For fourteen years, Orhan Pamuk kept a record of his daily thoughts and observations, entering them in small notebooks and illustrating them with his own paintings. This book combines those notebooks into one volume. In words and pictures, he writes about his travels around the world, his family, his writing process, and his complex relationship with his home country of Turkey. He charts the seeds of his novels and the things that inspired his characters and the plots of his stories. Intertwined in his writings are the vibrant paintings of the landscapes that surround and inspire him.
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.
