Other Colors
Orhan Pamuk and Maureen Freely
"I'm a big fan of Orhan Pamuk; I've read several of his books. Some I liked better than others. Other colors is his latest. It just came out in September 2007. Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish writer. He's in his mid-50's.
He writes about the self, and he writes about what it is to live in a culture that is influenced both by the East and by the West, and he wants to promote Turkish culture as something that's not a mixture of East and West or a clich -- d meeting of East and West, but is its own organic entity. It includes his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which is very gracious and very moving about his father. It's got occasional pieces and little essays about his daughter, about the big earthquake in Istanbul.
It's okay; it's a lot of odds and ends, and I think it was created to satisfy a need for product because after he won the Nobel Prize, he got big. I love Istanbul; it's my favorite city. It's a beautiful city, and all his books take place there. It's where he's lived all his life, and you can take his books as a guidebook to the city and see the places that he's writing about, and he gives them so much resonance. The best parts about it for me are when he writes about art. Pamuk was trained as an artist, and he writes about the art of the 16th and 17th Centuries in Turkey in a way that really makes it come alive. Pamuk has a gift because he's almost -- he's bilingual in that he speaks the language of art and also the written language of literature.
For someone who hasn't read Pamuk's works, Other Colors wouldn't be the place to start. It's really for the true fan. I'd give it 2.5 stars."
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