Other Colors
Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk's first book since winning the Nobel Prize, <i>Other Colors</i> is a dazzling collection of essays on his life, his city, his work, and the example of other writers.<br><br>Over the last three decades, Pamuk has written, in addition to his sevennovels, scores of pieces—personal, critical, and meditative—the finestof which he has brilliantly woven together here. He opens a window onhis private life, from his boyhood dislike of school to his daughter'sprecocious melancholy, from his successful struggle to quit smoking tohis anxiety at the prospect of testifying against some clumsy muggerswho fell upon him during a visit to New York City. From ordinaryobligations such as applying for a passport or sharing a holiday mealwith relatives, he takes extraordinary flights of imagination; inextreme moments, such as the terrifying days following a cataclysmicearthquake in Istanbul, he lays bare our most basic hopes and fears.Again and again Pamuk declares his faith in fiction, engaging the workof such predecessors as Laurence Sterne and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, sharingfragments from his notebooks, and commenting on his own novels. Hecontemplates his mysterious compulsion to sit alone at a desk and dream, always returning to the rich deliverance that is reading and writing.<br><br>By turns witty, moving, playful, and provocative,<i> Other Colors</i> glows with the energy of a master at work and gives us the worldthrough his eyes, assigning every radiant theme and shifting moodÂ itsÂprecise shadeÂ in the spectrum of significance.<br>