Tag: Uprisings
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