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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then that changed.

Can I ask why that changed?

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

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

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.

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

which I did.

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

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

everyone surrounded me.

Oh, and then the professor was, the teacher.

...