Novels are second lives

"Novels are second lives. Like the dreams that the French poet Gerard de Nerval speaks of, novels reveal the colors and complexities of our lives and are full of people, faces, and objects we feel we recognize. Just as in dreams, when we read novels we are sometimes so powerfully struck by the extraordinary nature of the things we encounter that we forget where we are and envision ourselves in the midst of the imaginary events and people we are witnessing. At such times, we feel that the fictional world we encounter and enjoy is more real than the real world itself. That these second lives can appear more real to us than reality often means that we substitute novels for reality, or at least that we confuse them with real life. But we never complain of this illusion, this naïveté. On the contrary, just as in some dreams, we want the novel we are reading to continue and hope that this second life will keep evoking in us a consistent sense of reality and authenticity. In spite of what we know about fiction, we are annoyed and bothered if a novel fails to sustain the illusion that it is actually real life."

From the opening paragraph in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, by Orhan Pamuk

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Reading makes you crazy enough to become a writer

In The Silent House, a novel by Orhan Pamuk, there is a character who “read so many books that he went crazy. This is an autobiographical nod. He is the boy who read so many books that he went crazy. Not one particular book, but Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Borges, Calvino… these writers and their novels made me. Reading novels changed my life. I’ve said that I mysteriously moved from painting to novels but at that time I was reading so much that it’s really no mystery. Discovering these writers, as Borges once said about reading Dostoevsky for the first time, is like the experience of seeing the sea for the first time in your life. Discovering these writers, all of them, was like seeing the sea for the first time. You’re stuck there. You want to be something like that. You want to belong to that.”

An Interview with Orhan Pamuk: http://thequietus.com/articles/10733-orhan-pamuk-silent-house-interview



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Western World's publishing industry fails readers

Orhan Pamuk says "that being a writer from the non-Western world, posed a series of problems such as the question of human experience being marginalised only because it was not written in the language of the Western world.

"My essential concern is with non-Western writers who do not write in English. They don't find true representation. Most of the writers at a festival like Jaipur are in English. This is because may be English is the official language here. But for those writing in other languages, their work is rarely translated and never read. So much of human experience is marginalised. This is a major deficiency," Pamuk said.

"When I write about love, the critics in the US and Britain say that this Turkish writer writes very interesting things about Turkish love. Why can't love be general? I am always resentful and angry of this attempt to narrow me and my capacity to experience this humanity. When non-Western authors express this humanity through their work their humanity is reduced to their nation's humanity," he said." SOURCE

While this may seem like the concerns of a very select group of foreign writers who see their works published in the English language, it should worry all readers.