Tag: Pamuks
Outbreaks and Uprisings in Orhan Pamuk’s “Nights of Plague”
Six years ago, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk started writing a historical novel about the outbreak of bubonic plague on a fictional island. He’d been dreaming of such a project for decades: as a student of history and of the great European plague chronicles and novels—Defoe’s “A Journal of a Plague Year,” Manzoni’s “The Betrothed,” Camus’s “The Plague”—he had a particular interest in the way that plagues have tended to get what we might now call “Orientalized.” Muslims, especially in
Orhan Pamuk’s Literature of Paranoia
Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, Nights of Plague, is set mainly on Mingheria, a “fairy-tale,” “otherworldly,” and fictional Ottoman island—a “pearl of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea,” or so say the painters and tourists enchanted by its rugged mountains and its pink-stone capital, which glows when seen from afar. But behind the Orientalist fantasia lies a microcosm of empire at the point of collapse. In 1901, a bubonic plague breaks out. Pamuk will use it to expose the infirmities of