Resumo de The Black Book

Read this abstract; the chances are you won't Read the book.Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. Reprints of his books are hot off the press. A new translator is now engaged. My copy, however, was published in 1996 and translated by Guneli Gun. It is a competent translation, but sometimes I was forced to grimace.The Black Book is a search for one's identity: how to discover it, accept it, maintain it. It can be read at the individual level, the national level or the universal level. It is not an easy book to read. Pamuk's prose overflows with vibrancy: the sights, sounds, smells of Istanbul today. Anyone who wandered about this fascinating city, even for a few days, will find himself immediately in the Black Book.Galip, a young lawyer, comes home from work to find a 19 word message from his wife (and first cousin) saying that she has left him. He searches the apartment briefly and notes that she took very little with him. He proceeds to lie to the extended family, saying that she is sick, in bed. It is winter, after all. He then begins to look for her throughout the city. But he does not tell anybody that he is looking for her. After a few days of dead ends, he realizes that his wife's much older half brother stopped writing new columns in the daily newspaper on the same day that his wife disappeared. He suspects that they are holed up together somewhere and focuses his search on the newspaper columnist. He looks for hints in the column, in the advertising on plastic bags, on people's faces. Islamic mystics believe that letters of the alphabet are incorporated into our faces and thus Galip makes a breakthrough: he learns to read his own face. At this point he is living in his cousin's apartment (one of them) where old columns are archived. He reads for days, still looking for clues as to his wife's whereabouts with the cousin. He is aware that many people are looking for his cousin and begins to impersonate him on the phone. He sends in a column, saying he received it from his cousin. He has a long phone conversation, as his cousin, with an admirer who knows all his columns by heart. The next day the same admirer's wife calls him and says that they were once lovers and a recently published column was meant for her. The husband then takes the phone and threatens to kill the columnist, not for sleeping with his wife, but for insincerity in his writing. Eventually he calms down and Galip agrees to meet him and his wife later that evening. Galip knows that he will be able to identify the couple from a distance, but will not be mistaken for his missing cousin. Galip waits 20 minutes at the rendezvous, but leaves none the wiser. He goes off to impersonate his cousin in a BBC interview. On his way home from the interview he discovers what happened to his cousin and wife.In order to make sense of this marvelous journey, I think of a plastic squeeze bottle we used for ketchup when I was a boy. It was decorated with a picture of a waitress carrying a tray with a similar bottle of ketchup on it. The pictured bottle also showed a waitress carrying a tray with a bottle of ketchup on it and one would imagine that the smaller pictured bottle of ketchup was also adorned by a picture of a waitress carrying a tray with a similar bottle of ketchup on it. Now imagine that those waitresses were conscious, not only of themselves, but of their place in the overall scheme. Welcome to the Black Book.Note: I am a translator. While reading this book I received a text for translation. It was a lawsuit by a husband whose wife had abducted their daughter to Istanbul and then disappeared as more and more courts ordered her to return the minor to her home.I too had begun looking for hints in everything that happened.

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