The New Life

Ha! Last time I complained to the bookshop that there was nothing by Orhan Pamuk; this time they had a whole shelf!

I think I've said before that I love writers who don't walk you into their stories, but throw you in wholesale. This story is a mystery which plunges you into the source of it - a strange book - from the very first line. The narrator can't stop reading it, can't stop believing that its world must really somehow exist. It leads him to a girl under whose spell he falls, and onto an absurd journey across Turkey on buses. I think anyone who has travelled Turkey must really appreciate all these bus journeys - it's a fantastic portrait of their surreal tedium. Pamuk loves the slightly absurd, alongside the lyrical - he has an exquisite line, "I read a book and found you there". But then considering he was nearly locked up for mentioning the Armenian massacre of a hundred years ago, perhaps what we consider surreal is normal in his Kafkaesque landscape.

This book is definitely very similar to his earlier novel, The Black Book, although that novel focuses on Istanbul. It's got the same search and the same strange family undercurrents, with the importance of the children's magazines, and the woman who is just out of reach. He has such a distinctive voice anyway, but I wonder whether this is a kind of heir to that novel, or even an odd kind of sequel. In any case everything he writes is so powerful, that they change the way you see and think about things. Frightening, but wonderful, too.