A View of the Bosporus: Orhan Pamuk’s Other Colors

Pico Iyer reviews Orhan Pamuk’s new book Other Colors, The New York Times, September 30, 2007

ORHAN PAMUK takes the pundit’s dry talk of a “clash of civilizations” and gives it a human face, turns it on its head and sends it spinning wildly. In his early novel “The White Castle,” a Venetian slave and his Ottoman master swap clothes, exchange ideas and squabble like siblings until you can no longer tell who is who — or who’s on top. “I enjoy sitting at my desk,” Pamuk told The Paris Review, in an interview included in his new book, “like a child playing with his toys.” This gift for taking the urgent issues of the day and presenting them as detective stories that race past like footfalls down an alleyway has made Pamuk the best-selling writer in the history of his native Turkey and the deserving winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, at the unvenerable age of 54. Serving up 16th-century murder stories that investigate shifts in the history of Islamic art and offering us seriously entertaining wild goose tales that ask the deepest questions about identity, Pamuk is that rarest of creatures, a fabulist of ideas.

Each of his seven novels is written in a different style, and even as you hear echoes of Borges and Dostoyevsky and Proust, he makes of the compound something entirely new. Pamuk sits, as every profile-writer notes, at a desk in Istanbul overlooking the bridge that links — and separates — Asia and Europe. And he has taken on the existential riddles that have traditionally preoccupied European literature and wrapped them up in brightly colored fables, Sufi allegories about the quest for the hidden self and arabesques that could have come from “The Thousand and One Nights.” By chance, the pressing questions facing both him and his country — how much to define themselves in terms of an Islamic past, how much in terms of a future in the European Union — have, in some form, become the questions haunting the global village as a whole, as more and more of us find ourselves living within earshot of the mosque even as Hollywood movies play down the street.

In “Other Colors,” his first big assemblage of nonfiction, Pamuk gives us several of his many selves in a centrifugal gathering of memory-pieces, sketches, interviews and unexpected flights. The result is a gallery of Pamuks: here is the author of the haunted, half-lit inquiry into melancholy and neglect, “Istanbul: Memories and the City,” with further glimpses of the “forest of secret stairways” that is his home; here is the man who so loves books that he wrote a whole novel, “The New Life,” about a character whose life is turned around by a book, with essays on the writers who possess him. Here, too, is the author of the fearlessly topical Islamic novel “Snow,” who, two years ago, was brought to trial by his government after telling a Swiss newspaper it was taboo in Turkey to mention the local slaughter of a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds, offering public statements on freedom of expression; and here, round every corner, is the whimsical, endlessly inventive juggler of possibilities writing pieces in the voice of the subjects of a painting, and, in one mischievous chapter, of what he calls “Meaning” itself.

These essays are more an afterword than an introduction to Pamuk’s work — those who haven’t met him before may feel more comfortable beginning with “Snow” or “Istanbul.” And though Pamuk assures us this is a different book from the collection that came out under the same name in Turkey eight years ago, newly shaped to form a “continuous narrative” that is also an autobiography in disguise, it feels more like a rich and suggestive set of explorations than a single story. Yet mostly what this collection gives us, by swiveling the lens from the window out toward the Bosporus to the man taking it in, is a chance to savor one of the inimitable literary storytellers of our time, who — to borrow a phrase from Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping” — is set upon a “resurrection of the ordinary.”

Pamuk has two enduring loves: books and Istanbul. Often they converge as his journeys through his hometown come to resemble excursions through memory itself. Like Proust, Pamuk has spent decades of his life — 15,300 days, he calculates — in the same room in his beloved birthplace, alone with his books and thoughts. Yet his window is always open to catch the sound of the sandwich vendors in the street, the men in the teahouse, the metallic whine of the ferries as they dock “at any of the little wooden tire-ringed landing stations .” Turkish writers pride themselves on their long sentences, and Pamuk’s most virtuoso catalogs, some stretching across hundreds of words, take in all the barbershops, the horse-drawn carriages, the winter afternoons and rainy backpassages of old Istanbul until he seems a Turkish Whitman, ready to contain all contrarieties.

Out of such everyday details, he makes parables. When Sean Connery’s James Bond came to Istanbul, Pamuk tells us, crowds excitedly applauded as Goldfinger offered the hero Turkish tobacco. Mayonnaise, once known in Turkey as Russian dressing, was later “referred to as American dressing because of the cold war.” Like a character in one of his fairy tales, Pamuk seems to realize he can find hidden treasure just by sitting where he is: he looks at New York with the freshness and eager expectancy of a typical foreigner, even as he remembers reading “The Thousand and One Nights” during a trip to Geneva when he was 7, “as a Western child would, amazed at the marvels of the East.”

To see how this mix of local and global can draw blood, and even tears, turn to his unforgettable accounts of the earthquakes that rocked the outskirts of Istanbul in 1999 and left 30,000 people dead. Pamuk begins by describing how his bed began “swaying violently like a rowboat caught in a storm at sea”; then, as a dutiful reporter and anxious lover of his city, he goes out to inspect the damage and to record buildings that are “just a heap of powder, iron, broken furniture, tiny scraps of concrete.” Before long he has made out of the cataclysm a pocket history of Turkey in all its hopefulness and corruption — and of people everywhere, distraught.

Born into an upper-middle-class family that once sat on great wealth — he grew up in the Pamuk Apartments, and his elder brother was sent to Yale — Pamuk began inhaling the great writers of the canon in his teens, reading them with the special longing and intensity of a boy from the far side of the world. He was moved by Dostoyevsky’s “impassioned questions,” his struggle to “decipher our own beings,” his furious battles with the center of faith. But what made the Russian writer seem almost a mirror for Pamuk was his position close to Europe yet cut off from it, anxious to see his country grow more Western and modern, yet impatient with those who felt they should remake themselves entirely in the European style. These reflections turn into touching self-portrait when Pamuk writes, “There are very few writers who can personify or dramatize beliefs, abstract thoughts and philosophical contradictions as well as Dostoyevsky.” For Dostoyevsky, he notes, “the world is a place that is in the process of becoming.”

IT’S conventional these days to see Pamuk as the man who lives out and thus gives voice to the shifting dance between East and West. But he never sees things in such abstract terms; the two forces are too alive for him to come to formal resolutions. His books are, really, celebrations of multiplicity (“My Name Is Red” is told in the voice of 19 narrators ), which makes them celebrations of unfinishedness; the mysteries they set up are always more delicious than any attempt to solve them. “Even the most intelligent thinker,” he says here, “will, if he talks too long about cultures and civilizations, begin to spout nonsense.” His refusal to settle into any one simple and simplistic position has, of course, made Pamuk the target of both secularists and religious conservatives.

When he was brought to trial and faced the prospect of three years in jail (until his acquittal), Pamuk became a hero to many in the West. Yet “Other Colors” makes clear (even in its title) that he has always been more at home in the world of the imagination, hanging out with Nabokov or Calvino, than in the doctrinaire position that circumstances pushed him into. He has no shyness about speaking out against censorship, or even about calling his country “a world leader in state- sponsored murder by unknown assailants, not to mention systematic torture, trammels on freedom of expression, and the merciless abuse of human rights.” Yet his heart lies very much, one feels, in opening up possibilities rather than in closing them off, and in what he calls “allegory and obscurity.” In some ways, all his books are about his sense that two souls are better than one. As he told The Paris Review in the context of cultural eclecticism: “Schizophrenia makes you intelligent.”

What “Other Colors” makes most clear is how seriously committed to playfulness Pamuk is. Over and over the terms extolled here are “childishness” and “innocence” and “enthusiasm,” both in the context of his narrators and in the context of his much-missed father, alight with “Peter Pan optimism.” Childhood is the source to which he constantly returns, whether recalling his love of games or devoting the single piece of fiction here to the story of a small boy exchanging trading cards even as his family falls apart around him. All a writer needs, for Pamuk, is “paper, a pen and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.”

For those who devour this writer in English, his particular sound of innocence and sophistication — lyrical, vulnerable, deeply human and engaging — has come to us with special immediacy since Maureen Freely began to translate him a few years ago. In the kind of coincidence Pamuk himself might have devised, Freely, an American novelist based in Britain, was a student at the same American school in Istanbul as Pamuk, and at the same time, though they never knew each other then. Now (with Pamuk at her side during revisions), she has found a voice for the Turkish writer that seems as close to us as our own.

“Other Colors” is too eagerly inclusive to make up the single-pointed, honed narrative that its author promises. Like the maximalist “Black Book” or “My Name Is Red,” it is more a fireworks display than a rounded sculpture (it’s no surprise that a favorite Pamuk character is the “encyclopedist ”). Yet what emerges powerfully, and often movingly, from it is Pamuk’s faith in writing as a “consolation” and refuge, “our only defense against life’s cruelties.” When he titles one major section in the book “My Books Are My Life,” he seems to be speaking both for the way that he has put almost all his adult life into his work (sitting in his room 10 hours every day and barely leaving Istanbul until he was 31 ), and for the fact that his shrine is his library of 12,000 books (in a culture that “views the nonreader as the norm”). Where a writer like Haruki Murakami offers up a cool and somewhat dystopian vision of globalism in which ambient music and drift seem to have superseded the word, Pamuk speaks for the hope that globalism can be made richer and more sustaining through uncompromising literary intelligence.

It’s startling, when falling under Pamuk’s spell, to realize that this Nobel laureate is younger than Martin Amis, say, or William Gibson, even as he grew up in a city without television, where the radio was state controlled. Perhaps he cherishes the grand inheritance of Faulkner, Flaubert and Tolstoy as only one who is far away from it can. Yet whether he’s writing wistfully about André Gide as the hero of Turkish intellectuals (though Gide himself wrote scathingly about Turkey ), or recalling how he used to collect Coca- Cola cans as a boy, from the trash cans of expat Americans, Pamuk is taking the world we thought we knew and making it fresh and alive. A rooted cosmopolitan, he has become one of the essential and enduring writers that both East and West can gratefully claim as their own.

Pico Iyer’s next book, “The Open Road,” about the 14th Dalai Lama and globalism, comes out next spring.

Folly in the Sundarbans?

Amitav Ghosh, Date of Publication: November 2004.

In 2003 the business group, Sahara India Pariwar, submitted an ambitious plan to the government of West Bengal proposing the creation of an enormous new tourism complex in the Sundarbans. Although the details of the plan have not been made available to the public, the broad outlines are described on the Sahara Parivar’s website. According to the site, the project will include many different kinds of accomodation, including ‘5-star floating hotels, high-speed boathouses, land-based huts, luxury cottages and an ‘eco-village’. Landing jetties are to be built and the project is to be serviced by hovercraft and helicopters. ‘Exclusive, beautiful virgin beaches’ are to be created and hundreds of kilometres of waterways are to be developed. The facilites will include ‘a casino, spa, health, shopping and meditation centres, restaurant complexes and a mini golf course’, and tourists will be offered a choice of ‘aqua sports’ including scuba diving. The total cost of the project will be somewhere in the region of six billion rupees (155 million US dollars). In short an industrial house that has no special expertise in ecological matters is proposing a massive intervention in an area that is a designated World Heritage site and Biosphere Reserve.

The precise status of the project is not clear. For a while, to the dismay of environmentalists everywhere, it was thought that the West Bengal government had already given the project the go-ahead. But recent statements issuing from Writer’s Building suggest that the authorities are currently re-evaluating the Sahara Parivar’s proposal. This is a welcome development, not least because it provides an opportunity for a public discussion of the project and its merits.

To begin with, it is worth asking whether the project is feasible even on its own terms. What for example, are the chances of converting a stretch of the Sundarbans into an arena for water sports and a haven for beach lovers? This an area of mud flats and mangrove islands. There are no ‘pristine beaches’ and nor are there any coral gardens. The Ganges-Brahmaputra river system carries eight times as much silt as the Amazon and the waters of this region are thick with suspended particulate matter. This is not an environment that is appropriate for snorkeling or scuba diving. In the water visibility is so low that snorkelers and scuba divers would scarcely be able to see beyond their masks. What is more, these waters are populated by estuarine sharks and marine crocodiles. A substantial number of villagers and fishermen fall prey to these animals every year. Snorkelers and divers would face many dangers and in the event of fatalities the Sahara Parivar and the West Bengal Government would be liable to litigation.

Even swimming is extremely hazardous in the Sundarbans. The collision of river and sea in this region creates powerful currents, undertows and whirlpools. Drownings are commonplace and boats are often swamped by the swirling water.

Swimmers who accidentally ingest water would face another kind of hazard. Consider for example the experience of an American woman who visited the Sundarbans in the 1970s: she dipped her finger in a river and touched it briefly to her tongue, to test its salinity. Within a short while she developed crippling intestinal convulsions and had to be rushed to hospital. Bacteria and parasites are not least among the many life forms that flourish in the waters of the Sundarbans.

The location the Sahara Parivar has chosen for its project lies athwart the entrance to the Hooghly River, in the vicinity of Sagar Island. This spot has the advantage of commanding direct access to the Bay of Bengal while also being easily accessible from Kolkata. But when the weather is taken into account these apparent pluses are quickly revealed to be an uncompounded tally of minuses. A quick glance at a map is all it takes to see that the chosen location is directly exposed to the weather systems of the Bay of Bengal. What would happen if the complex were to find itself in the path of an incoming cyclone?

The Bay of Bengal is one of the most active cyclonic regions in the world: two of the most devastating hurricanes in human history have been visited upon the coast of Bengal, in 1737 and 1970. Each of these cyclones claimed over 300,000 lives, a toll higher than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The toll might have been higher still if not for the the Sundarbans. The mangrove forests have historically absorbed the first shock of incoming cyclones: they are the barrier that protect the hinterland. This is why the people who live in this region have generally been wary of creating settlements that abut directly on the sea.

That this region will be hit by another devastating storm is a near certainty, in this era of global warming. Much of the destruction caused by cyclones is the result of ‘storm surges’ – the massive tidal waves that precede an incoming storm. What would happen to Sahara’s ‘floating hotel’ with its restuarants, helipads, shopping arcades, meditation centres etc. if it were to be hit by a fifteen-metre tidal wave and 200 kmph winds? Suffice it to say that the damage would be enormous and many lives would be lost. And what of the casualties? There are no advanced medical facilities in the Sundarbans: where would survivors be treated? Tourists who are harmed or injured are almost certain to initiate litigation. Who will be liable for damages: the Sahara Parivar or the Government of India?

And what of the question of insurance, which appears to have been ignored by the Government and by the Sahara Parivar alike? The ‘floating hotel’ will need to be insured, like any seagoing vessel. Considering the pattern of cyclonic activity in the region no reputable firm is likely to provide insurance for this project. If they did the premiums alone would make the project unprofitable. If there is no insurance the government will be fully liable for all damages. If indeed there is a major catastrophe here, the entire tourism industry in India would suffer a crippling blow to its reputation. The risk simply is not worth it.

The Sahara Parivar claims that it will open ‘virgin’ areas to tourists. But the islands of the Sundarbans are not ‘virgin’ in any sense. The Indian part of the Sundarbans supports a population of close to four million people – equivalent to the entire population of New Zealand. The Sundarbans are an archipelago of islands, large and small. Many, if not most of the islands have been populated at some time or the other. In fact several islands were forcibly depopulated in order to make room for Project Tiger.

In 1979 the Left Front government evicted tens of thousands of refugee settlers, mainly Dalits, from the island of Morichjhapi. The cost in lives is still unaccounted, but it is likely that thousands were killed. The eviction was justified on ecological grounds: the authorities claimed that the island of Morichjhapi had to preserved as a forest reserve. It is scarcely conceivable that a government run by the same Left Front is now thinking of handing over a substantial part of the Sundarbans to an industrial house like the Sahara Parivar. It runs contrary to every tenet of the Front’s professed ideology.

The Sahara Parivar’s project would turn large stretches of this very forest, soaked in the blood of evicted refugees, into a playground for the affluent. Although forgotten elsewhere, in the Sundarbans the memory of Morichjhapi is still vividly alive: would it be surprising if the people there took this project to be an affront to their memories and a delibarate provocation? And if indeed there were to be protests and disturbances, how would the government ensure the safety of the tourist complex? Piracies and water-borne dacoities are daily occurrences in the Sundarbans. The government is powerless to prevent these crimes. To police the winding waterways of the Sundarbans is no easy matter and the police presence in the region is minimal anyway. How will the authorities provide security to tourists in a region where the machinery of state has not so much withered as never been properly implanted?

It is clear then that even within its own terms, this project is misconceived. Its chances of profitability are so slim as to suggest that some other intention lurks behind the stated motives for embarking on it. Certain other business houses are also said to be interested in expanding into the Sundarbans, and this may well have something to do with recent rumours concerning the possible discovery of oil in the region.

But what would happen if a large-scale tourist project were actually to take shape in the Sundarbans? What for example, would be the environmental impact?

It needs to be noted first that the Sahara Parivar’s project has not been subjected to a rigorous environmental impact appraisal. However, several independent groups have conducted preliminary studies and their conclusions suggest that the effects may be disastrous.

For instance, the floating hotel is sure to have an impact on the patterns of sedimentation in its vicinity. The consequences are impossible to predict. It is quite conceivable that the structures will have the effect of retarding the flow of silt out of the Hooghly into the Bay of Bengal. This in turn will lead to increased siltation upriver and it might even cause a blockage in the rivermouth.

The floating hotel and its satellite structures will also disgorge a large quantity of sewage and waste into the surrounding waters. This refuse will include grease, oil and detergents. The increased level of pollution is certain to have an impact on the crabs and fish that live in these waters. Very high levels of mercury have already been detected in the fish that is brought to Kolkata’s markets. A sharp increase in pollution could have a potentially devastating effect on the food supply of the entire region.

The polluting effects would not be restricted to sewage and waste: there would be light and noise pollution as well. The hotel’s lights would disorient certain species. Olive Ridley turtles, for instance, would not be able to find their way back to their nesting places.

The Sahara Project also envisages the deployment of a large number of speedboats and other high-powered watercraft, possibly even including jet skis. Fast moving craft such as these pose a great danger to marine mammals, particularly to such endangered species as the Irrawaddy Dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris). The high-pitched noise produced by speedboats disrupts their echo-location systems, often resulting in casualties. In January 2000 I myself came upon the carcass of an Irrawaddy Dolphin on the banks of the Matla river. A huge hole had been gouged out of its head, probably by a propellor. Increased traffic in these waters will result in many more such casualties.

Historically the waters of the Sundarbans were home to great numbers of whales and dolphins. British naturalists of the nineteenth century reported the area to be ‘teeming’ with marine mammals. Very few of these animals are to be seen in these waters today. Their fate is unknown because there has been no major census or survey. There is limited expertise in this field in India and the Sundarbans being a border region, foreign researchers have not been allowed to conduct surveys for reasons of security. For all we know the cetacean population of this region has already dwindled catastrophically. It would be nothing less than an outrage if an area that has been closed to zoologists should now be thrown open to tourist developers.

These are just a few of the possible ecological consequences of the project: there are sure to be many others.

Tourism is the world’s largest industry and it is already one of India’s most important revenue earners. Clearly every part of the country will have to reach an accomodation with this industry: it would be idle to pretend otherwise. There is no reason why tourists should be excluded from the Sundarbans, so long as their presence causes no harm to the ecology or to the people who live there. But if tourism is to develop here it should be on the model of other ecologically sensitive areas, such as the Galapagos islands, where the industry is held to very high standards. The Sundarabans deserve no less and it is the duty of the Government of India and the government of West Bengal to ensure that this unique ecosystem and its inhabitants, animal and human, receive their due.

The Sahara Parivar is not the first to conceive of a grandiose plan for this region. In the early nineteenth century the British dreamt of creating a port on the Matla river that would replace Kolkata and be a rival to Bombay and Singapore. In 1854 Henry Piddington, a pioneering British meteorologist, wrote an open letter to Lord Dalhousie, begging him to reconsider the project. In his letter Piddington warned that in the event of a cyclone (a word he had invented) the new port would probably be swept away. Lord Dalhousie, secure on his proconsular throne, paid no attention to this lonely voice: the port was built and took its name from Lord Canning. But Henry Piddington was soon vindicated: Port Canning was swamped by a storm in 1867. It was formally abandoned by the British five years later.

Over the last few months, due to the efforts of a small group of concerned people, many letters have been sent to the Chief Minister of West Bengal asking him to re-examine the Sahara Parivar’s Project. It falls to him now, as a democratically elected leader, to show better judgement than did his lordly predecessors in Writer’s Building.

An Interview With John Updike: In ‘Terrorist,’ a Cautious Novelist Takes On a New Fear

Photo: Robert Spencer for The New York Times

By CHARLES McGRATH, The New York Times, March 31, 2006

John Updike is wary of the Internet, concerned that a worm could migrate into his computer and chew up whatever he is working on. In a much-publicized speech recently at BookExpo America, the annual publishing convention, he also took a dim view of the notion of digitizing all books on an enormous online data bank.

For his new novel, “Terrorist,” however, he ventured onto the Web to research bomb detonators. He was fairly certain, he remarked recently during an interview in Boston, that the only detonator he could recall — the one that Gary Cooper plunges in “For Whom the Bell Tolls” — must be out of date, but he was also reassured to discover, as he put it, that “the Internet doesn’t like you to learn too much about explosives.”

While working on the book, Mr. Updike, now 74, white-haired, bushy-browed and senatorial-looking, also risked suspicion by lingering around the luggage-screening machines at La Guardia Airport, where he learned that the X-rays were not in black and white, as he had imagined, but rather in lurid colors: acid green and red.

And he hired a car and a driver to take him around some of the seedier neighborhoods in Paterson, N.J., and to show him some churches and storefronts that had been converted into mosques. “He did his best, but I think I puzzled him as a tour customer,” Mr. Updike said.

“Terrorist,” which comes out from Alfred A. Knopf next week, is set in Paterson — or, rather, in a slightly smaller, tidier version of the city, called New Prospect — and is about just what the title says. Its protagonist is an 18-year-old named Ahmad, the son of a hippie-ish American mother and an Egyptian exchange student, now absent, who embraces Islam and is eventually recruited to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel.

The new novel is Mr. Updike’s 22nd and in some ways a departure. It loosely follows the conventions of a thriller, for example, one of the few forms that Mr. Updike, a jack of nearly all literary trades, had not tried before. And yet as he spoke about “Terrorist” it became clear that the novel also knits together some themes and preoccupations that have been with him almost from the beginning: sex, death, religion, high school and even Paterson itself, which also figures prominently in his novel “In the Beauty of the Lilies” and which Mr. Updike said he sometimes imagines as another version of Reading, Pa., near his hometown, Shillington.

Mr. Updike, who confessed to a mild phobia about tunnels, said the image of an explosion was actually the inspiration for the book. “That picture was the beginning,” he added. “The fear of the tunnel being blown up with me in it — the weight of the water crashing in.”

Originally, though, he imagined the protagonist as a young Christian, an extension of the troubled teenage character in his early story “Pigeon Feathers,” who comes to feel betrayed by a clergyman. “I imagined a young seminarian who sees everyone around him as a devil trying to take away his faith,” he said. “The 21st century does look like that, I think, to a great many people in the Arab world.”

When Mr. Updike switched the protagonist’s religion to Islam, he explained, it was because he “thought he had something to say from the standpoint of a terrorist.”

He went on: “I think I felt I could understand the animosity and hatred which an Islamic believer would have for our system. Nobody’s trying to see it from that point of view. I guess I have stuck my neck out here in a number of ways, but that’s what writers are for, maybe.”

He laughed and added: “I sometimes think, ‘Why did I do this?’ I’m delving into what can be a very sore subject for some people. But when those shadows would cross my mind, I’d say, ‘They can’t ask for a more sympathetic and, in a way, more loving portrait of a terrorist.’ ”

Ahmad is lovable, or at least appealing; he’s in many ways the most moral and thoughtful character in the entire book, and he gains in vividness from being pictured in that familiar Updikean setting, the American high school.

“It might be that, having gone to high school and having a father who was a high school teacher, that I’m imbued with the ethos,” Mr. Updike said. “It occurred to me, though, that a real omission in terms of plausibility is that I don’t do enough with cellphones. My school isn’t really electrified.”

When he was in high school, Mr. Updike added, his own head was “in The New Yorker instead of the Koran,” and so while working on “Terrorist” he again picked up that religious text, a book he first read when learning how to impersonate Colonel Ellelloû, the narrator of Mr. Updike’s 1978 novel, “The Coup.”

“A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner,” he said. “Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. There’s a lot of hellfire — descriptions of making unbelievers drink molten metal occur more than once. It’s not a fuzzy, lovable book, although in the very next verse there can be something quite generous.”

“Terrorist” even includes some Koran passages in Arabic transliteration; Shady Nasser, a graduate student, helped Mr. Updike on those sections. “My conscience was pricked by the notion that I was putting into the book something that I can’t pronounce,” he said, but he added: “Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. My feeling was, ‘This is God’s language, and the fact that you don’t understand it means you don’t know enough about God.’ ”

For all its theological concerns, “Terrorist” is also an authentic Updike novel, and, thankfully, includes some sheet-rumpled, love-flushed sex scenes between Ahmad’s mother, Teresa, and Jack Levy, a guidance counselor at the high school.

“I was happy — because there was so much shaky ground in the writing of this novel — when Jack began to hit on Terry Mulloy,” Mr. Updike said. “I felt I was in a scene I could handle. That little romance was very real — to me, at least. I liked those two because they’re normal, godless, cynical but amiable modern people.”

While waiting for “Terrorist” to come out, Mr. Updike has been working on one of his omnibus volumes. As for what will come after that, he said he was not sure.

“All my life there has been one more thing I think I can do — but only one,” he said. “I feel I’m very near the bottom of my barrel at every moment of my career — not like Dostoevsky, who had a notebook full of ideas when he died. I try to see the next book in my mind, and I see a slightly plump book with a lot of people in it, like ‘Gosford Park.’ But it’s not a murder mystery because I’m not clever enough to write one of those.”

In praise of the novel: Carlos Fuentes on Cervantes, Kafka, and the saving grace of literature.

Sign and Sight, September 13, 2005

This speech by novelist Carlos Fuentes* was delivered in English on the opening of the Fifth International Literature Festival Berlin, on September 6, 2005.

Not long ago, the Norwegian Academy addressed one hundred writers from all over the world with a single question: Name the novel that you consider the best ever written.

Of the one hundred consulted, fifty answered: “Don Quixote de la Mancha” by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Quite a landslide, considering the runners up: Dostoevsky, Faulkner and Garcia Marquez, in that order. The results of this consultation pose the interesting question of the long-seller versus the best-seller. There is, of course, no answer that fits all cases: Why does a bestseller sell, why does a long-seller last?

Don Quixote was a big bestseller when it first appeared in 1605, and has continued to sell ever since, whereas William Faulkner was definitively a bad seller if you compare the meager sales of “Absalom, Absalom” (1936) to those of the really big-seller of the year, Hervey Allen’s “Anthoy Adverse”, a Napoleonic saga of love, war and trade.

Which means that here is no actual thermometer in these matters, even if time will not only tell: Time will sell. One might think that Cervantes was in tune with his times whereas Stendhal consciously wrote for “the happy few” and sold poorly in his own life, was given the reward of Balzac’s praise before he died and only came into his own thanks to the efforts of the critic Henri Martineau in the 20th Century.

Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a somber graveyard of dead books. Yet permanence is not a wilful proposition. No one can write a book aspiring to immortality, for it would then court both ridicule and certain mortality. Plato puts immortality in perspective when he states that eternity, when it moves, becomes time, eternity being a kind of frozen time. And William Blake certainly brings things down to earth: Eternity is in love with the works of time.

The works of time. We could take each one of the writers I have quoted so far and undertake a fruitful excursion into their relationship with the times they lived. Fascinating as this can and should be, I wonder how much it tells us about the books that they wrote, the imagination that moved them to write, their use of language, their critical approach to the art of literature, their awareness of belonging to the larger tradition that Milan Kundera invokes in his recent book “The Curtain”: the fact that a novelist belongs, more than to his country or even to his native tongue, to a tradition in which Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne and Diderot are a part of the same family and that family, as desired by Goethe, lives in the house of world literature, the Weltliteratur which each writer, Goethe suggests, fosters independently of national literatures that – he goes on – “have ceased to represent anything of importance”.

If this be true, then all great works of literature contain both the tradition they spring from and add to and the new creation that depends as much on preceding tradition as tradition, if it is to remain in good health, depends upon the new creations that nourish it. Since this is the year of the fourth centennial of Don Quixote and since I consider Cervantes’ book to be the founding cornerstone of the novel as it has evolved since the 17th Century, permit me to root in it the vocabulary I have been employing.

Cervantes belongs to a tradition he cannot speak of. This is the tradition of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the guiding light of the early Spanish Renaissance in the court of the young Charles V, a candle soon extinguished by the cold dogmatic winds of the Counter Reformation. After the Council of Trent, Erasmus and his works are banned by the Inquisition, his legacy a secret.

Cervantes was steeped in this forbidden philosophy. Erasmus searched for reconciliation between Faith and Reason, refusing not only the dogmas of Faith, but the dogmas of Reason as well. Thus, Cervantes, who was a disciple of the Spanish Erasmists, had to disguise his intellectual allegiance. The “Praise of Folly” is the praise of Don Quixote as he wanders through an Erasmian universe in which all truths are suspect, everything is bathed in incertitude and the modern novel thus acquires its birth-right.

Since Cervantes cannot admit the liberating influence of Erasmian thought, he goes Erasmus one better: the wisdom of Rotterdam becomes the folly of La Mancha and the marriage of “la sagesse” and “l’incertitude” brings forth the novel as we understand it. A privileged space, indeed, of incertitude.

An uncertain place: a forgotten village in an insolated province of Spain. An un-namable place: “En un lugar de la Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme”. An uncertain author: Who wrote this book? Cervantes? De Saavedra? Cide Hamete Benengeli? An anonymous Moorish scribe? The masked funambulist Ginés de Pasamonte disguised as the puppeteer Master Pedro? The lack of author barely disguises the refusal of authority. Uncertain names: Don Quixote is really an impoverished hidalgo named Alonso Quijano – or is it Quijada? – or perhaps, Quezada? Or is it the other way around: Is the impoverished squire truly the brave knight errant, a Cid brought low, a diminished Cortez?

So, what’s in a name? The onomastic instability of the novel Don Quixote undermines all certainty of a linear reading. Dulcinea is Aldonza, damsels in distress become queens and princesses, broken down nags are deemed heroic steeds, illiterate squires become governors. Don Quixote’s imaginary foes have extravagant names – for example, the giant Pentapolpin of the Rolled up Sleeve – so his real foes must also have them: the Bachelor Sanson Carrasco has to be named the Knight of the Mirrors in order to enter Quixote’s onomastic universe. And Quixote himself, the battle name of the country Quijada… or Quijano… or Quesada… enters in full batllegear this nominative carnival, becoming the Knight of the Sad Countenance or the Knight of the Lions, or Quijotiz, when in a pastoral mode, or the ridiculous Don Azote, that is, Mister Whip, in the wayside inn or, in the Duke’s palace, the mocked don Jigote, Mr. Hamburger.

Places, names, authorship, all is uncertain in Don Quixote. And uncertainty is compounded by the great democratic revolution wrought by Cervantes and which is the creation of the novel as a common place, lieu commun, lugar común, that is, the meeting place of the city, the central plaza, the polyforum, the public square where everyone has a right to be heard but no one has the right to exclusive speech.

This guiding principle of novelistic creation is turned by Cervantes into what Claudio Guillen calls a dialogue of genres. They all meet in the open space of Don Quixote. Here the picaresque – Sancho Panza – shakes hands with the epic – Don Quixote. Lazarillo de Tormes is introduced to Amadis of Gaul. Here the linearity of narration is broken down, encircled, put on fast forward or in reverse by the tale-within-the-tale interrupted by the pastoral interlude and then by the novel of courtly love and the strands of Moorish and Byzantine tales woven into the tapestry of a novel that, finally, proposes itself as both the identity and the difference of its verbal universe.

Before Cervantes, narrative could exhaust itself in a single reading of the past: the epic, or of the present: the picaresque. Cervantes blends past and future, turning the novel into a critical process that, first, proposes that we read a book about a man who reads books and then becomes a book about a man who knows that he is being read. When Don Quixote enters the printing shop in Barcelona and discovers that what is being printed is his own book, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha, we are suddenly plunged into a truly new world of readers, of readings available to all and not only to a small circle of power, religious, political or social.

By multiplying both authorship and readership, the novel, from the times of Cervantes to our own, became a democratic vehicle, a space of choice, of alternate interpretations of the self, of the world, and of the relationship between myself and others, between you and me, between we and they.

Religion is dogmatic. Politics is ideological. Reason must be logical. But literature has the privilege of being equivocal. The quality of doubt in a novel is perhaps a manner of telling us that since authorship (and thus authority) are uncertain and susceptible of many explanations, so it goes with the world itself.

Reality is not fixed, it is mutable. We can only approach reality if we do not pretend to define it once and for all. The partial verities proposed by a novel are a bulwark against dogmatic impositions. Considered politically feeble and unimportant, why are writers then persecuted by totalitarian regimes as if they really mattered? This contradiction reveals the deeper nature of the political in literature. The reference is to the polis, the city, the evolving but constant community of citizens, not to the autoritas, the passing powers, essentially temporary but pridefully believing themselves eternal.

Kafka’s fictions describe a power that makes its own fiction powerful. Power is a representation that, like the authorities in “The Castle”, gain its strength from the imagination of those outside the castle. When that imagination ceases to confer power upon power, the Emperor appears naked and the impotent writer who points this out is banned to exile, the concentration camp or the bonfire, while the Emperor’s tailors stitch on his new clothes.

So, if there can be political power in writing, it is exceptional. Under so-called “normal” circumstances, the writer has scarce if any political importance. He or she can, of course, become politically relevant as citizens. Yet he or she possess the ultimate political importance of offering the city, however quietly, however postponed, however indirectly, the two indispensable values that unite the personal and the collective:

Fiction then, from Rabelais and Cervantes to Grass and Goytisolo and Gordimer, is another way of questioning truth as we strive for it through the paradox of a lie. That lie can be called the imagination. It can also be seen as a parallel reality. It can be observed as a critical mirror of what passes for the truth in the world of convention. It certainly sets up a second universe of being, where Don Quixote and Heathclif and Emma Bovary have a reality greater, though no less important, than the host of hastily met and then forgotten citizens we deal with. Indeed, Don Quixote or Emma Bovary bring into light, give weight and presence to the virtues and vices –to the fugitive personalities– of our daily acquaintance.

Perhaps, what Ahab and Pedro Paramo and Effie Briest possess is, also, the living memory of the great, glorious and mortal subjectivities of the men and women that we forget, that our fathers knew and our grand parents foresaw. In Don Quixote, Dostoevsky wrote, truth is saved by a lie. With Cervantes, the novel establishes its birthright as a lie that is the foundation of truth. For through the medium of fiction, the novelist puts reason to the proof. Fiction invents what the world lacks, what the world has forgotten, what it hopes to attain and perhaps can never reach. Fiction is thus a way of appropriating the world, giving the world the color, the taste, the sense, the dreams, the vigils, the perseverance and even the lazy repose that, to go on being, it claims.

Enter your own self and discover the world, the novelist tells us. But also, go out into the world and discover yourself. In the dark hours preceding World War II, Thomas Mann crossed the Atlantic with Don Quixote as his surest lifeline to a Europe in the throes of death. And even before, under the clouds of the First World War, Franz Kafka had discovered that Don Quixote was a magnificent invention of Sancho Panza, who thus became a man free to follow the adventures of the knight errant, without hurting anybody. And finally, in his “Pierre Menard Author of Don Quixote”, Jorge Luis Borges tells us that it suffices to re-write Cervantes’ novel, word by word, but in a different time and with a different intention, in order to recreate it.

Cervantes lived his age: the decadent Spain of the last Hapsburgs, Philip III and the devaluation of money, the fall of the economy due to the successive expulsion of the industrious Jewish and Arab populations, the compulsion to disguise Hebrew or Moorish origins leading to a society of brittle masks, the lack of efficient administrators for a far-flung empire, the flight of the gold and silver of the Indies to the mercantile powerhouses of Northern Europe. A Spain of urchins and beggars, hollow gestures, cruel aristocrats, ruined roads, shabby inns and broken-down gentlemen who, in another, more vigorous age, might have conquered Mexico and sailed the Caribbean and brought the first universities and the first printing presses to the New World: the fabulous energy of Spain in the invention of America.

Cervantes and the other great writers of Spain’s Golden Age truly demonstrate that literature can give the society what history has drained from the society. “Where are the birds of yesteryear?” sighs Don Quixote as he lays dying. They are dead and stuffed, which is why Don Quixote has to give his novel the renewed flight of the eagle, the wing-span of the albatross. As Cervantes responded to the degraded society of his time with the triumph of the critical imagination, we too, face a degraded society and must reflect upon it as it seeps into our lifes, surrounds us and, even, casts us upon the perennial situation of responding to the passage of history with the passion of literature.

We are aware of the danger of postponing the human agendas as the 21st Century begins. Military spending exceeds by far investment in health, education and development. The urgent demands of women, the aged, the young are left to chance. The offenses against nature multiply. In Heaven, wrote Borges, to conserve and to create are synonymous verbs. On Earth, they have become enemies. The root causes of terror are left unattended. Terror cannot be the answer to terror, but rather better intelligence, democratic governance and socio-economic development, while strengthening cultural identity, in nations long subject to authoritarian and colonial rule.

International values won with critical perseverance and sacrifice – human rights, diplomacy, multilateralism, primacy of the law – are assailed by the blind haste of unilateralism, preventive war and the blind pride that “precedes destruction” (Proverbs, 16: 18). Sometimes our answer to these realities is passive beatitude. There are those who believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds because they have been told that the indispensable is impossible. But on the other hand, we are assailed by the agitated though passive fear of latent Apocalypse when, as Goethe put it, “God ceases to love his creatures and must destroy it all and begin all over again”.

Space has capitulated. Thanks to the image, we can be everywhere instantly. But time has pulverized, breaking down into images that are in danger of refusing us both the imagination of the past and the memory of the future. We can become the slaves of hypnotic images that we have not chosen. We can become cheerful robots amusing ourselves to death. I believe that these are realities that should move us to affirm that language is the foundation of culture, the door of experience, the roof of the imagination, the basement of memory, the bedchamber of love and, above all, the window open to the air of doubt, uncertainty and questioning.

I find, in all great novels, a human project, call it passion, love, liberty, justice, inviting us to actualize it to make it real, even if we know that it is doomed to fail. Quixote knows he fails, as do Pere Goriot and Anna Karenina and Prince Myshkin. But only through the consciousness, implicit or explicit, of such failure, do they save, and help us save, the nature of life itself, human existence and its values as lived and proposed and remembered by all the ages, all the races, all the families of humankind, without alienating themselves to an illusion of unending, certified progress and felicity.

After the experiences of the past century, we can not ignore the tragic exceptions to happiness and progress that humankind constantly encounters. In “Light in August”, William Faulkner opposes and embraces two dissimilar characters, the mature nymphomaniac Joanna Burden and her young Black lover, Joe Christmas. Christmas is an agent of freedom. But he knows that his liberty is limited, even prometehical. He feels like an eagle, hard, powerful, remorseless, sufficient. But that sensation passes and then he realizes that his skin is his prison. Joanna Burden wishes, in possession of Joe’s body, to condemn herself, not forever but just a bit more: “Don’t make me pray, God”, she pleads. “Let me condemn myself just a bit longer”.

These are but two of the Faulknerian cast that discover in love the tragic nature of both freedom and destiny. In Faulkner, knowing that we are capable of resisting means that we are also capable, in certain moments, of victory. I highlight this tragic and time-resisting truth in Faulkner because I find it essential to the very heart-beat of the novel: Freedom is tragic because it is conscious both of its necessity and of its boundaries.

“I do not hope for victory”, writes Kafka. “Struggle in itself is not blissful, except in the measure that it is the only thing that I can do … Perhaps I will finally surrender, not to the struggle, but to the joy of the struggle”.

“Between pain and nothing, I choose pain”, Faulkner famously said, adding: “Man will prevail”. And is this not, perhaps, the truth of the novel? Humankind will prevail and it will prevail because, in spite of the accidents of history, the novel tells us that art restores the life in us that was disregarded by the haste of history. Literature makes real what history forgot. And because history is what has been, literature will offer what history has not always been. That is why we will never witness –bar universal catastrophe– the end of history.

Compare then the words of Franz Kafka and William Faulkner to the half-baked notions of the end of history and the clash of civilizations. I speak as a writer in the Spanish language from a continent that is Iberian, Indian and Mestizo, Black and Mulatto, Atlantic and Pacific, Mediterranean and Caribbean, Christian, Arab and Jewish, Greek and Latin.

If I am faithful to the accomplishments but above all to the purposes, to the attainments as well as to the possibilities of my own culture, I can not accept that we live in a clash of civilizations because all those that I have evoked are mine, not clashing, but talking, speaking to one another, disputing in order to understand, communicating in my very soul the relativity of both triumphalism and dejection, the need to venture what will never perish even if it has fallen back – my ancient Indian and Islamic cultures – and to earn what thinks of itself as permanent – the Western, Christian strains of my being beyond their present sufficiency – and to celebrate the meeting place of all of them, the place of speech and thought and memory and imagination that each one of us carries with him and her, asking us to participate in a dialogue of civilizations and to deny the end of history.

For how can history end as long as we have not said our last word?

*Carlos Fuentes is one of Latin America’s most prominent men of letters. Born in 1928 in Panama City, the son of a Mexican diplomat, Fuentes was raised in Washington, D.C., Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Santiago, Chile. His major works include: Where the Air is Clearer (1958); The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962); A Change of Skin (1967); Terra Nostra (1975); The Hydra Head (1978); The Old Gringo (1985); and The Campaign (1990).