In 2006 the Swedish Academy announced that it was awarding Orhan Pamuk the Nobel Prize in Literature, noting, as cited on the Web site for the Nobel Foundation, that "in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native [Istanbul he] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."

    The younger of two sons, Orhan Pamuk was born on June 7, 1952 in Istanbul, Turkey. (Some sources give his full name as Ferit Orhan Pamuk.) He grew up in a five-story apartment building in the upper-middle-class district of Nisantasi. "My mother, my father, my older brother, my grandmother, my uncles, and my aunts, we all lived on different floors," Pamuk wrote in his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City (2006), as quoted by Paul Carbray for the Ontario, Canada, Standard (June 18, 2005). The family's wealth had been made by Pamuk's grandfather, a civil engineer and industrialist who had amassed a fortune in the 1930s by, in part, building railroads--as part of the railway expansion program for the new Turkish Republic--and, in part, running the family's textile factory. Upon his grandfather's death, Pamuk's father and paternal uncle, who were both engineers, inherited control of the estate, which they squandered. "By the time I was growing up, the wealth was going down, but [my family] still had the instincts of rich people. Even though my grandfather's money had evaporated, our lifestyle didn't change," Pamuk told Nicholas Wroe for the London Guardian (May 8, 2004).

    Pamuk received a Western-style education, attending the elite, secular American high school Robert College, in Istanbul. "My family is secular, positivist, and in favor of Westernization. . . . My grandmother read us the 'atheistic' poems of Tevfik Fikret--the turn of the century utopian individualist Turkish poet, whose earlier poems condemn all aspects of traditional morality in Ottoman institutions, chief among them being religion, and whose subversive verses were read as the credo of new ideals, such as humanism, pragmatism, and the power of reason to transform the world," Pamuk explained for World Authors 1985-1990. As a young man, Pamuk aspired to be a painter, but his family expected him to become an engineer, and after graduating high school, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University, his father's and grandfather's alma mater, which was a radical Marxist campus at the time. Pamuk halfheartedly participated in the school's leftist culture. "Although I was reading the literature of all these little Marxist factions, I never joined any, and I would go home and read Virginia Woolf. Although I had my sympathies, I saved my spirits by reading Woolf and [William] Faulkner and [Thomas] Mann and [Marcel] Proust. I felt guilty but I also felt they were more interesting," he told Wroe.

    Pamuk never took the architecture program in which he studied too seriously, and he dropped out before completing his degree. In his memoir he represents himself during this period, as Christopher de Bellaigue wrote for the New York Times (June 12, 2005), as "a dissolute and errant architecture student" and recalled, Bellaigue continued, "sitting in the family apartment with his mother--his father is out with his mistress and his older brother, Sevket, is studying in the United States--while she lays out with appalling precision how his passion, which is to paint, will lead him either to the bottle or to the asylum. 'Everyone knows that [Vincent] van Gogh and [Paul] Gauguin were cracked,' she says, and goes on: 'You'll be plagued by complexes, anxieties and resentments till the day you die.' Seized by guilt but revolted by the bourgeois life his well-born mother has mapped out for him, Pamuk steps out into Istanbul's 'consoling streets,' but not before experiencing a dramatic conversion. In a parting shot to his mother--and also to the reader, for these are the book's final words--he says: 'I don't want to be an artist. . . . I'm going to be a writer.'" After giving up on architecture, Pamuk primarily confined himself to his bedroom in his mother's apartment, explaining to Fritz Lanham for the Houston Chronicle (April 19, 1998) that he "wanted the lifestyle of the author. I realized I have a screw loose in my head. I can't work in an office. I want to be alone in a room, with no one commanding me, daydreaming. I can work 10 hours, 11 hours--I won't complain. But I want to be by myself." During this period, however, he did study journalism at the University of Istanbul "so that I would have a university degree," he told World Authors. Others, however, attribute his pursuing a journalism degree to his desire to postpone his military service, which he fulfilled in 1982, the year his first novel was published.

    Originally titled Karanlik ve Isik (which can be translated as "Darkness and light") and published, three years after sharing the Milliyet Press Novel Contest with fellow author Mehmet Eroglu in 1979, as Cevdet Bey ve Ogullari (which can be translated as "Cevdet Bey and sons"), Pamuk's first novel is a multigenerational saga that explores the influence of Western capitalism on traditional Ottoman-Turkish society, particularly on the lives of Cevdet Bey, a first-generation Muslim entrepreneur, and his descendants. Formally, it employs the strategies and procedures of European realism, along the lines of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. Cevdet Bey (whose elder brother was a real Young Turk intent on stirring up political and personal trouble for its own sake) represents the generation of polite, goal-oriented, benign patriarchs who took their responsibility to their extended families seriously, while they basked in and insisted on being served with utter devotion. The sons, one of whom goes off to the hinterlands of Anatolia to build a railroad while the other follows in his footsteps to discover the tug of the heartland, consider themselves accountable not only to their family but to the nation. Yet they must also define themselves as individuals. They use the poet Tevfik Fikret's Anglo-American ideals of individual liberty, enterprise, sense of personal responsibility, dignity, and integrity in their quest for self. In a review of Pamuk's work, featured in the Times Literary Supplement (October 12, 1990), Savkar Altinel wrote that Cevdet Bey "offers all the pleasures of great realist fiction: a strong plot, memorable characters and a detailed social background . . . but at the same time traces with remorseless clarity the rise of the modern Turkish ruling class and the evolution of Turkish capitalism."

    Pamuk's second novel, Sessiz ev (which can be translated as "House of silence"), came out in 1983 and has been compared with the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. In its French translation as La Maison du silence it won the Prix Medici as the best novel of 1988. Told from five different points of view, it covers a week spent by three upper-class, but deeply disaffected, siblings at their dying grandmother's country house, where their uncle, a dwarf, attends to the old Ottoman lady. The eldest sibling is a corpulent and overindulgent professor of history whose interests lie in the local archives, where he digs up old stories concerning land deeds, legal dissensions, and all sorts of mayhem that now read like found poems. The middle grandchild is the sister, whose consciousness is kept repressed; she is a university student and involved in leftist causes. The youngest, in his last year at the American prep school in Istanbul, hopes to escape to the United States, where he plans to graduate from an Ivy League university and join the economic power elite on Wall Street.

    The family's background is filled out by the nonagenarian grandmother, reminiscing to herself about her late physician husband, who at the turn of the century had been exiled to the country by the Young Turk administration for his divergent politics. The old woman hated her husband's reform-minded efforts to write the first Ottoman encyclopedia, which was intended to teach and civilize his countrymen, and, worse, she hated his philandering with the housemaid, which produced two illegitimate sons: first, the dwarf who serves as her majordomo (and as the novel's fourth point of view); the second, a cripple who sells lottery tickets to make a living. The fifth point of view belongs to the crippled uncle's son, a high-school dropout with a deep grudge against the well-heeled relatives from Istanbul. He is involved in right-wing terrorist activities and sees himself as doing something momentous that will attract the attention of the world. He first develops a crush on the leftist university co-ed, stalks her all through the week, and finally approaches her, only to be called a "fascist maniac." In a rage, he beats her to death.

    The consciousnesses of the five narrators are forged by the predominant values of their particular circumstances. Set during the early 1980s, a particularly dark period in recent Turkish history, when generations and ideologies clashed, often physically and violently, Sessiz ev depicts a house where the family members keep quiet but go for each others' throats with their silent internal monologues. It is ultimately a metaphor for Turkey. The silent house is laden with its past and divided against itself: the legitimate and illegitimate.

    Although Pamuk's early work has its roots in modernist novels, his later fiction can be considered postmodernist. His third book, Beyaz kale (1985), which was released in an English translation as The White Castle in 1998, masquerades as a historical novel in which the two protagonists seem to be mirror images of one another--one of them ostensibly Ottoman, the other Venetian--but in fact they serve as a metaphor for the dissolution of one self into an other, one of Pamuk's major themes. The book has garnered critical acclaim in outside Turkey not only because it is part of a discourse that transcends national boundaries: it is concerned with philosophical and aesthetic themes that have interested individuals everywhere.

    The unnamed Venetian narrator begins by describing how he was captured by Ottoman corsairs, shipped back to Istanbul, and thrown into the dungeons. He avoids hard time by pretending to be a physician and, after impressing the Pasha who owns him with his medical knowledge, he is saved from prison by being presented as a slave to a royal scholar, called the Hoja (teacher), who, to the narrator's astonishment and horror, resembles him so much that the two are identical--something that the Hoja never mentions. The two teach each other everything that they know: "'Everything,'" the novel explains, "meant all that I'd learned in primary and secondary school; all the astronomy, medicine, engineering, everything that was taught in my country." Then they begin to teach the adolescent Sultan, in an effort to bring enlightenment to the empire by enlightening the sovereign who will one day rule single-handedly. The thing that the little Sultan truly desires, however, is for them to build him a war machine that will help conquer an impregnable, shining white castle in Europe called "Doppio." The war machine they build is too encumbered by its own clumsiness to succeed, and the campaign fails. At the end the narrator says that the Hoja, pretending to be the narrator, goes to Italy to assume the Venetian's identity. The narrator says that he himself, having "become" the Hoja, has stayed on in a little town not too far from Istanbul.

    "The passion that steadily drives the tale is intellectual and philosophical," John Updike wrote for the New Yorker (September 2, 1991), "concerning the interplay of East and West--of fatalistic faith versus aggressive science--and at a deeper level, the question of identity." Pamuk would certainly agree with Updike on the question of identity, but he has noted that critical approaches to his work that rely on notions like East versus West unnerve him. Paul Berman wrote for the New Republic (September 9, 1991): "One of the appeals of Pamuk as a novelist is that he invites this sort of daffy speculation, not explicitly, but by the substance of what he writes. Possible interpretations bubble up spontaneously from his pages. There are novelists who entertain us with their inventiveness and novelists who entertain us with our own inventiveness. Pamuk, with his easy Cartesian cerebralness, manages to do both."

    Although his readers may think that the Ottoman and the Venetian are "real" and separate characters, Pamuk makes clear that his Venetian comes from fictions about Venetians. Nor is his Ottoman "real," but an amalgam of popular images of Ottomans. The narrator, neither European nor Asian, is unbounded; his two identities are often indistinguishable, merging into a single one. It is the reader, in the act of reading, who frees the soul from its slavery to a fixed persona, because it is only in reading that one can be "oneself and also another." This is a major theme in Pamuk's work. Behind his fiction there is a wondering adolescent who seeks to resolve the polarities of his imagination, personified in this novel by the charming adolescent Sultan who, although the sovereign of the largest empire in the world, is still capable of being awed and thrilled by the mysteries of the universe. Jay Parini pointed out, in the New York Times Book Review (May 19, 1991), that one does not read The White Castle to find out what life was like in the 17th-century Ottoman Empire. He suggested that the author "places his narrative in a slightly disorienting, dreamlike zone simply to point up the fictional aspect of the narrative."

    Kara kitap (1990), which was released in an English translation as The Black Book in 1994, is set in modern-day Istanbul. Pamuk says his interest lay less "in representing life in Istanbul" than in "searching for a 'texture' appropriate to life as it is lived there." In The Black Book the Western and Eastern influences on Pamuk's fiction are conjoined. In the novel, a lawyer's wife, who is also his first cousin, vanishes into the maze of Istanbul. Has she left him? Or is she playing a game of hide-and-seek? She may be with her half-brother, the narrator's cousin Jelal, a famous columnist who writes for a popular daily and who also seems to be missing. Chapters depicting the search for the lost wife are interspersed with columns ostensibly written by Jelal. The lawyer-sleuth studies minutely all the signs and significations and, after holing up in Jelal's apartment, goes through his cousin's entire literary output, totally acquiring his memory banks; the narrator even "becomes" the columnist, taking over Jelal's column after Jelal is gunned down by a disgruntled fan.

    Terming The Black Book an "exercise . . . not for the faint of intellect," Robert Houston, writing in the New York Times Book Review (January 15, 1995), commented that it places the reader "in the world of those thousand and one nights in which life is sustained only by the endless telling of story after story plucked from . . . the garden of memory--without which one ceases to exist." But Houston added that the novel "has a political dimension . . . [as] a running commentary on Turkey--Istanbul in particular--and its multiple identities, on its legacy of despotism and rebellion, on its ancient internal battles between East and West, between past and present." Houston thought Pamuk failed in that dimension: "To a visionary, there may well be other Istanbuls behind the quotidian one, but that 'real' city where the book began, with all its supposedly real people, still makes its demands. To the extent that . . . Pamuk ignores those demands, he loses and frustrates his reader, and damages his novel."

    In the process of writing A New Life, his 1994 novel, Pamuk, a master of fictional devices, found, "My basic concern now is language." The book begins: "I read a book one day and my life was completely transformed." The book in A New Life is so luminous that it lights up the narrator's face. A voice whose source is Dante's La vita nuova (The New Life) begins to flow, miraculously, in Turkish. The narrator begins to stay up all night to copy the book in longhand into his own notebook. He falls in love with a girl who had also read the book, loses her even before he can tell her he loves her, and takes off looking for her on dangerously dilapidated buses driven recklessly over treacherous country roads.

    Pamuk's next novel, Yeni hayat (1998), which was translated as My Name is Red in 2001, is a meditation on the relationship between art and religion as well as East and West disguised as a murder mystery and a love story. Set in 16th-century Istanbul, a time when the Ottoman Empire was among the most powerful empires in the world, and told from multiple perspectives, the novel opens with a soliloquy on the murder of Elegant Effendi, whose corpse lies at the bottom of a well. One of a cadre of artists who are working for Enishte Effendi on illuminations for a manuscript that follows Western rather than Islamic aesthetics and thus are potentially heretical, Elegant was considering turning his colleagues in to the religious authorities. Meanwhile Black, a miniaturist who has returned to Istanbul after 12 years of living abroad, is charged by Enishte's daughter, Shekure, whom he loves, to solve the murder mystery.

    As Daniel Mulhall wrote for the Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, New Straits Times (July 30, 2003), Pamuk "skillfully employs the device of using multiple narrators to tell his story. The opening chapter is told by a corpse and others by a tree, by 'death,' by the colour 'red' and, in an hilarious chapter . . . by a gold coin which recounts its experience of being passed from purse to purse and pocket to pocket. It turns out that the coin is not genuine Ottoman gold, but a clever Venetian fake!" Others found the novel to be similarly impressive, if not perfect. "Seldom does My Name Is Red lose its exquisite tensions, though one long episode, in which Black and the master miniaturist Osman search for clues in the Sultan's dim and crowded treasury, may try a reader's patience. Mostly, structure and voice pick up the slack when the basic plot slows to a crawl, and Pamuk often achieves the timeless quality of parable within a thoroughly modern work in ways reminiscent of Kafka and Borges." My Name is Red was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (2003).

    Kar (2002), which was released in English as Snow in 2004, followed My Name is Red. Described by Pamuk as his first and last political novel, Snow is set in the mid-1990s against the backdrop of the northeastern city of Kars. The story, which counts among Pamuk's most accessible novels, addresses the conflict among political Islamists, soldiers, secularists, and Kurdish and Turkish nationalists. The novel's protaganist, Ka, a Turkish poet who had been living in exile in Germany, is sent to Kars--where he hopes to see his old college friend Ipek, who has separated from her husband--to report on a group of young women who have committed suicide to protest a ban on headscarves. His investigation of the story provides Ka with access to a number of the key figures in the conflict, including Blue, a terrorist; Necip, who aspires to become an Islamic science fiction writer; and Kadife, who is the leader of the headscarf girls and Ipek's sister.

    Calling Snow "the latest entry in Pamuk's longtime project: narrating his country into being," Margaret Atwood, writing for the New York Times (August 15, 2004), praised the novel for succeeding at drawing a fine line "between playful farce and gruesome tragedy. . . . For instance, the town's newspaper publisher, Serdar Bey, prints an article describing Ka's public performance of his poem 'Snow.' When Ka protests that he hasn't written a poem called 'Snow' and is not going to perform it in the theater, Serdar Bey replies: 'Don't be so sure. There are those who despise us for writing the news before it happens. . . . Quite a few things do happen only because we've written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about.'" John Updike, writing for the New Yorker (August 30, 2004), compared the novel to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and Franz Kafka's The Castle and concluded: "To produce a major work so frankly troubled and provocatively bemused . . . took the courage that art sometimes visits upon even its most detached practitioners." Others were less impressed. "It is," Richard Eder wrote for the New York Times (August 10, 2004), "a novel of lesser scope than its grand and magical predecessor and more narrowly focused, although it is enriched by the author's same mesmerizing mixes: cruelty and farce, poetry and violence, and a voice whose timbres range from a storyteller's playfulness to the dark torment of an explorer, lost." Snow was awarded the Prix Medicis in 2005.

    Pamuk then released Istanbul: Memories and the City (originally published in 2003 and translated into English for a 2005 release) a book that sets out to tell the story of Pamuk's early life and explore the nature of his native city, which is, the book explains, characterized by a melancholy called huzun in Turkish. "This evocative book succeeds at both its tasks," Noel Malcolm wrote for the London Sunday Telegraph (April 10, 2005). "It is one of the most touching childhood memoirs I have read in a very long time; and it makes me yearn--more than any glossy tourist brochure could possibly do--to be once again in Istanbul." The successful mix of childhood memoir and meditation on the history of a city partly stems from the analogy Pamuk is able to establish between his family and the city, both of which suffered a decline in the 20th century, but critics found more compelling the book's focus on melancholy. "For Pamuk, melancholy is the defining characteristic of the modern city" of Istanbul, as Murrough O'Brien observed for the London Independent on Sunday (March 27, 2005). "But he uses the Turkish word huzun. As he explains, this originally meant one of two things: the soul's yearning for God and the concomitant frustration of not being at one with him, or the result of a culpable, and misguided, attachment to worldly things. To these definitions Pamuk adds, though never explicitly, a third: a kind of city-sorrow which is unique to Istanbul, a fatalism which leads its residents to dress in drab clothes and expect--even welcome--the worst." Not everyone was entirely taken with the book. "The least successful elements of the book are the autobiographical," Aengus Collins wrote for the Irish Times (April 9, 2005). "Pamuk is effective when writing about Istanbul because of the directness with which he teases out the complexities of his feelings about the city. The postmodern tics that on occasion mar his novels are absent here. With the autobiographical material, however, these tics recur--for example, . . . in the tired motif, familiar from his fiction, of the new or second life--here an 'other world' opened first by childhood daydreaming, later by his painting and writing. It is a pity these devices consume so much of his autobiographical energy, because the story of his family's decline deserves more room to breathe than it is given."

    The year his memoir appeared, Pamuk told a Swiss magazine that the Turkish government was responsible for the death of one million Armenians between 1915 and 1917, something Turkey denies, and the killing of 30,000 Kurds later in the 20th century. It was subsequently reported that he used the word "genocide" to refer to the conflict between the Turkish and the Armenians, and he was subsequently charged under a law forbidding one to insult the Turkish identity. Following an international outcry protesting the charges, the case against him was dropped, on a technicality, at the beginning of 2006. Later that year he was a Nobel laureate.

    Other Colours: Essays and a Story, Pamuk's first book since winning the Nobel Prize, was published in September 2007. The collection, which includes an interview, a speech, and a short story, was praised by critics. Pico Iyer wrote for the New York Times (September 30, 2007), "In Other Colors, his first big assemblage of nonfiction, Pamuk gives us several of his many selves in a centrifugal gathering of memory-pieces, sketches, interviews and unexpected flights." He added that the book "feels more like a rich and suggestive set of explorations than a single story. Yet mostly what this collection gives us . . . is a chance to savor one of the inimitable literary storytellers of our time." Tibor Fischer, writing for the London Telegraph (September 13, 2007), called many of the pieces "weighty, colourful and elegant." During an interview with Lila Azam Zanganeh posted at the Columbia Magazine Web site, Pamuk announced that his next novel, The Museum of Innocence, a love story set in Turkey's high society, will soon be published in Turkey.

    Pamuk, who has has a daughter, Ruya, with Aylin Turegen, a historian of Russian descent whom he married in 1982 and divorced in 2001, has lived in Istanbul for his entire life, with the exception of the three years he spent in the U.S., when he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University, in New York City, from 1985 to 1988, and a visiting writing fellow at the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, in 1988. More recently he returned to Columbia for a stint as a visiting professor, but he still calls the building in which he was raised his home.