The Black Book
Thursday, April 10th, 2008 @ 02:11
by Orhan Pamuk (1990)
Galip’s wife, Ruya, has suddenly disappeared; suspecting that she has left him for her ex-husband and half-brother, Celal — a popular newspaper columnist who has also vanished mysteriously, Galip embarks on a journey to find them both, obsessively searching for (and drowning in) endless possible meanings and leads.
Structured in alternating chapters of third-person and first-person (Celal’s columns?) narratives, The Black Book — again, like all other Pamuk’s works — deals with the questions of identities and doppelgangers, both of individuals and of the East/West, bearing striking similarities to his later novel, The New Life.
The mystery/detective plot sometimes makes reading Pamuk feel like a guilty yet exquisitely absorbing pleasure. You see the blueprints: alienated, solitary man with almost embarassing longings and neurotic self-analysis, elusive missing woman, ubiquitous, all-consuming Istanbul (I can’t help thinking of Ceylan’s movies),
