The new life (novel)

The new life ( Turkish original title: Yeni Hayat ) is a novel published in 1994 by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk . Its title alludes to Dante 's work of the same name ( Italian Vita Nova ). 22-year-old Osman, a civil engineering student from Istanbul , feels the life-changing power of a mysterious book and at the same time falls in love with the beautiful Canan. In search of his missing lover and a new life, he embarks on an adventurous journey to eastern Turkey. The new life is considered Pamuk's literary most important novel.

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul

Course of action

Osman tells his story in 17 chapters essentially chronologically with many reviews integrated into conversations. This complements the relationships as well as the motives and developments of the people and completes the overall picture.

The starting point of the various journeys of the protagonists is Istanbul. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator lives with his mother in Erenköy, a district of the Kadıköy district on the Bosporus coast on the Asian side, and studies at the Faculty of Civil Engineering. His father, who worked for the state railroad, died a year earlier.

motto

"... the others have heard the same
thing , and nobody has come across anything like it."
Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen

The Book The New Life (Chapters 1-3)

Osman meets Canan and her friend Mehmet at the Taşkışla Technical University in Istanbul. Here he sees the book for the first time and begins his search for the meaning of life, the central theme of Pamuk's novel.

Osman first saw the book in the hand of the architecture student Canan in the college cafeteria and then bought a copy at a street stall. After reading it over and over again at home at night and even copying it out (Chapter 1), his whole life is increasingly changing.

The next day (chapter 2) the narrator looks for his fellow student, falls in love with her and tells her about the effect the reading has on him. He is convinced that the book contains its own story, that the world it reveals really exists and that Canan came from there. He would do anything, including risking his life, to get into this realm. The girl kisses him as praise for his courage and asks him to convince her friend Mehmet of his faith. However, he did not succeed in doing this, as his search for the new country was unsuccessful on his many bus trips. History, he replies, is just literary fiction. He warns him that readers are in danger of being killed. And indeed, a few hours later, Osman observed a man shooting at Mehmet and injuring him. He followed the perpetrator through a park, but lost his trail. When he returned to the scene of the crime, the injured man and one of his companions, his girlfriend, had already driven away in a taxi. He researched Mehmet's whereabouts in various clinics without success. Canan also disappeared from that day on. The narrator learns from her parents that she is traveling (Chapter 3).

He no longer listens to his lectures, wanders through the city and hopes for the student's return. After all, he drives busses, which he randomly changes at the train stations, across wintry Anatolia in search of them.

Osman's Journey with Canan (Chapters 4-7)

This section of the novel tells the one-sided love affair between Osman and Canan. During the journeys, the protagonist experiences the border area between life and death several times in rear-end collisions with many dead and injured, which he interprets as the gateway to a new life. That's why he goes to such bus accident sites and meets the injured Canan at the salt lake near Konya (Chapter 4). After their foreheads have been sewn in the hospital, they travel together, changing buses at random, looking through the window panes day and night at the passing landscapes and cityscapes and watching American and Turkish films on television. Canan tells of Mehmet (chap. 5), who fled his former life in a large country house and drove through Turkey in search of the land of his dreams. After a bus accident he had assumed the identity of a killed boy of the same age from Kayseri to go into hiding. After she got to know her boyfriend in Istanbul and read the book with him, she tried to get him on a journey into a new life together. However, he replied that in the land of the book “Death, love and horror in the disguise of desperate men with weapons in their belts, frozen expressions and broken hearts wander hopelessly like ghosts and it was wrong for a girl like Canan to even dream to imagine such a land of love sorrows, hopelessness and murderers ”. The author of the book was also murdered. Mehmet left Istanbul after the assassination attempt and is now looking for him and the new world: “Love [...] gives people a goal, brings the things of life out of them and finally leads them [...] to the secret of the world."

When the third month of the journey comes to an end (chap. 6), Osman hopes to win Canan's love through the shared experiences, but she fends off his tenderness and makes him aware of her bond with Mehmet: "You are not him." A collision with another bus tells them the story of the seriously injured Efsun Kara. She and her husband Ali, who was killed in the accident, were inspired by the book to embark on a search and then, disaffected, joined the Dr. Narins, who sees the seduction of young people by the idea of ​​a new life as a great danger for the traditional values ​​of Turkey. He has set himself the goal of tracking down, monitoring and shooting readers with the help of a network of agents. Osman and Canan now play the roles of the couple and travel to Güdül for a broken-hearted meeting of representatives . There (Chapter 7) they take part in the opening of the event in the Kenan Evren High School, where students present new Turkish inventions. Afterwards, the representatives tell their experiences in a local bar and exchange their opinions about Narin. Osman is interested in these disappointed people because he is skeptical whether he will ever achieve his goal of starting a new life with Canan's love. When he goes out again at night, the “conspirators of the night” lead him to a bar where he has surreal conversations between dream and reality. The next morning a '61 Chevrolet takes them to Narin's property.

Visiting Dr. Narin (Chapters 8-11)

During the protagonists' stay on land, the background of the Nahit Mehmet story and the connection with the father's terrorist network are explained.

Narin first worked as a lawyer and, after inheriting his father's land, opened a shop for Turkish goods in the small town. Together with his wife and three daughters, the rose maids Gülizar, Gülendam, Gülcihan, he lives in a large country house (Chapter 8). Canan identifies his son Nahit as Mehmet in a photograph. On a walk with Osman across the fields (Chapter 9), Dr. Narin of his gifted boy, who suddenly turned away from him after reading a book, lost the traditional orientation based on the Koran, left his home and died in a traffic accident. The father sees a "great conspiracy [from the West] against himself, his way of thinking, [...] against everything that is vital for this country." That is why he had Nahit and other like-minded people monitored. He gives the reports of the agents to Osman, to whom he would like to entrust the position of his son and successor to read (chap. 10). So he learns about the activities of the medical student in Istanbul, u. a. his meeting with the author of the book, Osman's uncle Rıfkı, who was soon murdered. After that, Nahit began his omnibus tour through Turkey. Various agents followed him, but lost his trail. In a bus accident, his ID was discovered on a charred corpse that Dr. Had Narin buried. This now intensified its fight against the Great Conspiracy with the help of representatives with broken hearts who feel like victims of international competition, expanded the agent network to kill the readers of dangerous books.

In a further conversation (chapter 10) the host introduces his watch philosophy : The watch does not indicate time intervals in the western world, but as an instrument of prayer it shows the way to Allah's kingdom. After the supposed death of his son, Narin therefore appointed new watch agents to monitor all book lovers.

Osman learns from the documents also Mehmet and Canan's love affair (chapter 10) up to the shots of the agent Seiko and their lure game with him: The two put the narrator on the book. Osman now admits “that [he] had bought and read the book as an aid in order to be able to approach the beautiful girl.” And that “[he] was chance for life himself held, to whom [he] was happy and met with love, [...] so all alone was the staging of someone else ”He feels like“ the deceived hero ”who has recognized that“ the light of the book that the Inspires people, […] their eyes fatally [blinds], ”as he explains to Canan before he leaves. He compiles a Mehmet list from the agent's reports, has a “Walther […] with two full magazines” given to him from the host's collection of weapons, in order to wipe out “[the] ghost of a third party” in the life of the beloved and her for himself to have alone. Since Canan has a bad flu and is supposed to recover for a week, Osman wants to use this time to search for and kill his rival.

The Murder of Canan's Loved One (Chapters 12-13)

On his journey the protagonist meets many Mehmets. Two of them have found different solutions to connect the fantasy world with their everyday life:

In Samsun (chap. 12) a young doctor with whom Canan is going to Germany wrote the book “in contrast to people like me [Osman], whose life had slipped off the beaten track as a result, on a different, healthy and meaningful one Wise incorporated into his digestive system [...] and [could] live with it in peace and passions. " In a synthesis, this Mehmet grasps, as if following a “recipe for happiness”, the existence of the angel “intellectually” and believes “from the heart” that one day he would “ascend with him to heaven of new life and that it will be for for example, he might be able to find a job in Germany. " Osman, however, says goodbye to him as the "terminally ill []".

In Viranbağ he discovers Canan's lovers among the circus audience. During the three-day stay in the city (Chapter 13) they hold various conversations. Nahir-Mehmet now calls himself Osman and has organized his new life in a disciplined way: In contrast to the doctor's synthesis, the focus is on the fantasy world, because he writes the book in the mornings and afternoons time and again “feeling and understanding” and lives off the sale of copies. In the evening he goes out and seeks company. So "[t] the peaceful equilibrium he achieved [...] gave him an infinite, an everlasting period of time." He tells the narrator that after his first trip, in contrast to Canan, he himself no longer believed in finding “the land beyond words outside of what is written” and therefore left his girlfriend. In his opinion it is pointless to want to “get to the origin of all things, to the first cause, to the root”. "A good book [be] a document that describes non-existent things, a kind of absence, a kind of death." His confession sounds like a preview of the end of Osman's life: he himself “never met the angel mentioned in the book. […] Perhaps a person can [be] able to recognize him in front of the window of a bus while he is dying. " Out of “jealousy” and the “desire to do evil”, the narrator shoots him during the screening of the film Endless Nights , saying: “You will find someone like me, give him a book to read, and then you admit it that his life gets off the rails. ".

Osman's Life in Istanbul (Chapters 14-15)

When Osman returns to Narin, Canan has already gone to Istanbul. There he searches for her unsuccessfully (chap. 14). Then he studies again and then does his military service. He now reads the book repeatedly, looking for his lover on bus rides, and later after his marriage, until he learns that she lives with a doctor from Samsun in Germany. He works for the city administration and lives with his wife and daughter in his late mother's apartment. During a visit his aunt Ratibe Hat tells him how her husband got into writing the book after Pertev and Peter or Kamer became known in America through picture stories "The New Day - Children's Adventures" as the chief inspector of the state railways and hobby writer . Osman borrows 23 books from his uncle Rıfkı and discovers many passages in them that he used as templates for his novel.

The angel (chapters 16-17)

In his research, Osman increasingly concentrated on the angel motif (Chapter 16): In the candy dish that Aunt Ratibe gave him when he visited, he discovered seven New Life branded caramel candies , as he ate them in his childhood, with a trademark Angel on paper. He ponders: if life was "not just a chain of merciless absurdities without any logic", the appearance of the angels in his life had to follow a plan of his uncle. He wants to find this “key to the secrets of [his] life” by asking the founder of the Engel-Zuckerwaren factory, Mr. Süreyya, about the origin of the picture. He travels by bus through many cities and villages known to him from earlier journeys, which have now lost their traditional appearance due to standardized modernization, to the factory locations that have been relocated several times over the years.

After many stops, he finally found the creator of the candy in the Lichthügelstraße in Sonpazar (chapter 17). He tells him many stories, including the decline of the Naris organization. His mistake was "the belief in the objects and the assumption that one can prevent the loss of their soul by keeping them." The explanation of the angel picture ends with a disappointment for the protagonist: The company logo is inspired by Marlene Dietrich's role as a prostitute in the film The Blue Angel .

On the nightly return trip to Istanbul to his intended new life with his wife and daughter, Osman thinks he sees an angel of light through the front window, but the headlights of an oncoming truck are in the fast lane, shortly before the collision with the bus.

analysis

A book that changes life

Novalis

The novel begins with the sentence: "One day I was reading a book and my whole life changed." (9)

“This sentence seems so old, so worn, so shabby on its long journey from Augustine to Novalis to Michael Ende , that at best one believes it to be something senselessly tried and playful. But everything is different in this work. The new life, the latest novel by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, does not like to stick to the facts. But he tells a lot of truths. "

Osman, the hero and narrator of the novel, feels the life-changing power of the mysterious book just as Dante felt the first encounter with Beatrice, the love of his life. A “light” flows towards Osman from the book, which makes him “new and different”. At first nothing is learned about the title of the book, which is identical to that of the Pamuk novel “The New Life”, and its content. Only its strong effect on the narrator is shown.

"Osman's first reading of the book is at once an experience of enlightenment and revelation. It is a visceral experience: he feels his "body dissociating"; he admits that he feels "its influence not only on my soul but on every aspect of my identity." "

("When Osman reads the book for the first time, it is both an enlightenment and a revelation. It is an experience that goes to the core: he feels his" body detaching ": he confesses that he is the influence of the book "Not only feels on his soul, but on every aspect of his identity." ")

B. Venkat Mani compares the narrative entry of the novel with the rabbit hole as the gateway to the other world in Alice in Wonderland . The book captures Osman's entire existence, his physical and mental identity, shows him the shadowy idea of ​​a completely different life and at the same time triggers fears. As in Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen , it is the stories of an enigmatic stranger that give rise to visions of a new life in the hero of the story, the dream of the blue flower .

“A Novalis word as the motto of his novel proves Pamuk's very conscious handling of influences from German romanticism:“ I came from Poe via Coleridge to German romanticism. My concern is that there is real life in some place, that our life is perhaps only a shadow of that life, that we are exiled, far from what is essential and real. That's what I owe to the romantics. That dreams, opium and poetry are attempts to get closer to the essential. And that we still know that we are not in the real place. ""

Osman turns the mysterious book into a guide to the other, true world. "Meanwhile the book was on the table and sprayed its light in my face ..." (10) The light is one of the central symbols of the novel, the light of the televisions in their different colors, the cold, radiant light of winter, the glow of Canans , the beloved, the lamp that illuminates the book, the lights of Istanbul, the “death light” of the oncoming trucks, which in the end pulls the narrator to his death.

Orhan Pamuk has always emphasized the importance of books for his own youth. For him, books are still tools for preparing for life in the sense of the Enlightenment . Pamuk attributes his fascination for printed paper in part to the scarcity of literature in his youth in Turkey, where there were no large libraries and no access to foreign language literature. As a young man, Pamuk begins to buy a library, a wild hodgepodge of classics with an influence on Turkish culture, compendia of long-forgotten artists, dubious conspiracy theories, dozens of volumes written by Turkish intellectuals in prison. He compares his deep belief in the books with Sartre's autodidacts from “ La nausée ”, who systematically rummages through a small town library from A to Z, and with Peter Kien, the hero of Elias Canetti's “ Die Blendung ”, whose lost world ultimately leads to self-immolation his library leads. Pamuk collects strange local stories written by retired teachers, angry historical works from the 70s looking for reasons for poverty and backwardness in Turkey, military history works about the last defeats of the Ottomans, the few novels from Turkey, always looking for the comedy and The tragedy of life in Turkey.

Enderûn Library (Enderûn Kütüphanesi) in the Topkapı Palace

For all the distance and irony, Pamuk is a person who lives from books and hopes to discover truths even in weak works. In this respect, the light that shines out of the book in the New Life is to be understood initially as an enlightening glow. At the same time, however, the symbol of light in Pamuk's novel can be interpreted in many ways. As the clarity of what is meant dissolves more and more, the different lights begin to refer to each other. The brilliant white, cold light of winter, which makes seeing almost impossible, refers to the light of the book, which both blinds and illuminates. The television is also a magical “lamp”, “a god” (16). A world of signs of their own emerges, the meaning of which is determined less by the designation function than by the relationship between the signs and the respective interpretation.

Pamuk is fascinated by this game, but also knows its dangers and abysses. "Turkey ... is a country in which general, ready-made theories, paranoid ideas and the delusion that everything is connected with everything have taken root."

Things become symbols, the aftershave becomes the symbol of a secret organization, a candy brand stands for the traditional variant of the new life. Here Pamuk ties in with the ideas of the German romantics who wanted to discover signs of the true, poetic world in nature and objects. Thus, in the romantic notion, the way to transcend everyday life is hidden in the everyday life itself, and the objects prove to the enlightened as references to universal transcendence. The blue flower, the great love, the other life, the poetry, light up in everyday life when you find the way to them.

“I once heard talk of old times; how the animals and trees and rocks spoke to people. I feel as if they want to start immediately and as if I could see what they wanted to tell me. "

"So things seemed to have a language too, and thanks to the temporary silence into which the book had drawn me, I now began to understand this language at least a little." (Orhan Pamuk, Das neue Leben)

The Communist Manifesto

open Quran

However, crossing the line to a different, new life proves to be difficult, goes hand in hand with the danger of death and a loss of reality. Osman senses it from the beginning when reading the book, the “encounter with his own inevitable death”. While Osman's fascination with the mysterious book initially appears as a mystical romance, Pamuk couples his hero's experiences with the reality of Turkey. Be it the principles of Marxist philosophy, esoteric texts or Islamist edification literature, the number of young people who believe that they have found the key to a new life in an idea or a book is great.

“But I was afraid.
Why?
Because I'd heard about what others had to go through after reading a book like me and losing their lives. I knew stories of people who had read The Principles of Philosophy one night , found every word in it correct, and joined the new avant-garde of revolutionary proletarians the next day, got caught robbing a bank three days later and for ten years were imprisoned. I also knew other people who, after reading Islam and the New Morals or The Betrayal of Westernization, had gone from the pub to the mosque one night and had begun patiently on their fifty years on the ice-cold carpets with the scent of rose water waiting for death due. And still others I knew who had let themselves be carried away by books like Freedom of Love or I recognized myself. These were mainly among those people who believed in the stars, but they too declared with full conviction: 'This book changed my whole life in a single night!' "(21)

The mysterious book can therefore stand for any printed form of great ideas that claim to change the world and life. Such works reach and seduce young people who are dissatisfied, who have romantic dreams of a new and different, a real life. In doing so, they leave their previous plans, their friends and their everyday lives behind, in order to devote themselves entirely to the newly discovered big goals. In doing so, they are ready to sacrifice their own lives. “From the book, from the books, death seeped into life.” (207) Pamuk sees specific links in Turkey for such a deadly belief in books.

“Orhan Pamuk's novel, which was an unprecedented popular success in Turkey, claims to deliver a complex parable of Turkey today, its cultural traditions and constructions, its political tensions and contradictions and, above all, a specifically Turkish variety of paranoia:» The Turkish Paranoia is a generally accepted cultural reflex, ”says Orhan Pamuk. “It's the political language that government and school use. She paints a crude positivist picture of the world; it is a political fairytale variant of French positivism, which the whole population adheres to and which is propagated by the state and television. The message is: everyone is our enemy, everyone has conspired against our fatherland. There are institutions, people, groups that conspire against us, the holy Turkish nation. You can find this perspective everywhere in everyday life. Turkish paranoia therefore means a chain of conspiracies in which we believe we are involved. ""

Through the book, Pamuk's hero Osman gets on the trail of a number of conspiracies, and as funny and abstruse as they appear in part, they are dangerous and ruthless. Dr. In the novel, Narin is the name of the head of an organization that fights everything Western and all modernization. The mysterious book appears to Narin as a manifestation of these ideas and he wants to fight its readers as well as Coca-Cola drinkers and other opponents of tradition. According to Pamuk, it is a specific feature of Turkey that an individual book is given such importance:

"I come from a culture where reading books is not very widespread," says Pamuk. "When people read books, it is in a strange way that I sometimes call the" Third World Way of Reading. " denote. You dive into a book with the expectation that the whole world will change. So you don't read to relax like you might go to the cinema. Reading is a radical thing associated with an anonymous, messianic vision. This is how in my youth the students read Marxist books; and so some fundamentalists read religious pamphlets. You expose yourself to the world of a book and everything must change with it. So what matters is not the book itself, but a tendency to discover something in every text that will completely transcend our view of life . "

Orhan Pamuk's novel is not only a book about powerful books, but also embodies the genre of mysterious books, which it wants to unmask at the same time. Obviously, openness to interpretation is a feature of such books. They must be suitable as a projection surface for the wishes and dreams of their readers. Obviously, they must contain some sort of promise of salvation, coupled with deadly dangers that one must take to gain it.

“There are many who read the book and they are all rushing to get somewhere… Everything is very chaotic and the light of the book that inspires people is deadly blinded to their eyes. How amazing life is! "

[...]

"Who is the angel?" She asked.

“It obviously has something to do with the book. Not only we know. Others are on his trail too, "I said.

"To whom does he appear?"

"To those who believe in the book, who read it carefully."

"And then?"

“If you read the book over and over again, you will become him. When you get up one morning, people will look at you and say, my goodness, they will say, the girl has become an angel in the stream of light from the book! That is, the angel was a girl. Later you wonder how such an angel can trap others! Can angels play bad games? "(205 f.)

Ian Almond sees in his investigation of Orhan Pamuk's postmodern writing a source of the melancholy of his heroes in the addiction to meaning, explains the hermeneutic anger for interpretation as an expression of their unhappiness. They are unable to take things as they are. According to Pamuk, the inability to get along without great ideas is the work of broken men who are now looking for the secret meaning of things in the Koran or elsewhere.

“This idea of ​​basing one's life on the wishful and passionate misreading of texts occurs again in The new Life , where Osman finally discovers the comic books and sweet wrappers contain no hidden clues, mystically leading to a 'new' reality, but are nothing more than comic books and sweet wrappers. The desire to learn the secret ultimately results in its destruction; the honor of the exegete is ultimately his undoing. "

(The idea of ​​basing one's life on desire-driven and passionate reading of texts reappears in The New Life novel when Osman finally realizes that comics and the wrapping paper of candy contain no covert clues that mystically lead to a ' new 'reality, but are nothing but comics and wrapping paper. The desire to discover the ultimate secret ends in its destruction; the exegete is ultimately doomed by his own zeal.)

From Almond's point of view, Pamuk's novels pose the question of whether we will ever be able to love things as they are, or whether we will always be compelled to charge things with meanings based on vague hopes, hope a messiah, true love, a political coup, a better state. Pamuk's novels created a tension between the beauty of big dreams and the realization that reality contained no signs of another, better wilting, no secrets, no mysteries, no hidden treasures.

Another way of loading the book with meaning is the large number of references to the great texts of Western and Eastern culture and the mixture of these great ideas with oddities of everyday life. Ian Almond sees here the influence of a literary concept by Borges of mixing banalities with esoteric secrets without any relation. Just as the various references to Western literature unsettle the Turkish reader and burden them with an almost insoluble educational task, so the Western reader is confronted with the educational goods of the East, Islamic mysticism, the symbolic geography of Turkey, its stories, everyday experiences and worlds of goods. Another 'lead' the reader can follow are the hidden references to Pamuk's novel The Black Book , from which the concept of 'New Life' can be distilled and interpreted. But as there, too, the references, self-interpretations, food for thought, fairy tales and stories should be treated with caution. The interpretations and perspectives contradict each other, sometimes misleading interpretations are later presented as wrong and are then correct again.

A cultural mix appears as a construction principle and as a theme of the book, interpretation as a requirement, as a danger and as stupidity, which nevertheless requires a tremendous amount of hard work. The reader is in danger of falling into the role of Mehmet, the friend of the beautiful Canan, who after endlessly reading it no longer has the courage to express his own opinion, but rather literally reads the book like a medieval monk who spends his life as a bible copyist repeatedly copies. Dealing with the Koran, the Bible and Marx's capital is addressed here as well as the behavior of the perplexed reader, for whom the book suddenly becomes a ruthless machine that confronts him with ever new questions, problems of interpretation and contradictions, and forces him to read more and more. In the sense of Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino , the meaning that so irritates us is the product of the reader, not the property of the text.

At the end of the novel, the book that so intrigued Osman is completely demystified. It turns out to be the product of the progressive uncle Rıfkı, a deceased railroad worker from the Osman area, who put it together mainly from quotations and ideas from 33 books. “I started reading the books that same night. And from that moment on it was clear to me that some scenes, some expressions, some images of the New Life had either been written under the influence of these books or had been taken directly from them. As informal and fluent as Uncle Rıfkı dealt with the images and text material by Tom Mix , Pecos Bill and the Lonely Sheriff for his children's stories, he had also used these books when he wrote The New Life "(303 f. ) The following are various examples of copied quotations. The match between the title of the mysterious book in the book and Orhan Pamuk's novel creates a peculiar ambiguity and self-irony that both demonstrates and demystifies postmodern writing.

Love and melancholy

Antonello da Messina , Pietà with three angels (detail)

“Love is the longing to embrace a person violently, to be in the same place with him. She is the desire to hug him and shut out the whole world. It is man's longing to find a safe refuge for his soul.

You see, I couldn't say anything new. Despite everything, I said something! I don't care now whether it's new or not. ... What good is it then, for God's sake, not to open your mouth and not to say a single word while life in all its ruthlessness drifts past us like a slow train and meanwhile our soul and body are falling apart? " (291)

“The next day I fell in love,” the first-person narrator begins the second chapter of the novel. "Like the light that streamed towards me from the book, love shook me and clearly showed me that my life had long since been thrown off course." (25) The seemingly accidental encounter with the beautiful architecture student Canan in her hand Osman had first seen the mysterious book, only turns out to be a planned seduction much later. Canan's friend Mehmet reveals to Osman that the readers of the book are being systematically persecuted and attempted to be murdered. All of this can no longer stop Osman's determination: "I left myself behind and ran after her."

So Osman's fascinated looks follow the beautiful Canan, now like Dante's Beatrice when they first met in a purple robe to witness a murder attempt on her friend Mehmet.

The icy window of the university through which Osman observes the events becomes for him the symbol of the boundary between old and new life, behind the window of the bus at the moment of the accident at the end of the novel, he looks for the face of an angel. Semi-transparent mirrors are the transition points between transcendence and everyday life, the “thresholds” that have to be crossed.

Osman's great feelings for Canan and the book are overlaid with melancholy from the start .

"All the books of Orhan Pamuk, in their own way, breathe certain sadness. Their plots are wandering and discursive, their tones reflective yet distant, their styles making curious use of an oxymoronically comic melancholy. … The tea-salons and bus-stations of lonely Turkish provincial towns in The New Life,… Perhaps most keenly of all, it is the endings of Pamuk's novels that express this modern, post-Romantic version of melancholy, a sadness which seems to combine the pain of unrequited love with the with the discovery that there are no grand narratives - or, rather, that there are only narratives, stories whose only secret is that there is no secret, no supernatural source, no cosmic meaning beneath them. All three of the above novels end on similar moments of silence and indifferent resignation; ... the glare of the headlights of the oncoming truck approaches the bus in The New Life ... "

(All of Orhan Pamuk's books breathe a certain sadness in their own way. Their plot is determined by aberrations and long-windedness, their tone thoughtful and distant, their style peculiarly shaped by a contradicting, comical melancholy. ... the tea rooms and bus stations of the lonely provincial towns in the Turkey in The New Life ... Perhaps the ending of Pamuk's novels most clearly expresses this modern, post-romantic version of melancholy, a sadness that combines the pain of unrequited love with the discovery that the Great Narrations don't exist - or more precisely that these are just stories, narratives whose only secret is that there is no secret, no supernatural source, no cosmic meaning behind them. All three of the above novels end in similar moments of silence and indifferent resignation; ... the blinding lights of the oncoming trucks approaching the bus in “D as new life "...)

Pamuk sees this collective melancholy , this Hüzün, as a characteristic mood of his hometown Istanbul. “She does not suffer from this melancholy, because the melancholy softens the view and gives consolation.” Melancholy appears as a way “to deal with all setbacks in life with dignity”.

The trip

Old Mercedes bus in Turkey

Fascinated by the mysterious book and Canan's beauty, Osman sets off, leaves his mother and gives up his studies. He takes the bus, the “little man's vehicle”, and discovers eastern Turkey, Turkish traditions and goods that have long been forgotten in the western-oriented city of Istanbul.

"Orhan Pamuk's" New Life "is a book about travel, and as in all" road novels ", the country is like a sacred book that you have to read seriously but with confidence, a doctrine of the eternal cycle of things. You can go where you want, there is always a broken white line that disappears behind the horizon, and the wheels of the big automobile always turn on itself. If you travel far enough to the east, you will eventually find yourself in the great plains Of the West."

The journey that Osman takes to get into the world of the beautiful Canan and that of the book is aimed at fleeing from two realities: Both the "false" reality of television as an official guide through the social reality that is always first produced, as well as the world of mothers, women who keep a cozy world in stock at home as a refuge for those who expose themselves to the reality of the profession, which is experienced as threatening. If the television stabilizes this social function of the women / mothers, it only makes the unbelievable boredom bearable, so the world of the mothers / domestic women in turn stabilizes the unreal world of those "outside" who, in turn, are distorted and linked to everyday domestic life by the television sets becomes.

Both television and books are increasingly taking on the role of mediating human communication in addition to interpreting reality. Aunt Ratibe sits at an angle of 45 degrees to the television and thus offers the deceased uncle and the visitor a co-pilot's seat for mutual human-machine coupling.

The escape from the inextricably linked “realities” of television and the family remains a mystery to the mothers; Mothers don't understand, they cry, says Canan.

By saying goodbye to Istanbul, Osman is not only leaving the familiar television and family world, he is also traveling to eastern Turkey, which has been shaped by the past:

“The further the student leaves the civilized west behind, the more remote the places become, the deeper the hero seems to penetrate into an original land. But for a long time he noticed the neon letters that proclaim the names of high schools, or the old villas that are now called “Palasthotel Frohsinn” or “Palasthotel Komfort”. He traces the goods of the past, he notices where the western lemonades have not yet displaced the Turkish soda, where the men use the old "OPA" shaving water and where the woolen gloves have a felt insert on the palm. The attention that the young man pays to the little things is like the instinct with which the Islamic fundamentalists pursue every Western branded article as a sign of an atheistic cultural revolution. The hero's true rebirth would be the miracle of an old world returned. "

Osman's departure changes his reality by giving it tremendous depth. The world seems to be doubling, everything becomes an intertwined system of signs that refer to each other. On the trail of the New Life, Osman follows his beloved at the same time, the clocks become a metaphor for a threatening secret organization that again proves to be surprisingly real and yet connected to the world of the book. The relationships are diverse, sometimes mere similarities in appearance or terms, sometimes real affinities, for example when the head of the secret organization turns out to be Mehmet's father, Canan's friend.

Kemal Ataturk around 1920

The everyday objects turn out to be signs of the other reality, but at the same time seem to stand for certain Turkish-Ottoman traditions and identities.

Pamuk ironically ironized these identities from the beginning, proving their purity as a deception: Uncle Rıfkı's children's books already show themselves to be interspersed with typical Western motifs, their stories as depictions of typical Turkish virtues barely hide their origins from Western ideals.

Uncle Rıfkı's ideals of progress, represented by railways, cooperatives and educational writings, stand for Ataturk's greyed-out project of a modern western Turkey. The railway lines as symbols of western modernity, the link to the modern economy, the internal Turkish connection between East and West, will not be expanded. Ataturk stands as a silent witness in the squares of the provincial towns, dusty and full of pigeon droppings, and looks at the monuments of uniformed, ugly westernization made of concrete like a prisoner. The railway, which for Canan's husband stands for life on the right track - one later lives in auspicious Germany at Bahnhofstrasse (299) - does not fulfill its mission as the country's savior.

Almost at the end of his journey, when he found out that the image of the angel on the candy of his childhood had no mystical or religious models, but was modeled on the German film star Marlene Dietrich in the film The Blue Angel , Osman gives his search for the real one World behind the wrong one.

“What should I do now? What I had to experience - which was not worth experiencing at all - I had experienced and had reached the end of all riddles that I could invent for myself, of all adventures and all journeys. "(336)

The narrator resolves to enjoy his life and things as they are, his family life, consumption, everyday life. He gets back on the bus and heads home. Finally, he has the esoteric appearance he has longed for so long. He sees “the angel on the right front window of the bus [...] this deep, simple and strong light” (345).

On his first trip, Osman had met fate in the form of accidents. Reality broke brutally and ruthlessly over the travelers who were banging in front of the constantly running television on the bus.

“At some point there has to be a point where it seems easier to get to the other bank. “I was jolted by a loud tearing and a tremendous force that shook my bowels, flew from my seat, hit the seat in front of me, collided with shards of steel and sheet metal and aluminum and glass, struck angry, got mad bumped, was compressed. At the same moment I fell back again completely different and found myself in the same seat in the bus. But the omnibus was no longer the same ... I got out of the back door of the car into the garden of the night. ”The rebirths are now endless; they come suddenly and with force. The accident has taken the place of the fate that elevates or destroys the individual. "

Now, on Osman's last trip, he has to realize that the mysterious light in the windshield has a real source.

“When I instinctively turned to the driver, I saw the liche cover the entire windscreen with overwhelming force. Two trucks overtaking each other, sixty to seventy yards away, with their high beams pointed at us, were coming quickly closer and directly towards us. I realized that the accident could no longer be avoided. "(346)

“I realized this was the end of my life. But I still wanted to return home, start a new life, die - I definitely didn't want that! "(Final sentence)

The same motif of the journey as well as a similar personal constellation can be found in The Black Book . Here, too, this time in Istanbul, the protagonist Galip is looking for a new identity and a new life, combined with researching his wife Rüya, who has left him and wants to achieve her goal in life with another man. Orientation for Galip's hikes are the newspaper articles, they correspond to the "book", the journalist and rival Celâl. They serve as a guideline for him through the labyrinth of the city with its long oriental traditions reaching back in fairy tales and myths. a. the mysticism of Mevlâna, and the tension to the western secularized-rationalistic, consumption-oriented or socialist influences. In this unmanageable, heterogeneous world, people are looking for signs of a second, true existence. The interlacing and endless reflections of the mysteriously encoded stories told by Celâl, Galip and other characters in the novel, using the mise en abyme technique, become metaphors of a life in which no one can be himself. Unless the reader fills the black pages, the blank spaces of the book, imaginatively with his own stories, he is however aware that they are only variations on the tradition.

Influences: Dante and German Romanticism

Dante Alighieri

It is this concealed mixture of Eastern and Western inspirations and mystical images that fascinates Pamuk and makes reading his works an adventurous journey between East and West. Pamuk cleverly uses Dante's numerical mysticism and color symbolism for his purpose, modifies and regroups them.

“The book title Das neue Leben , of course, comes from Dante's Vita nuova . The most important thing, however, is that Das neue Leben, like La vita nuova, are reflections on love. Love as an inner shock, what is called romantic in the traditional sense. My novel is about elementary feelings, thoughts, inner states. "

The medieval idea of ​​love to dedicate oneself and one's life to an unapproachable lover is found in the text, as are the erotic motifs. On closer inspection, the encryption turns out to be extremely complex. In addition to the late medieval source Dante, Pamuk also adopted the interpretation of German literary romanticism and its processing of medieval motifs and incorporated elements from it in his book, especially from Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Novalis.

"On the other hand, my novel is also influenced by German Romanticism, for example by Novalis, from whom the sentence comes: Philosophy is the search for a place where you feel at home."

As there, Pamuk's new life is not based on the direct, albeit symbolically exaggerated, love encounter, but on reading a book, the content of which some readers adopt in a special way. In Ofterdingen the starting point is the story of an old man, which, although many hear it, only brought about the turning point in Heinrich's life. The new perspective on life appears to him in the form of the legendary blue flower. Despite this turn to poetry as a universal power at Novalis, the effect of the story is linked to erotic motifs right from the start: The ray of light is found in Novalis as a jet of water from a mysterious spring that hugs the body of the dreaming Heinrich, as if the water consisted of loosened naked female bodies.

The hidden erotic motivation of the turn in life is also processed in Pamuk: It is the beloved Canan who seduces Osman to read, apparently random and innocent-pure, but in reality in deliberate seduction, as the reader learns later. Two things become clear to the attentive reader: First, that Osman lets us experience things as it were and, although he tells in the past tense, he does not reveal the information he acquired later. This narrative attitude is a tension in the novel. Tied to the perspective of the first-person narrator, we follow him through the various adventures until he finally reveals the background of the events with flowing transitions to explanations, presumably by the author, about his aesthetics.

Mirrors and angels - inspirations from RM Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke around 1900

Pamuk uses the mirror symbol adopted by Rilke in several ways: As an object, if, depending on the lighting behind and on the windows of the buses, one's own face, images of the outside world, the appearance of an angel can be seen. At the same time, however, when the reports of others describe their own experiences to the narrator from a different perspective, the visit to Aunt Ratibe as well as the first encounter with Canan. As in the mirror, the events appear several times. However, the mirrors turn out to be distorting mirrors, each throwing back a different image of reality.

The reality of the everyday world is also ailing from the outset, once through television, the light of the world through which reality streams into the apartments of Istanbul. The real windows and the TV windows are just as real to everyday people: just as the curtains are never drawn all the way to avoid missing anything that is going on on the street, so the TVs always stay open windows to keep in touch with the people streaming in through them Never let reality and life tension tear down so as not to burst with boredom.

The motif of the angel also comes from Rilke.

“Rilke's remark that the angel in the Duinese elegies was more of an Islamic angel than a Christian one, interested me very much. But I have come to the conclusion that this distinction has no basis. The angels in the Islamic and the Christian world are more or less the same. This double-faced reality of looking at the world on the one hand from the side where the sun rises and on the other from where it sets - to search for this dualism and at the end of the journey to say that it does not exist - that I like it."

Pamuk's angels are not only higher beings from another world, they take shape, “as a figure on the lid of cream jars, as a conversation partner in the inner dialogue of my heroes, as an enigmatic figure connected with love or as a mysterious face in Persian Miniatures. "

Pamuk is not only inspired by Rilke with regard to individual motifs. Much more fundamental is the influence of Rilke's 9th Duinese elegy on Pamuk's work. Rilke assigns people the task of putting simple things and their own experiences into words. Man should not express the big ideas or the universe in language, but his feelings, his experiences, the simple things.

“Praise the angel for the world, not the unspeakable one, for him

you cannot boast of what is wonderfully felt; in space,

where he feels more feeling you are a newbie. Drum show

for him the simplicity that shapes from sex to sex,

lives as one of ours, next to the hand and in sight.

Tell him the things. He will stand in awe; how you stood

with the rope maker in Rome, or with the potter on the Nile.

Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours,

how even the mournful suffering resolves itself purely to form,

serves as a thing, or dies into a thing -, and beyond

blissfully the violin escapes. - And this one, by Hingang

understand living things when you praise them; transient,

trust us, the most fleeting ones, to save us. "

This invitation to research simple things and experiences appears in the novel both fragmentarily in dialogues and thoughts of the characters involved and as a literary concept when Pamuk meticulously and imaginatively depicts individual objects of everyday life and brings them to life. As Pamuk shows, “in particular a passage from the ninth elegy about the meaning of words, the world and life ... is the material of the monologues of my heroes”.

Political background

Orhan Pamuk sees himself as a man of letters, he has “always emphasized” that he is “not a political writer” and that he “does not want to put his books in the service of politics”. Pamuk sees the politicization of his work partly justified in the expectation of the West in a writer from a developing country, partly in the political situation in Turkey:

“Completely against my will, I was pushed into the politics of Turkey. But now I have no right to run away from it and complain that we are seen politically in the West. I would rather retreat to my ivory tower, but political events force me to take a stand. "

The novel Das neue Leben addresses a number of current problems in Turkey in the highly complex form of modern literature (see below Paranoia and Conspiracy Theory ):

• the young generation's longing for a different, better life,
• the irrationality of the concepts and dreams used,
• the readiness to die and the longing for death,
• the loss of reality,
• the frenzied escape from the meaningless world of the parents with its traps of maternal security and simultaneous wasteland and emptiness
• the failed hopes of the parents' generation for a modernization of Turkey, as represented in the novel by Uncle Rıfkı and the railways, the expansion of which was stopped for some inexplicable reason,
• the brutality of political murders, which, barely camouflaged as private murders, destroy even the most cautious hopes for the future, such as those of Kemalist uncle Rıfkı.

It depicts the brutality with which a conglomerate of reactionaries, traditionalists and government, military and police circles react to every sign of change; it is about systematic spying and widespread murder. Pamuk succeeds in avoiding any clear partisanship. His essential stylistic devices in dealing with political and religious fundamentalism of all varieties are irony and distance.

“My jokes get on the nerves of all parties in Turkey,” said Pamuk. “I joke about the fundamentalists, their traditionalism and their obsessive religiosity, and then I joke about the so-called Kemalists and their humorless narrow-mindedness. Of course, they feel provoked and angry. Both parties attack me and at the same time want to take me over. I am also interested in writing because I want to provoke. The country is divided between the secularists and the fundamentalists and I want to show my readers that together they make up the establishment in this country. ""

The question of the interpretation of reality, of everyday life, of texts and politics, which in the West, albeit increasingly less than an amusing game, have become a question of existence in Turkey. The young Marxist who was arrested at a student demonstration and sentenced by state courts to endless prison terms without much reading, and who might be lucky enough to spend his life in exile, the young Kurd who quite simply had the right to an identity of his own, the right to the Knowledge of the history of the oppression of his people demands, and whoever is gunned down by them, the western-oriented writer who finds his death in an Islamist murder, the drug courier in the service of one of the countless organizations that use the future hopes of young people for their purposes use. Pamuk's novel explores why, for so many young people in Turkey, books have the power to change their lives and the world, and to join risky ventures.

“Books in themselves have no such power. What gives books this power are our expectations, our desires, our will to change the world. Perhaps even capital or the Koran do not have the power to revolutionize, pose no threat, but somewhere in the world these books can lead to a great revolution . Or at least provide the initial spark.

I spent my youth in a milieu in which people expected the power to change from books. Turkey was a polarized society in the 1970s. There was a strong expectation that something would change. An apocalyptic expectation of overthrow. Politically, such longings are expressed in the expectation of a Mahdi , a prophet, a great political leader and hero, even a terrorist, a military leader. Where there is such unrest, books and writings are the source of constant argument and discussion. "

Orhan Pamuk does not take sides with any project, not with the PKK and not with the modernization plans of the military, not with the Marxists and not with the state-supporting parties. Above all, his work is a polemic against the great ideas on which most of these conceptions are based and in whose name people are murdered, tortured and arrested.

“From my point of view, literature has always defied great ideas, great generalizations. I believe that the task of literature - if there is any task - is to play with the great ideas that we hold in our hands as common change without realizing it, to gnaw them on the edge like a mouse to let it be felt that they are wrong and to arouse doubts in the reader about the eternally valid opinions. ... That means I'm angry about my readers' passion for big ideas, about their paranoid tendencies, and that's why I make up a story that plays with them. "

East and West

Page of the Quran from the 8th to 9th centuries

Page from the Gutenberg Bible

As early as 1918 a work was published in Turkey under the pseudonym Ziya Gökalp under the title “Das neue Leben”. The author, Mehmed Ziya, was one of the initiators of a nationalist reform of Turkey as a secular state. Mehmed Ziya developed the concept of Turkishness ("Türklük") as a separate identity between Western and Ottoman self-image.

"Through his works, he initiated a discussion about the optimum appropriation of Western ideas of democracy, secularism, and political sovereignity in the new Republic to the advantage of the Turkish cultural identity. A clear delineation of Turks as an ethnic and a national group becomes the central concern of Türkçülüğün Esasları (Principles of Turkism, 1921) and Türk Toresi (Turkish Customs, 1922). … Gökalp was an intellectual who acknowledged Westernization as an essential parameter to measure development, yet unlike Ataturk he was not ready to turn his back completely on the Islamic heritage of Turkey. "

(Through his works he opened a discussion about the optimal appropriation of Western ideas of democracy, secularism and political sovereignty in the new republic for the benefit of Turkish cultural identity. A clear definition of the Turks as an ethnic and national group was the central interest of Türkçülüğün Esasları ( Principles of Turkishness, 1921) and Türk Toresi (Turkish Morals, 1922).… Gökalp was an intellectual who recognized Westernization as an essential measure of progress, but unlike Ataturk, he was unwilling to turn entirely away from Turkey's Islamic origins .)

Orhan Pamuk initially criticized the East-West conflict as the “condescending style” of the West if the problem were understood as the “fact” that “the poor countries in the East do not bow to all the demands of the West and the US want. "Essential for the problem are the" gap between rich and poor "and peace. In Turkey itself, since the last Ottoman sultans, due to the defeats against the West, the attitude “that blame for the poverty and weakness of the country is to be found in the traditions, the religious forms of organization of the time and in general the entire ancient culture.”

For Orhan Pamuk, the process of westernization in itself is “nothing negative ... but something problematic, also painful. The cultural change was accompanied by trauma and identity crises. ”The weakness of one's own culture gave rise to a“ feeling of “shame”, but at the same time a “proud nationalism” as a counterbalance.

"This kind of shame, pride, humiliation and anger is the material I form my novels out of."

In the “new life” the indissoluble connection between the occidental and the oriental culture in Turkey becomes clear, the confusion and mixing of their symbols, fairy tales and stories. Pamuk himself attributes his interest in the question of Turkish identity to his biography: "I was brought up in the illusion that I felt European in an Eastern country." His surroundings have denied Eastern history and symbols. From this arises the special need to determine one's identity. It is only natural that the intellectuals increasingly imported Western culture with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, but one sometimes overlooks “painful things”, “trauma, identity crises”. In contrast to his father, who was completely enthusiastic about Western culture, Pamuk states that he felt the purely secular perspective from the age of thirty as one-sided. Precisely for this reason, he builds fragments from traditional Sufi literature, from oriental fairy tales, lived and remembered traditions into his works.

"Pamuk, whose novels include Snow, My Name is Red, and The New Life, explained the" doubleness "of Turkey - how the country thrives on both modernity and the past, and how it is the meeting point of Islam and the West. But he was quick to say that the bridge across the Bosporous, as a metaphor for the connection of East and West, was a "very worn-out cliché." "

(Pamuk, whose novels Snow My Name is Red and The New Life explained Turkey's double life and portrayed how the country is growing between the modern and the past, as a meeting point for Islam and the West. At the same time, he did not hesitate to point out that the bridge was over the Bosporus has become a cliché as a metaphor for the connection between East and West.)

Pamuk himself depicted the tension between modernity and traditional everyday culture as a central motif for his writing. At the same time, it shows the danger for authors who, like Nazim Hikmet , got into political conflict by advocating modernization in Turkey and ended up in bitterness or even imprisonment .

"In the age of Westernization and rapid modernization, the central question — not just for Turkish literature but for all literatures outside the West — is the difficulty of painting the dreams of tomorrow in the colors of today, of dreaming about a modern country with modern values ​​while also embracing the pleasures of everyday tradition. Writers whose dreams of a radical future propel them into political conflicts have often ended up in prison, and their plight has given a hard and embittered edge to their voices and their outlook. "

Just as the romantics in Germany around 1800 and in the face of the French Revolution tried to rediscover the universal poetry of the world and the unity of Christianity, so too did the Islamic mystics of Persia and the Ottoman Empire discover the secret meanings of things. Just as the backward-looking romantics of the European Middle Ages of the Crusades seek true human values, so the backward-looking Turks seek in the glory of ancient Ottoman values ​​and the power and identity that resulted from them.

On closer inspection, however, Pamuk seems to mischievously inform the reader, in both the European and the Islamic Middle Ages, exactly the opposite can be discovered: imaginative dreams of new life, of eroticism and beauty, which the reactionary images of their late and stupid admirers as caricatures expose.

Apollinaria Avrutina from St. Petersburg University compares the situation in Turkey with the situation in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union. In both countries between East and West, the consumption of Coca Cola, the western symbolic product par excellence - as shown in "New Life" - becomes a symbol of the farewell to all national thoughts and habits, in Turkey represented by the traditional lemonade " Budak " like in Russia by the traditional " kvas ". Avrutina sees Pamuk split between a pro-Western advocacy of modernizing Turkey and the ironization of the inundation of the country with western clutter, which uniformed cities and lifestyles.

Pamuk's book title “Das neue Leben” is not only an allusion to Dante's work and a Kemalist manifesto, but also denotes a Turkish candy brand.

“The new life,” as we learn in the course of the novel, is the name of a Turkish brand of toffee. "The new life" is also the title of Dante's lyrical description of his encounter with Beatrice: one of the many and generously cited sources from which Pamuk's novel is fed. "The new life" means, first and foremost, literally: the promise of radical change. It is triggered by a book, the book. It plays a central role in Pamuk's novel, without our being able to more than suspect what is written in it. "

It is precisely this ambiguity of terms and their references that characterizes Orhan Pamuk's literary work.

Literary Techniques

Orhan Pamuk's writing represents a break in Turkish fiction, saying goodbye to the social realism of authors like Yaşar Kemal . In his novel “The New Life”, Pamuk combines different styles, literary epochs, western and eastern worlds of thought in a postmodern way . In doing so, he ties in with modern forms of educational novels as well as lyrical-romantic forms, which he ironizes at the same time and thereby creates distance. He is preparing to conquer the literary form of the modern novel for the Orient, even if it is playfully and ironically broken. One of the most cited passages from “The New Life” takes an ironic stand on this conquest.

“Apart from that, this modern toy known as a novel, this greatest invention of Western culture, is not an activity for us. And if the reader hears my fragile voice on these pages, it is not because I am speaking from a level now polluted by books and vulgarized by extensive thoughts, but because I have still not been able to find out how to find myself within this strange one Toys to move. "(288f)

This self-deprecating interference by the author in a direct address to the reader indicates as a writing and reading motif that he wants to forget the beautiful Canan. Only through the polyphonic orchestra of the "different voices in my head", through the feeling that "the books read one after the other whispered intensely to one another" (289), life was endurable. This polyphonic “orchestra” (289) in the head fits the postmodern writing concept as well as the late romantic self-deprecation of great feelings.

“Pamuk reconciles beauty and cruelty in a spirit of romantic irony. Romantic is the irony with which his novel, like some fairy tales by Hauff, Tieck or ETA Hoffmann, reminds the reader "of nothing and everything." The polyphony of the genres that Pamuk deals with in his novel also seems romantic and ironic. As in the “Black Book”, his penultimate novel, the author mixes motifs from Islamic mysticism with postmodern narrative strategies and weaves lyrical, ornamental forms of expression into the pattern of a socially critical contemporary novel. Last but not least, Pamuk is inspired by the German genre of the educational novel. "

Orhan Pamuk explicitly differentiates his writing from “forms of the historical novel ” that gave the story “meaning”, interpreted it as “progress” for the better and assumed that this meaning could be conveyed to the reader by the author. The historical novel of the previous generation also wrongly formulated the claim that the author had all the details of historical events and could present 'the right details'. Pamuk also believes that the view that the "specific problems" of historical events should be "dramatized" is wrong. H. To present "as human conflicts". Pamuk relies entirely on the author's creativity, which can open up other perspectives than historical studies.

“So it's not about the erudition of the author, but rather about his creativity , not about the extent to which he is a historian, but rather the extent to which he is a narrator . If this is done well - by a writer of stature - he gives us the feeling that literature can be an alternative to history, that one can go beyond history. ... And the power of the imagination is a real alternative to history. "

The characters in Pamuk's novel stand for positions, they “pay because they are designed as representatives of their culture, with a certain lifelessness…”, they “are more allegorical image carriers than individuals.” In the novel, Pamuk builds on stark contrasts, on confrontations and Exacerbations. His characters do not meet on friendly terms, they get into ever new, violent confrontations. The author does not take sides with either the modernizers or the fundamentalists. Despite all the fascination for traditional habits and goods, Pamuk always presents her admirers ironically or backwards and brutally. But the rationality of people with a western orientation also appears to be unfounded, dubious, as a half-understood admiration for the foreign.

“My attitude towards literature is not that I am 'on one side'. That would not be essential for me. On the one hand, I'm a cynic. On the other hand, my heart also takes sides, for example for the value of traditional simple things. But I also know the consequences of such an attitude; so I look at things with cruel cynicism. That's why I cynically make the old man who worships the little things a bit of a fascist. The pleasure of writing for me is being cruel and cynical. But I make up for it with poetry that comes from the heart. So I have both in the same moment: the beauty and the cruelty of life. "

To make the ambiguity and the metaphysics of the outer and inner world, which suddenly flows into Osman understandable, to draw the reader himself into Osman's attitude, to at least temporarily withdraw him from reality and to win him over to history Pamuk uses different techniques: It was already pointed out above how Pamuk loads the central terms of the book with meanings and mutual reference structures, and thus turns the lights, the windows, the book, even the everyday objects into a complex system of peculiar references and pseudo-explanations.

“Nevertheless, I have never done without the ambiguous, the opaque or the dark when writing. My writing instinct is to enrich the text with new meanings, with the possibilities of chance and allusions. ... The author, who courageously tackles the cracks in the text, his own resistance nodes, internal rules and coincidences, will discover a new continent there, which consists of intensity, strength and wealth of meanings. At this point the text turns into texture, the story into the weave of what is written, and both complement each other, and this is where true and pure literary pleasure begins. "

The reader always remains in the dark:

• how exactly the individual terms are to be understood; there are no clear definitions that can be obtained from careful reading of the text
• the relationship between the terms, the leitmotifs “light”, “angel”, “book” for example. It is not possible to draw a mind map, a conceptual map. Only the young doctor succeeds and through it he wins Canan's love. Its interpretation, its map, is at least as dark as the text.
• whether the reference connections are understandable at all or are products of a dangerous loss of reality and whether one does not necessarily have to escape Osman's anger to interpret in order not to endanger one's life, as Mehmet says at the beginning of the book.

Paradoxes and suggestive repetitions of the key concepts are a means of mystifying the central concepts of the book and charging them with meaning . At the same time, metaphorical expressions in the Romantic style create a pictorial idea of ​​the power of the book: The light “sprays” (9, 10) out of the book, it “seeps over the threshold of the other life” (11), it flows to the reading Osman contrary to (12). The reader takes the place of the interpretation-mad Osman, who on the trail of Uncle Rıfkı is doing the same thing as the reader with Orhan Pamuk: One searches for the secret meaning of light and the book. At the end of the novel, the voices of the narrator and the author mix in the readers' speeches ("The sensitive reader who follows my adventures should not accept [...]", "You see, reader, and therefore do not believe in me [...]" "You know by now, I assume that we have reached the explanatory section of our book.") And the confusion of identities becomes complete when Canan's lover Mehmet lives as a book writer Osman in Viranbağ and the narrator, after exploring the different perspectives, e.g. . B. Alis, the "broken-hearted agent," Nahits or the hiding Mehmets, saw Agent Narins kill the rival. The book turns out to be a machine into which the reader can join: a dangerous toy to which those who are crazy about interpretation fall victim.

The romantic dream of a universal reference context, of saving the unity of the world, has become a nightmare in the modern age. At the same time, solving the conceptual puzzles and language games appears to be extremely important, as a question of life and death, as the only way to gain a meaningful perspective on life, a true life in the wrong.

Another means of sharpening the reader's view of the reality behind reality and thus luring him into the “trap” of the book is to use a variety of hidden and open references to cultural-historical and collective symbols, some of which are disclosed in the book. The photo of nine-year-old Canan "with a sad child's look and an uncertain smile" in a "cute angel costume with small wings, copied from the West" refers to Dante's major literary works New Life and Divine Comedy . The Italian poet first met his great love Beatrice at the age of nine and was so fascinated that at that moment he felt a new life within himself.

The number mysticism of the nine, recognized as western, whose root is Dante St. Trinity, but also has its eastern reference:

Urwa reports on the authority of Aisa: The Prophet married Aisa when she was six years old. She was brought to him at the age of nine. And she was his wife for nine years until his death. "

Another means of irritation is the narrowing of the first-person narrator. The narration is closely related to the experience of the respective moment, the narrator does not seem to know more than the reader, many of his assessments and interpretations later turn out to be wrong. The encounter with Canan and the discovery of the book initially appeared to Osman to be pure coincidence. It was only much later that Osman realized that both the meeting with the beautiful Canan and the discovery of the book were the result of a planned seduction.

"" The coincidence, which I took to be life itself, to which I was happy and filled with love, was therefore entirely the production of someone else, "said the deceived hero ..." (198)

Paranoia and Conspiracy Theory

Some of Pamuk's books, e.g. B. The White Fortress , are given as examples in the article on the postmodern novel . In Das neue Leben, too, the author uses typical features of this genre: u. a. the motifs that are pronounced in Thomas Pynchon's work of the inexplicability of relationships and people's lack of orientation and the resulting paranoia with conspiracy theories .

The entire plot of the New Life takes place in a seemingly surreal, traumatic world into which the author projects his personal, society- related (see above political backgrounds ) and ontological themes known from other novels . The protagonists leave their old lives and, after reading the promising “book”, travel through Turkey in search of a new happy existence. Finally, disillusioned, they break off their explorations, like the narrator Osman, find themselves with everyday life, emigrate, e.g. B. Canan with the young doctor from Samsun, or take refuge in a fantasy realm.

These changes are associated with changes of identity: Nahit, the son of Dr. Narins, who separates from his Islamic traditional father, takes over the identity of the killed boy of the same age after a bus accident and goes into hiding in Istanbul as a student. The narrator later finds him in a small town as Osman Bey. His main occupation now is to copy the "book" over and over again.

These "book" readers and those who seek meaning in life do not form a closed group, but a loose association. You have to camouflage yourself and advertise like-minded people like in a conspiratorial organization only in personal relationships. So in the milieu of Istanbul students Canan is made aware of the “book” by Nahit / Mehmet and later the narrator by Canan and warned by their friend Mehmet that agents are on their toes and that in the land of the “book” they would “death, love and horror In the disguise of desperate men with guns in their belts, frozen expressions and broken hearts, wandering hopelessly like ghosts and it would be wrong [...] to imagine such a land of love ailments, hopelessness and murderers even in a dream. ”Osman observed shortly afterwards the attack on Mehmet. He then travels with Canan through Turkey to find out the puzzling events. They discover the background of the actions. Dr. After his son's turning away from his worldview based on the Koran, Narin has turned into the paranoid idea of ​​a "great [n] conspiracy [from the West] against himself, his way of thinking, [...] against everything that is vital for this country . "And now wants to track down the deviants, monitor them and shoot them. Together with the "broken-hearted representatives" (Chap. 7), failed small business people who could not withstand the wave of modernization and feel like victims of international competition, he intensifies his struggle, expands the network of agents and lets readers of the dangerous " Book “and kill the author. Such constellations correspond to Pamuk's description of "Turkey [...] [as] a country in which general, ready-made theories, paranoid ideas and the delusion that everything is connected with everything have established themselves." "Turkish paranoia [is] [... ] the political language that government and schools use. [...] The message is []: everyone is our enemy, everyone has conspired against our fatherland. […] Turkish paranoia mean a chain of conspiracies in which we believe we are entangled. «In this context, a statement by the writer about“ The White Fortress ”also applies to Das neue Leben :“ [I] I [have] transferred the motif of a figure with two selves to a fearful country between East and West [...] - a fear that the Turks have almost elevated to art. "

The narrator himself also changes his identity several times in the course of the plot: employee and family man or a traveling dropout. Under the name of a “broken-hearted representative” Ali who died in a bus accident, he met Canan, who plays the role of his wife Efsun Kara, at the founder of the movement, Dr. Narins, who sees him as his adopted son and successor, crept in and learns the story of his own recruitment from the agent reports. Out of disappointment over Canan's betrayal of love, he finally kills his son, who lives under his own name, Osman, with the pistol given by his father.

The novel ends with the deconstruction of both the conspiracy theories and the mysterious book and, in the sense of constructivism, refers back to the experience of personal perception: "And so I came back to the thought that had long since occurred to the reader who is curious about the teaching example, namely, that I was so deeply impressed by the New Life only because the books of my childhood had prepared me for it. But since, like the old masters of the parable , I myself could not believe in the teaching example set up for me, the story of my life remained entirely my story, which in no way alleviated my pain. My heart had long since come to this cruel result, which slowly dawned in my head ”.

As Dostoevsky connoisseur Pamuk should the conspiracy issue also from the demons to know: How the new life there, but at a different assessment of the contrasting groups by the authors, a tension between Western reformers and traditionalists who distrust each other (see FIG. East & West ): In 19th century Russia. Many intellectuals and writers influenced by the ideas of the French Revolution are constantly exposed to the danger of denunciation and of being arrested as supporters or sympathizers of conspiracies. Pyotr Stepanowitsch Verkhovensky takes up this dissatisfaction and plans to overthrow the feudal system and build a society of equal people. Both Dostoyevsky and Pamuk disillusioned their utopian goals: like Verkhovensky, the narrator Osman plays a double game for his private revenge and kills Canan's lover. Verkhovensky reports his father Stepan Trofimowitschs to the governor as the leader of the revolutionary movement and enforces the cohesion of his supporters by jointly executing the alleged informer Shatov, who wants to separate from the group, for fear of the secret police. Dostoyevsky wants to use this example to demonstrate the danger of nihilistic terrorists ruled by evil spirits. In Pamuk, however, the delusion of a fundamentalist is focused. In the end, both novels expose the conspiracy theories as constructions, the destructive effect of which, however, cannot be seen through by the characters concerned.

text

• Orhan Pamuk: Das neue Leben, original title: Yeni Hayat, translated from Turkish by Ingrid Iren, Roman, Munich, Vienna (Carl Hanser Verlag) 1998, 347 pages, ISBN 3-446-19289-1
• Orhan Pamuk, Yeni hayat, volume 27 by Çağdaş Türkçe edebiyat, volume 304 by İletişim Yayınları, İletişim 1994, 280 pages, ISBN 9789754704457

literature

• Ian Almond: The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard. Tauris IB, September 4, 2007, ISBN 978-1-84511-398-8 .
• B. Venkat Mani: Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk. University of Iowa Press, June 2007/2, ISBN 978-1-58729-584-3 (English).
• Ziya Gökalp : Yeni Hayat ve Yeni Kıymatlar (The new life and the new values). Genç Kalemler, 1918.
• The fabric of Istanbul, Celal Özkan in conversation with Orhan Pamuk, writing book, Zeitschrift für Literatur 48, November 1996, pp. 61–65.
• Orhan Pamuk: Europe, Turkey and the meaning of the novel. In: Lydia Haustein, Joachim Sartorius, Christoph Bertrams (eds.): Model Turkey ?: A country caught between religion, military and democracy. Wallstein, September 15, 2006, ISBN 978-3-8353-0067-5 , p. 110 ff.
• Orhan Pamuk: No problem about my problems ..., a lecture. Writing book, Zeitschrift für Literatur 48, November 1996, pp. 51-53.
• Joachim Sartorius: The world in the picture of the poet, Orhan Pamuk's descriptions of modern Turkey , abridged and revised version of the laudation for Orhan Pamuk for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade 2005, in: Lydia Haustein, Joachim Sartorius, Christoph Bertrams (ed.): Model Turkey ?: A country caught between religion, military and democracy. Wallstein, September 15, 2006, ISBN 978-3-8353-0067-5 .

Web links

• Apollinaria Avrutina: The Novels by Orhan Pamuk and Russian Literature. In: Cevirbilim , May 13, 2009 (English).
• Christoph Bartmann: The new life, from the Turkish by Ingrid Iren. Review in Deutschlandradio , March 11, 1999.
• Andrew Bast: Writers Sounding Off, On Stage With Pamuk, Manea and Rushdie ( Memento July 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ). In: The New York Inquirer , November 10, 2006.
• If someone stopped and led me to Ararat, review: “The new life”. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , November 3, 1998.
• Reviewed in The New York Review of Books , Volume 55, Number 20, December 18, 2008.

Sources and individual references

1. ↑ Further reference points for the title are an essay by Ziya Gökalp , one of the most influential propagandists of a nationalist reform in Turkey, from 1918, entitled "Yeni Hayat ve Yeni Kıymatlar" (The new life and the new values) in the The influential journal Genç Kalemler was published (see B. Venkat Mani: Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk, 2007, p. 156). Gökalp already used the metaphor “light” for the desired innovations (Altın Işık: Goldenes Licht , Istanbul 1339 and 1923). Furthermore, the title in the novel alludes to a traditional candy brand in Turkey.
2. ↑ Orhan Pamuk himself studied architecture at the Technical University of Istanbul for three years from the age of 20 and began his first book “Cevdet Bey and his sons” at the age of 22; see. Orhan Pamuk: The view from my window . Munich, Vienna (Carl Hanser Verlag) 2006, ISBN 3-446-20739-2 , p. 26 f. and: The fabric of Istanbul, Celal Özkan in conversation with Orhan Pamuk, writing book, 1996, p. 62
3. ↑ Orhan Pamuk: The New Life . Fischer Frankfurt am Main. 2001, p. 82. ISBN 978-3-596-14561-4 . In the course of action section is quoted after this edition.
4. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 93.
5. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 100.
6. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 124.
7. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 155.
8. ↑ ^{a b c} Pamuk 2001, p. 198.
9. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 205.
10. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 201.
11. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 203.
12. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 238.
13. ↑ ^{a b c} Pamuk 2001, p. 239.
14. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 252.
15. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 256.
16. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 265.
17. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 270.
18. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 265.
19. ↑ ^{a b} Pamuk 2001, p. 259.
20. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 273.
21. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 317.
22. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 328.
23. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 331.
24. ↑ All page numbers based on the bound edition of Orhan Pamuk: Das neue Leben, original title: Yeni Hayat, Roman, Munich, Vienna (Carl Hanser Verlag) 1998, 347 pages, ISBN 3-446-19289-1
25. ↑ ^{a b c d e} If someone stopped and led me to Ararat, review: “Das neue Leben”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 3, 1998
26. ↑ ^{a b} B. Venkat Mani: Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk. University of Iowa Press, June 2007/2, ISBN 978-1-58729-584-3 , p. 152.
27. ↑ Christoph Bartmann: The new life, from the Turkish by Ingrid Iren. In: Deutschlandradio , March 11, 1999. Accessed August 27, 2018; the motto is: "... the others have heard the same thing, and nobody has come across anything like it" and is taken from the first chapter of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. At Novalis, it is the speeches of a stranger that open the way for his protagonist to a new world. In the dream the way into another world appears to him. These stories have no effect on others.
28. ↑ cf. Review in The New York Review of Books , Volume 55, Number 20, December 18, 2008. Retrieved August 27, 2018 (English; I regret that I have not been able to shake off the enlightenment utilitarian idea that books exist to prepare us for life. Perhaps this is because a writer's life in Turkey is proof that they are. But it also has something to do with the fact that in those days Turkey lacked the sort of large library where you could easily locate any book you wanted.)
29. ↑ cf. Reviewed in The New York Review of Books , Volume 55, Number 20, December 18, 2008. Retrieved August 27, 2018.
30. ↑ cf. Review in The New York Review of Books , Volume 55, Number 20, December 18, 2008. Retrieved August 27, 2018 (English; "... if I spent time skimming through them, it was not because they had literary merit, but because I could find in them descriptions of life in Turkey's villages and small towns and slices of life from Istanbul. ")
31. ↑ ^{a b c} Orhan Pamuk: Problem-free about my problems ..., A lecture, writing book, 1996, p. 52
32. ^ Novalis , Heinrich von Ofterdingen
33. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Christoph Bartmann: The new life, from Turkish by Ingrid Iren. In: Deutschlandradio , March 11, 1999. Accessed August 27, 2018.
34. ↑ cf. Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, 2007, p. 122
35. ^ Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, 2007, p. 123
36. ^ Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, 2007, p. 124
37. ^ Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, 2007, p. 126
38. ↑ cf. Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, 2007, p. 115 ff.
39. ↑ cf. Das neue Leben, p. 300 ff. (“Handbooks such as The Principles of Sufism , Child Psychology , A Brief History of the World , The Great Philosophers and the Great Martyrs , Illustrated and Commented Dream Interpretations , some translations by Dante, Ibn Arabi and Rilke from the classic series of the Ministry of Education, which were distributed free of charge in some ministries and administrative departments, anthologies such as The Most Beautiful Love Poems and Stories of the Fatherland , translations by Jules Verne, Sherlock Holmes and Mark Twain in colorful covers and others such as Kon- Tiki , also geniuses were children , the last station , birds as pets , tell me a poem and a thousand and one riddles . ")
40. ^ Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, 2007, p. 110
41. ↑ Joachim Sartorius, Die Welt im Bild des Dichters, Orhan Pamuk's Descriptions of Modern Turkey, 2006, p. 107
42. ↑ Joachim Sartorius, The world in the picture of the poet, Orhan Pamuks Descriptions of modern Turkey, 2006, p. 107 f.
43. ↑ cf. The new life, p. 294ff
44. ↑ Das neue Leben, p. 333
45. ^ Rainer Maria Rilke, 9th Duinese Elegy, quoted from Zeno.org
46. ↑ “Yeni Hayat ve Yeni Kıymatlar” (The new life and the new values), published in the journal: Genç Kalemler (cf. B. Venkat Mani: Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk, 2007, p. 156 ).
47. ↑ B. Venkat Mani: Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk, 2007, p. 157.
48. ↑ ^{a b} Orhan Pamuk, Europe, Turkey and the meaning of the novel, 2006, p. 110
49. ↑ Orhan Pamuk, Europe, Turkey and the Meaning of the Novel, 2006, p. 110 f.
50. ↑ Joachim Sartorius, Die Welt im Bild des Poet, Orhan Pamuk's Descriptions of Modern Turkey, 2006, p. 104
51. ↑ ^{a b} Orhan Pamuk, Europe, Turkey and the meaning of the novel, 2006, p. 111
52. ↑ cf. The fabric of Istanbul, Celal Özkan in conversation with Orhan Pamuk, writing book, 1996, p. 61
53. ↑ Andrew Bast: Writers Sounding Off, On Stage With Pamuk, Manea and Rushdie, The New York Inquirer, Friday, November 10, 2006 [1]
54. ↑ Reviewed in The New York Review of Books , Volume 55, Number 20, December 18, 2008. Retrieved August 27, 2018.
55. ↑ Apollinaria Avrutina: The Novels by Orhan Pamuk and Russian Literature. In: Cevirbilim , May 13, 2009. Retrieved on August 27, 2018 (English; The author writes that everybody who had drunk Coca-Cola, which gradually gets hold of the position of the Turkish mineral water called "Budak", lost their minds ). [6] By the way, in Russia an ad of the Russian national non-alcoholic drink called "kvas" was shown on TV with the slogan "No colanization, kvas is the health of nation".
56. ↑ Apollinaria Avrutina: The Novels by Orhan Pamuk and Russian Literature. In: Cevirbilim , May 13, 2009. Retrieved on August 27, 2018 (English): “On the one hand, the writer supports progress, the necessity to westernize his country, to understand that Europeanization and the European culture will bring progress and prosperity . At the same time, he writes - both in "The New Life", in "Istanbul" and in "Other Colors" - what featureless are the Turkish cities filled with attributes of the Western man-caused civilization: plastic billboards, brands of transnational corporations and concrete undistinguished apartment buildings, which make all cities all over the world look similar. "
57. ^ Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, 2007, p. 112: "Pamuk's novels represent a clear brake from a tradition of Turkish social realism à la Kemal."
58. ↑ ^{a b} cf. Orhan Pamuk: Problem-free about my problems ..., A lecture, copybook, 1996, p. 52
59. ↑ Orhan Pamuk: Problem-free about my problems ..., A lecture, exercise book, 1996, p. 53
60. ↑ Orhan Pamuk, quoted from: Christoph Bartmann: Das neue Leben, From Turkish by Ingrid Iren. In: Deutschlandradio , March 11, 1999. Accessed August 27, 2018.
61. ↑ Orhan Pamuk: Problem-free about my problems ..., A lecture, writing book, 1996, p. 51
62. ↑ for example Osman's body detaches itself under the effect of the book “from table and chair”, at the same time Osman seems “more firmly than ever to sit on the chair at the table with all of my being and all the fibers of my body” (9); "A light that made my mind completely dull and at the same time extremely shiny" (9)
63. ↑ the term “light”, for example, appears 5 times on the first page of the book
64. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 287.
65. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 288.
66. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 306.
67. ↑ ^{a b} Pamuk 2001, p. 49.
68. ^ Al-Bukhari : News of actions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad
69. ↑ “That was all, that was all chance that changed my life.” Das neue Leben, p. 27.
70. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 82.
71. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 155.
72. ↑ quoted from: My grandmother donated ten lira. In: Die Welt , October 20, 2005. Retrieved August 27, 2018.
73. ↑ Pamuk 2001, p. 340.