Knopf
Review by David Starkey
Writing in the New York Times, Dwight Garner dismissed Orhan Pamuk’s Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022 as “breezy and frictionless,” “a book of paintbox colors and pastel moods. It’s a kiddie pool when one is hoping to body surf.” In short, he wonders if this is “the most embarrassing book published in modern times by a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature?”
Harsh, Dwight. Very harsh.
Granted, a few of Garner’s criticisms ring true. Pamuk, who in his many novels has written with great sensitivity about suffering and pain and loss, seems rather tone deaf as he jets from a writers’ conference to a film festival to a gallery opening, living the good life in Goa and Berlin, Paris and New York, usually on other people’s dimes. As he listens to Mozart on the train to Lyon or runs through the rain in Harvard Square to an event for Nobel Laureates, he can seem rather full of himself.
And yet I was captivated by Memories of Distant Mountains, in part because it seems so uninhibited and unfettered by traditional ways of telling stories. The book begins without any introduction. On the first page, a full-color facsimile from Pamuk’s notebook, centered inside a thick margin of white space, shows a coastline glimpsed from the sea in a rainstorm. Above the drawing, which appears to have been largely created with colored markers, Turkish words are scattered across the sky. The English translation above tells us the meaning of some of the words: “drip,” “drop,” “words,” “it’s raining,” “on the ocean.” In the upper left corner, in a small vertical font, we are told that this scene is from “2013A,” presumably notebook A written in 2013.
The very next two-page spread takes us to 2016B. In this entry, Pamuk has drawn a scene of “distant mountains” from a recurrent dream. The text tells us what we are seeing: “Steep mountains, a slope, the nest of a giant bird, a longing for a glimpse of MEANING as it soars toward the heavens, and my own grave, the earth still warm!” He tells us that a woman named Ash listened sympathetically as he recounted his dream, and at the bottom of the page we are told that “WHAT WE MUST DO NOW IS READ and SEE THE LANDSCAPE AS IF IT WERE A DREAM.” It’s a rather gnomic instruction. Isn’t the landscape already from a dream?
Two images in, and one might already be tempted to give up, and that’s before turning to pages six and seven, where we return to notebook 2013A and find a village street disappearing into the vanishing point. On either side of the road are stone fences, telephone poles and lush vegetation. A couple of red-roofed houses appear on the left side, and a rather glorious sunset is shaping up on the right. The street itself is full of words. Yet it’s unclear if the words on the verso page—“the place / we return / far away / words” are meant to match up with the words on the recto: “where I first saw the ant / go along this way / for once…finally / THEN AT NIGHT I’M COLD.”
At this point, a reader expecting continuity and logic may be tempted to throw their hands in the air and give up. However, if we approach Distant Mountains on its own terms, one in which free association and intuition are the creative engines, then suddenly we’re in for a rather pleasant experience. For me, it became one big illustrated poem.
Although Pamuk began his artistic life as a painter, his drawings have a childlike quality, especially when he adds watercolors to the mix. Quickly rendered landscapes are his specialty, with an abundance of trees and bodies of water, along with the occasional recognizable structure like the Lincoln Memorial or the Taj Mahal. There’s a hint of Matisse in Pamuk’s use of color, but what Memories of Distant Mountains reminds me of most is Jung’s illustrated Red Book, with its sincere, if somewhat amateurish, renderings of images that made an impact on the artist/writer’s thinking. Like Jung, who tried “deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking state,” Pamuk’s notebooks straddle the line between reflection and pure imagination.
And while Pamuk may not offer an extended treaty on novel writing, that makes sense. These are diaries, after all. What we do get is a granular account of the writing life. He often records where he was when a certain scene in a novel he was working on occurred—a boon, no doubt, for future biographers. And we’re also shown the less glamorous side of a working writer’s life. We get the quotidian: “In the afternoons, I go to the Avery Library to write my novel. I sit at more or less the same desk every day.” And the mundane: “I finally finished the text for the Everyman edition of Snow.”
I’ll admit that, as some point in my reading, when I stumbled on the chronology at the back, everything suddenly made more sense. What happened to that girlfriend he was so crazy about in one entry? Ah, she was replaced by the woman who later became his wife. What was he doing in Russia again? Getting an honorary degree from the University of St. Petersburg. It all fits together, but one can see how a strictly chronological ordering of all Pamuk’s high-brow activities might have seemed a bit boring. Instead, Memories of Distant Mountains offers us a chance to enter the whirlwind of the writer’s life and mind. It’s a good place to be—a bit snobby at times, but charming and colorful overall, and—why not say it?—quite a bit of fun.
