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Best of the Spectator

The Book Club: Orhan Pamuk

Best of the Spectator

The Spectator

News Commentary, News, Daily News, Society & Culture

4.4785 Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by the Nobel Prize winning novelist Orhan Pamuk to talk about the publication of Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks. Right up to early adulthood, Orhan had imagined he was destined to be a painter, but then his life took another turn. In these illustrated notebooks he marries words and images in an elliptical sort-of diary. He tells me about what he puts in and what he leaves out, how his imagination works, the artists and writers he admires, what fame has given him, and why he wishes he didn't have to talk about politics.  

Transcript

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0:00.0

If you enjoyed the Spectator's podcast, why not subscribe to the magazine as well?

0:04.2

You can get 12 weeks of The Spectator for just £12, plus a free £20 £10,000 or weight trade voucher

0:10.6

if you go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

0:14.7

This is a podcast-only deal and we hope you take us up on it.

0:24.3

Hello. and we hope you take us up on it. Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

0:28.0

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

0:30.5

This week, I'm very pleased indeed to be joined by the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist, O'Han Pamuk.

0:36.8

And Orhan's new book that we're going to talk about

0:38.9

is not a novel. It's described as illustrated notebooks, and it's called Memories of Distant Mountains.

0:46.0

Now, O'Han, you write quite early on in this book that you say from the ages of seven to 22,

0:52.8

you were fixed your life you were going to be a painter.

0:56.4

And then that changed.

0:58.1

Can I ask why that changed?

0:59.9

I explain all this in a way in my autobiographical essay book, Istanbul.

1:07.1

The whole book is not only about that, but mostly about that if you pay attention to the narrative voice.

1:15.9

The narrative, that is, me when I was a child, I was raised in a family of civil engineers, my grandfather, my father, my father, uncles, all civil engineers.

1:24.9

And I was expected to go to the same Istanbul Technical University,

1:28.9

which I did.

1:30.3

But since I was raised among the engineers as a black sheep, that is, I was artsy, I was painting,

1:39.6

drawing, and everyone was saying, I'm talented when I made a picture in the class, painting class,

1:45.6

everyone surrounded me.

1:47.0

Oh, and then the professor was, the teacher.

...

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