Orhan Pamuk

È stato insignito del Premio Nobel per la Letteratura con la seguente motivazione: "nel ricercare l'anima malinconica della sua città natale, ha scoperto nuovi simboli per rappresentare scontri e legami fra diverse culture".
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« Ho trascorso la mia vita ad Istanbul, sulla riva europea, nelle case che si affacciavano sull'altra riva, l'Asia. Stare vicino all'acqua, guardando la riva di fronte, l'altro continente, mi ricordava sempre il mio posto nel mondo, ed era un bene. E poi, un giorno, è stato costruito un ponte che collegava le due rive del Bosforo. Quando sono salito sul ponte e ho guardato il panorama, ho capito che era ancora meglio, ancora più bello di vedere le due rive assieme. Ho capito che il meglio era essere un ponte fra due rive. Rivolgersi alle due rive senza appartenere »
(O.Pamuk, Istanbul, 2003)
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Il signor Cevdet e i suoi figli
Roccalba, (Il castello bianco)
La casa del silenzio
Il libro nero
La nuova vita
Gli altri colori
Il mio nome è rosso
Neve
Istanbul
Il castello bianco
Le voci di Istanbul
Istanbul. Le memorie e la città
La valigia di mio padre
Sceneggiatura per il film Gizli Yuz (Il volto segreto), basato su Kara Kitap e diretto dal regista turco Ömer Kavur
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-Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul, 7 giugno 1952) Nel 1982 sposa Aylin Turegen. La coppia divorzierà nel 2001 dopo aver dato alla luce una figlia di nome Rüya, born in 1991, whose name means "dream" in Turkish.
-And though he has lived alone since his marriage to the historian Aylin Turegen ended in 2001, he says his ex-wife and teenage daughter Ruya "remain my best friends".
- I thought I would write Memories and the City in six months, but it took me one year to complete. And I was working twelve hours a day, just reading and working. My life, because of so many things, was in a crisis; I don’t want to go into those details: divorce, father dying, professional problems, problems with this, problems with that, everything was bad. I thought if I were to be weak I would have a depression. But every day I would wake up and have a cold shower and sit down and remember and write, always paying attention to the beauty of the book. Honestly, I may have hurt my mother, my family. My father was dead, but my mother is still alive. But I can’t care about that; I must care about the beauty of the book
- What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin ... Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations outside the Western world–and I can identify with them easily–succumbing to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West–a world with which I can identify with the same ease–nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.


(PS. c'e' un gatto bianco nella foto !)