Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Nights of the Plague. Review. – Culture

An island in the Aegean of “frightening” beauty, the houses are made of white stone, the rocks are overgrown with green. The people there trade in rose water, scents, ointments and pastes. A paradise? Orhan Pamuk had wanted to write a plague novel for a long time, starting in 2016, and when the world plunged into the corona pandemic at the beginning of 2020, the Turkish Nobel Prize winner for literature was surprised and overwhelmed.

Pamuk taught literature at Columbia University in New York. In a panic, he returned to his hometown of Istanbul and spoke in interviews of his fear of the epidemic and death. “The Nights of the Plague” foreshadow Orhan Pamuk’s demons. But the plague not only uncovers human abysses, it also destroys certainties with almost revolutionary force.

The same applies to the beautiful island. Pamuk’s plague novel manages the feat of being both a horror story and a history book. Although its subject matter is heartbreaking, it is surprisingly playful and highly political at the same time. But this time Pamuk is making it difficult for all those who want to see him as a nag because of his well-known criticism of the prevailing conditions, most recently the conversion of Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque. He has now taken the liberty of inventing an entirely new country, albeit one that seems strikingly similar to his own with its historical burden.

Pamuk dreams of an Ottoman society, half Christian, half Muslim

The beautiful island, which enchants all who arrive at the sight of it, bears the name of Minger. There is lush greenery, cute red roofs, a mighty white castle rock, horse-drawn carriages trundle across the pavement. Pamuk, known for his attention to detail, designs his island neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street, so you’re tempted to look on a map to see if Minger, located between Crete and Rhodes, doesn’t exist after all.

The world Pamuk dreams of is an Ottoman microcosm, with Christian and Muslim populations roughly balanced. This old order is thrown into hell by the plague, there is a revolution and there are multiple putschs. The historical background is the great outbreak of plague at the end of the 19th century, which claimed millions of lives, especially in Asia, and also reached Australia up until the 20th century. Only Europe got off lightly at the time, with luck and new ideas helping to combat the epidemic.

Appear: Muslim sheikhs and orthodox priests, rich citizens and poor people, mostly Muslim, doctors driven by western ideas of quarantine, corrupt, lovestruck politicians, informers and spies, an Ottoman princess and a self-inspired nationalist revolutionary who turns the island into which leads to independence, but is then wiped out early by the plague.

This does not detract from his afterlife in the new state of Minger. That founder of the state is called Commandant Kâmil, he has at least the first and last letters of his name in common with Kemal Atatürk. Historical and fictitious alternate seamlessly in this epic tale, so that the levels can get mixed up while reading.

Pamuk is interested in the question of whether the fatalism attributed to Islam makes it more difficult to accept quarantine rules, for which he sees historical evidence. Funeral ceremonies were still held in the mosques of Constantinople in Ottoman times while the plague raged in the streets. In the current pandemic, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government opted for secular intervention and banned such celebrations. The television showed men in white protective suits burying the dead from the corona virus. The curfews in Istanbul have long been particularly strict.

At Pamuk, one encounters a lot that is historically documented, and it is amazingly similar to the fever curve familiar from the daily news: the denial of the disease, the struggle for freedom and restriction, science, reason and conspiracy theories, the search for the culprit: bacteria or fate? Pamuk’s characters live in the contradictions between the worldly and trust in God.

Pamuk has recently promised to be more feminist in his books

The author cites Daniel Defoe’s 1722 fictitious documentary report “The Plague in London” and Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Bride and Groom” from 1827, an Italian tale of the plague based on an alleged but invented historical manuscript, as important sources of inspiration. In the case of Pamuk, there are letters and postcards from the fictional Ottoman princess Pakize, who writes to her sister as a reporter from Minger, while the island is cut off from the outside world in 1901 because of the plague. One sometimes wonders how the mail then reached Istanbul?

But you don’t have to worry about such subtleties, because Pamuk’s female narrator this time – he had recently promised to be more feminist in his books – apologizes right at the beginning that she is not a writer at all, and that from Minger, that is hardly objective, and that she would certainly find it difficult to empathize with men in power. This preface sets the ironic-melancholic tone of the novel, which is full of allusions and with a lust for parody dedicated to the inevitable drama, which is also a form of demon-fighting.

The story is intricate and there are a few lengths, but Albert Camus knew that great disasters are monotonous because of their duration. For Camus, “The Plague” is also a code for the horror of National Socialism. Pamuk also takes a lot of time to work on a despot, Sultan Abdülhamit II, who agrees to reforms of the empire and quickly throws away the new constitution. The sole ruler pursues his opponents with harshness and uses Islam as a means of power. Pamuk never gets Ottoman nostalgic.

The setting of the novel looks like a miniature of the Republic of Turkey

As in “Schnee”, his 2002 novel, the scene is cut off from the outside world. Great Power and Sultan ships form a blockade around the quarantined Minger for six months to prevent the plague brought from Alexandria from spreading to Europe. The blockade also protects the new rulers on the island, which declares its independence from the Ottoman Empire during the plague. This new state, born out of the catastrophe, then looks in many ways like a miniature of the Republic of Turkey. Pamuk roughly carved some of the parallels, as if he needed to get rid of a few demons with that as well. And yet, those who think evil confuse fiction and fact.

The last chapter is the key, the open sesame for the Minger fairy tale: the narrator describes how things are in the independent state of Minger. Schoolchildren have to form sentences in Mingerian from the last 129 words of the commander Kâmil, who died early, which a secretary recorded. Opposition members are intimidated with prison sentences, unpopular journalists fear for their lives. “Minger to the mingers!” is a raison d’etat.

Of course, every Turkish reader knows the slogan “Turkey for the Turks”. That’s how the thugs chanted in 1955 who smashed the window panes of Greek shops on Istanbul’s Istiklal boulevard. The images of this destruction have just been brought to mind again by a great Turkish Netflix series called “The Club”. In Minger, Greeks are also being harassed and expelled, but also Muslims who remain loyal to the Sultan, all in the name of nationalism, of Mingerization.

The target of this parody are the heirs of Atatürk, who turned Kemalism into a substitute religion

There was already a lawsuit against the Turkish edition of the novel in 2021 for “insulting Atatürk and the Turkish flag”, despite all the alienation. It failed in the first instance, which unfortunately says nothing about other instances. Pamuk let his critics know that he hadn’t written anything that could be interpreted as disrespect for Atatürk, the “heroic founder” of the nation.

Gerhard Meier has once again brilliantly translated the German edition. Nothing is lost from this biting satire. Turkey will be 100 years old in 2023. One will hear many incantations of the founder of the state, also from the current powerful. But Pamuk’s political parody isn’t aimed at Atatürk, who after a series of wars created a new state from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. What is meant are rather the heirs who once made a substitute religion out of Kemalism, and every crude nationalism. And it doesn’t have to be Turkish.

But all this is not told by Orhan Pamuk, the world’s best-selling Turkish author, but by the narrator, who finally introduces herself at the end. As the great-granddaughter of Princess Pakize, who is sent to the mythical island of Minger by the sultan and Sherlock Holmes fan Abdülhamit after a long period of imprisonment in the palace. There she is supposed to solve a murder “of science” with her husband Nuri, a modern doctor. The victim is a pharmacologist sent by the Sultan to fight the plague.

But this crime story isn’t that important because the plague crowds out everything else. Mina Mingerli, as Pamuk calls his female alter ego, finally professes her love for the island so heartbreakingly that one suspects that her inventor is no different with his flawed country. In the end, Mina urges the three-pronged sentence: “Long live Minger! Long live the Mingerer! Long live freedom!” The last exclamation point is important.