reader is in keeping with Pamuk’s impressive, multifaceted, and swaggering intentions.
... long and intellectually capacious ... Yet, for all the weight of its subject matter, its tone is lightly ironic, arch, even flippant. It has many flaws. It is repetitive; it contains far too much exposition. All the same – formally and in terms of content – it is one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year ... Pamuk is hiding behind two masks, two assumed female voices. He is also an impressionist, trying out other period-appropriate authors’ personae ... Every piece of action is subjected to reprises from different points of view. It is confusing, I think deliberately so. This is a novel whose structure is not like scaffolding, more like a very complex piece of knitting ... Pamuk (and/or Mina) flout the normal rules of storytelling; the mantra 'show, don’t tell' is completely ignored...And yet none of these infringements of literary convention seems to matter much when set against the exuberance of Pamuk’s invention ... Pamuk has often written indirectly about Turkey’s nationalist revolution, and got into trouble with the Turkish authorities for doing so. This book can be read as a playful variation on the theme. More obviously it is a novel about a community ravaged by an incurable disease. It talks – in many different voices – about enforced isolation and lockdown. It tracks the way an epidemic justifies authoritarian measures, providing another way for Pamuk to make a veiled comment on Turkey’s current regime. It will inevitably be seen as his Covid novel, and yet, for all its rows of corpses, it seldom sounds a tragic note. Rather, it is a compendium of literary experiments, ludic, audacious, exasperating and entertaining.
Pamuk’s story effortlessly generates a set of resonances that the novelist could hardly have predicted when he started the book ... Curiously, though, the plague is not the most interesting element of Pamuk’s novel. Imaginatively speaking, the plague is relatively dead in Nights of Plague, partly because, as seasoned Covidians, we’re all now morbidly familiar with the mechanics of plague containment. What is most vital in this book is what is most fictional: Pamuk’s lovingly obsessive creation of the invented Mediterranean island of Mingheria, a world so detailed, so magically full, so introverted and personal in emphasis, that it shimmers like a memory palace, as if Pamuk were conjuring up a lost city of his youth, Istanbul’s exilic, more perfect alter ego. The effect is daringly vertiginous, at once floatingly postmodern and solidly realistic, something like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities crossed with the nostalgic re-creations of Joyce’s lost Dublin, or Joseph Roth’s vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire ... There’s a curious way in which Pamuk, alert for how, in history, the plague has been unfairly Orientalized, enjoys, in fiction, frankly Orientalizing his own island, imbuing it with swirls of Ottoman magic and legend ... As you’d expect in such a long novel, there’s a good deal of plot, but the book is engrossing and easy to read. The result is strangely paradoxical: a big but swift novel, a novel about pain and death that is fundamentally light and buoyant ... captivating.
A museum of imaginary history, Nights of Plague is stocked with stuff that a more frugal curator might choose to deaccession. Detailed descriptions of foods, pharmaceuticals and clothing in Arkata and disquisitions on Mingherian language add density to the prose. They furnish the work with artifacts of the communal experience while magnifying the duration of the nightmare. As transposed from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap...the pages bear the weight of a fateful year ... However, they come in the form of exposition more often than dramatization ... muffles a story that should resonate loudly with the current pandemic ... In the film Night at the Museum, Ben Stiller, a security guard at the Museum of Natural History, undergoes a harrowing night in which the collection’s ancient predators come to life. It is safer — and more thrilling — to spend a week inside Nights of Plague.
On one hand the novel is dense with researched information about medicine, religious custom, government protocol and turn-of-the-century international politics. On the other, it weaves in elements of romance and detective fiction, lending the production a consciously literary effect meant to offset its weightily topical material and create, in the narrator’s words, the appearance of a 'three-dimensional fairy tale' ... while undoubtedly courageous, the politics in Nights of Plague require so much context and explication that the story takes a long time finding its feet. The degree of detail feels staggering—there are even paragraphs devoted to styles of mustache waxing—and because the characters are mostly pashas and princesses, the writing, in Ekin Oklap’s cultured translation, can seem mandarin and finicky. Mr. Pamuk has clearly hoped to add zip to the narrative by introducing a murder mystery at the start—Princess Pakize and Dr. Nuri investigate the assassination of a health official using the methods of Sherlock Holmes, beloved by the sultan—but the thread is half-hearted and ultimately dropped ... In the end it’s good old-fashioned plot and incident that bring this novel to life. By around page 450 the sediment of information finally settles and the story unfolds the scintillating events of Mingheria’s revolution and subsequent civil wars. It is here that Princess Pakize and Dr. Nuri are propelled from aloof bystanders to central actors in Mingheria’s destiny. There is a lesson in the way their sudden involvement, and the book’s intensified drama, bring about the kind of novelistic enchantment that Mr. Pamuk has so beautifully apostrophized. For too much of Nights of Plague, I think, the crucial compounds of fiction remain overly theoretical: The history is comprehensive but stodgy, the literary allusions clever but artificial. But by the end of this long book the artist’s alchemy has taken effect and readers may find themselves in that immeasurably strange and deeply cherished condition of being swept away by events they know perfectly well never happened.
... might pass for an old-fashioned, detail-rich Tolstoyan epic if not for all those writer-at-work signs ... And if not for its immersiveness, the book might pass for an exercise in self-reflexive postmodernism ... Pamuk’s delight in art and artifice is inextricable from his realistic accounts of disease, poisonings and assassinations, political intrigue, cultural and religious enmity, gender inequity and medical futility. Is this the production of a writer who can’t decide what effect he wants? Take it up with the author of Hamlet, a prematurely postmodern work that also leaves us with a glut of corpses, yet continually reminds us that we’re watching a play ... The very heft of Nights of Plague — as well as its thematic omnivorousness, its placement in world history, its epigraph from War and Peace and its author’s 2006 Nobel Prize — seems to declare it a contender for the heavyweight crown. But Pamuk’s too cagey to get into any ring with Tolstoy. Imposing as it seems, Nights of Plague falls short of War and Peace by the length of a middling Victorian novel; it doesn’t even outstrip The Count of Monte Cristo, another of the sultan’s favorite works of Western literature. The book’s self-conscious bookishness, not its bulk, is what presumes to elevate it from a mere page-after-page-after-page-turner. Although Pamuk lays out a traditional feast of traditional plot, character and setting, we’re never allowed to forget that this novel, however convincing in its historical minutiae (feigned and otherwise), is a novel, based on that fictive trove of letters, which the fictive narrator intends to publish when she’s done writing the fictive Nights of Plague ... more fun to reflect upon than to wade through ... a good editor might have pruned some of Mingheria’s oft-mentioned roses, as well as its lindens, pines, planes, palms, acacias, olives, peaches, lemons, oranges, figs, magnolias, cypresses, horse chestnuts and tamarinds — to mention only the trees. The characters deliver paragraphs-long expository speeches, and talk in Old Translationese spiced with the occasional anachronism ... They just don’t have sufficient inner lives to give the illusion that they’re real, knowable people. If one of them were to come leaping off the page at us, it would be a breach of aesthetic decorum.
This beautifully translated work reads like a Salman Rushdie novel. Pamuk is no stranger to grand philosophical discussions, but the staging of the drama and the interaction of the characters take a gigantic premise and make it an entertaining journey. Regardless of the weight of this tome, readers will find themselves drawn into the tale, especially with our newfound understanding of the politics and chaos of such a situation. Every character offers something of intense value to the plot, and the dramatic twists and turns are delightful ... a rich and rewarding masterpiece from a master storyteller that will entertain even the least focused reader with its simple telling of a very labyrinthine story. If you need something to take your mind off the insanity of the holiday season, get this book and find a quiet corner to hide out. It’s a true page turner.
... storytelling so luxuriant that one cannot help but soak in it ... This all sounds quite serious, but one can detect the authorial tongue in cheek even in the grimmer parts of the novel ... The novel itself is preceded by a hand-drawn map of the island’s capital, but his powers of description are such that one needn’t refer to it ... But there is more to Nights of Plague than a good story and memorable characters ... Fiction surely, but a thought experiment nonetheless, and a timely one at that.
Pamuk crams his Mingherian map with precise, almost obsessive detail. It thickens the texture but slows the pace. Ekin Oklap’s cleverly voiced translation captures our historian’s fussily pedantic, sometimes tortoise-footed, story-telling. Go with its leisurely flow, however, and the island saga can exert the hypnotic pull of those historical soaps Turkish TV does so well ... As it pivots between saga and satire, mystery and pseudo-history, Nights of Plague can feel as overloaded as an Arkaz boatman’s caïque. Pamuk, though, shows nous, charm and cunning as he keeps his bulky cargo afloat and on the move. If this generous hybrid of epidemic soap opera and novel of ideas has becalmed patches, it stirs the senses and flexes the mind. You will be sad to leave lavishly imagined Mingheria.
Pamuk is able to pose timely questions about the nature of the state: When is it helping people despite themselves, and when is it a dictatorship? And how are citizens to know the difference? ... Pamuk specializes in protean characters and dizzying shifts in perspective, and he is not about to make moral judgment easy ... Paranoia is Pamuk’s great subject and the engine of his style. He forces you to read through scrims of suspicion and doubt. No fact, no backstory, is ever what it seems...f his novels have the postmodern quality of resisting closure, if they frustrate what Roland Barthes called 'the passion for meaning,' that’s because there are plots and counterplots all the way down. He’s truly a novelist for the post-truth age ... gives us a taste of the atmosphere of menace that surely closes in on Pamuk as he sits down to work. And understanding the political and legal constraints he has to write around helps explain the feints and complications that make his fiction unsettling and often funny, but also hard to get through ... To parse a Pamuk novel, you can’t focus exclusively on plot. You have to pay close attention to how the story is told. Pamuk sets fictions inside metafictions: His narrators explain how they found the letters or manuscript on which they will base their tale, only to undermine that claim with offhand revelations and jarring changes of tone. By the end of a Pamuk novel, the scaffolding established at the beginning has usually collapsed, leaving readers dangling in midair ... We can be sure that they lack the finesse to grasp that novels tell their stories slant. How do we know a legitimate government from a dictatorship? Pamuk has built a maze around the answer, and that’s an answer in itself.
The Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk knows how to do historical research and present it in inventive ways ... Pamuk vividly describes the detailed texture of life on Mingheria, the island, along with the tension of a brutal disease threatening an entire population. He introduces a dizzyingly complicated cast of characters both from the present situation and the recent past of the Ottoman Empire. As if that weren’t enough to carry along the tangled narrative, Pamuk adds yet another element: that of a murder mystery, with frequent allusions to the crime-solving techniques of Sherlock Holmes ... It’s a lot to pack into one book, but Pamuk allows himself the time and space to carry it all off brilliantly. The plague story, the political one, the murder mystery—all converge in an unpredictable and satisfying way. This is a book to savor and read slowly, not to race through. Its pattern emerges slowly and richly, like a fantastical Turkish carpet, carrying the reader into a world that’s both imaginary and very real.
Among other accomplishments, Nights of Plague places the reader at the intersection of epidemiology and nation-state formation ... Pamuk confronts us with the ironic idea that a political entity, even a nation-state, could arise in response to, or as a symptom of, an epidemic.
... 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.
Pamuk establishes his cast with a marked lack of rhetorical flourish: if the intention is to create the appearance of reliable historical accuracy, it succeeds almost too well. The accumulation of characters and of background details, many of which serve no purpose in powering the plot, can feel suffocating in their profusion. Then Bonkowski is found murdered and it seems likely this will make the wheels of the story turn faster. It doesn’t – for all that we hear about the faraway sultan’s interest in murder-mysteries and the deductive methods of Sherlock Holmes. Instead the novel rolls forwards at the same imperturbable pace, offering incidental clutter with the same unruffled air as it records more significant events ... the prevailing tone of our 'objective historian' narrator remains so composed that the turmoil feels oddly lacking in drama ... The book’s 700 pages don’t create much variety in pace, despite the torrent of events that pours through them. But the objective tone of the prose, which allows for a sense that all human activity, however noble in intention, might be infected with foolish vanity, and which is well caught by Oklap’s alert translation, means that a necessary degree of lightness attaches to even the gravest of its themes. The question of the role of 'personality' in history lies near the novel’s heart, and the answer is that it is crucial – though often in ways that are unintended, and always in a manner that is 'shaped by history itself'. You can, with difficulty, take an island out of an empire, Orhan Pamuk implies, but taking the empire out of an island is no less complicated a procedure.
Writing in a flat, encyclopedic tone, Pamuk examines how racism and imperialism defined nineteenth-century quarantines ... Pamuk gives us revolutionary heroes but not without their flaws, and the persuasive arguments of a historian who is nonetheless a frustrating, insistent figure in her own right, not to be taken literally.
Deftly blending rich realism and wry social commentary, Turkish Nobel laureate Pamuk delivers an invented history that leverages the all-too-familiar experience of a deadly pandemic to return to one of his cherished topics: Ottoman bureaucratic and social reform. The continued volatility of the Turkish political environment and the potency of Pamuk’s allegory were underscored when, upon this novel’s Turkish publication in 2021, Pamuk faced a criminal inquiry for allegedly besmirching Turkey’s founder, Ataturk.
... ambitious ... Though Mina’s romanticizing of her ancestors and her nation’s history can sometimes be overwrought, the story she shapes is consistently captivating. As a result, the grandiose statements—'emotions and decisions of individuals could often change the course of history'—wind up ringing true. Though it doesn’t stand with the author’s best work, the cracking narrative will keep readers in for the long haul.
There is a lot at play here, and while Pamuk’s prose is as elegant and informed as ever, an occasional hint of pomposity does waft through his pages. Then, too, there is so much information to be conveyed that the burden sometimes falls to his characters, and dialogue becomes an unfortunate vehicle for exposition ... It’s possible the novel is overdetermined ... On top of all that, there’s a murder mystery at play. And yet, despite these flaws, Pamuk’s storytelling is so compelling and coy; his intelligence and interests so wide-ranging; the project, as a whole, so ambitious, that the book has survived its own excesses. There is a great deal here to savor ... Not quite a triumph, Pamuk’s latest work still manages to delight.
