On Orhan Kemal's The Idle Years

Novels are a source of comfort and psychological sustenance to their readers, but they can be so to their writers too. This is especially true for writers working in an autobiographical mode. The novel, here, is like a beam turned in upon oneself, lighting up old shadows and nooks -- or it might be thought of as a mirror in which one's old faces successively appear. The forward march of the narrative in this case also a backward journey into time, and the slow time and fruitful agitation of writing throw up memories long submerged.
These are the speculations occasioned by The Idle Years, a novel first published in two parts in 1949 and 1950 by the great Turkish writer Orhan Kemal (often referred to in the English-speaking world as "the Turkish Dickens"), and now newly and strikingly translated by Cengiz Luhal. Although it is sometimes a mistake to link a writer's books too simply to his autobiography, it would seem that a discussion of The Idle Years would at least begin with such a reading.

The unnamed narrator of the book is the son of a charismatic political agitator who is sent into exile with his family after falling foul of the Turkish regime in the 1920s. Brought up in a large house with all the comforts of life, the protagonist is suddenly pitchforked into a life in which the family is always on the move, money is scarce, and the father's temper thunderous. He is forced to work at menial jobs, and begins to keep the company of a set whom he had previously seen only from afar, and with no consideration of their miseries: workers, vagabonds, and prostitutes. He is constantly hungry, and when granted a good meal through luck, comradeship or charity not only eats ravenously but also remembers every dish and every helping for days. He is often consumed by despair and by shame, but most of all loathes the heavy hand and bellowing voice of his father.

This story broadly follows the contours of Kemal's own youth, and it might be seen as part of that current in literature in which writers mull over the weight placed on their lives, in both good and bad ways, by their fathers: the early novels and later autobiographical meditations of VS Naipaul, for instance, or Franz Kafka's anguished Letter To My Father, or even the essays of Kemal's famous countryman Orhan Pamuk (whose Nobel Prize acceptance speech is called "My Father's Suitcase", and who has written a short, admiring foreword for this book).

Indeed, the first part of The Idle Years is called My Father's House, and its closing movement is one in which the protagonist resolves to leave that house, and returns from Beirut to his homeland to strike out on his own. In one of the novel's best passages, the narrator returns to his hometown, Adana, hot with stories of his itinerant life to tell his childhood friends, only to find that nothing is as it used to be. The place the heart thinks of as home is a pillar to one's self but fragile on its own terms.

Kemal's novel beautifully evokes the world-changing ardour and angst of youth, the consolations of friendship, the aches and burns of love, and the redemption of constant misery and hardship by small acts of kindness or brief interludes of escape. He is considered a great writer of dialogue, and in Luhal's translation the reader can see why. Many of his characters are real talkers, but they talk in a stop-start and naturalistic fashion, leaping from one subject to another, or revealing some particularity of their character through a repeated emphasis. They don't always know what they are saying, though characters in other kinds of novels seem to.

The Idle Years ends with a scene in which the protagonist, still impoverished, marries his beloved wearing a borrowed suit, shoes, and tie. The newlyweds are excited by the beautiful gifts that they have been given, and begin to construct a castle of dreams upon them, only to find out that the groom's grandmother borrowed them all from family and friends to give the wedding a glitter, and that the goods must now all be returned. This episode is symbolic of the whole story, in which hope and yearning are always trying to break free of the chains of reality, and disappointment is quickly forgotten. The last line of Kemal's novel - "So we carried on with our lives, appreciating all that we had" - seems both an observation of a fact and a piece of friendly advice to the reader.
And some other essays on Turkish literature: "Nazim Hikmet in prison" (Hikmet and Kemal were contemporaries, and spent time in prison together, and indeed one register of The Idle Years is distinctly Hikmetian), "Orhan Veli Kanik all of a sudden", and "On Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red".

On Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul

My review of Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul appeared last weekend in the Sunday Telegraph.

If Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak, the two best-known Turkish novelists in the English-speaking world, have one virtue in common, it is that both have persistently interrogated their country's self-image, contrasting the narrowness of Turkism with the cosmopolitanism of the old Ottoman empire. Both have gone on trial, too, under an infamous article of the Turkish Penal Code for the crime of "insulting Turkishness". In terms of their viewpoints there is not much to choose between them. Shafak's latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, shows her though to be a more attack-minded and perhaps less sophisticated novelist than her great contemporary.

Shafak's novel drives the distant past into the path of the heedless present through a multi-generational narrative, and it addresses explicitly a controversial episode in Turkish history, the massacre of perhaps a million Armenians by Ottoman forces in 1915-16. The bastard of Istanbul is Asya Kazanci, the illegitimate child of one of four headstrong sisters who live together as one family - the Kazanci men having an unfortunate habit of dying young. Asya does not know who her father is and has been taught not to bother with trying to find out; she is similarly indifferent to her country's history.

The single living Kazanci man, Asya's uncle Mustapha, has settled in America and married a divorcée of Armenian descent. When Mustapha's step-daughter, Armanoush, arrives suddenly in Istanbul on a search for her family's roots, the Kazanci women are forced to accept the truth that the novel dramatises, which is that "the past is anything but bygone". Thus, Shafak's double-sided narrative demonstrates how the Armenian diaspora and the Turkish people live in different time frames, one community still nursing the wounds of old crimes, the other living in a present that accepts no responsibility for the past.

Yet it could be said that, on balance, Shafak's novel is not all that novelistic. Its characters lack true freedom and interiority and can seem mere symbols or meanings fitted into an overarching structure. Indeed, one suspects that what seems to be a problem with Shafak's theory of character may really have to do with her choice of language. Shafak is that rarity, a bilingual novelist; she began writing novels in Turkish, but this is her second novel in English.

Yet deadly flat sentences such as: 'If her passion for books had been one fundamental reason behind her recurring inability to sustain a standard relationship with the opposite sex...' raise doubts about whether even a novelist as gifted as Shafak possesses the understanding and intuition to successfully dramatise her ideas in two languages.

And an old post: on Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red.

Orhan Veli Kanik all of a sudden

The Turkish poet Orhan Veli Kanik (1914-1950), in the honorable tradition of poets the world over, lived in penury, drank too much for his own good, and died young. He left behind a body of work sometimes accused of being too simplistic, even unpoetic, but Kanik's rebellion was actually against what is conventionally thought of as the "poetic" - lyrical effusions, elaborate conceits, stifling metres.

Kanik's poems are about the texture of everyday life and about the sudden epiphany or realization glimpsed amidst life's chaos. Their language is simple and undecorative, all verbs and nouns, and they have a tone of casual, offhand utterance. We may hold that the special quality of poets is that they present (as Alexander Pope memorably put it) "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed", but curiously with Kanik we feel as if he has expressed something in exactly the language we would have found ourselves. All readers of Kanik go from his work convinced, for good or for bad, that they are poets themselves. "Even I," they may say to themselves, "could write a poem such as 'Fine Days' - in fact I was thinking these very thoughts just the other day...." And why do I put those thoughts in quote marks? Even I have thought them - but here is the poem:

Fine Days

These fine days have been my ruin.
On this kind of day I resigned
My job in "Pious Foundations.''
On this kind of day I started to smoke
On this kind of day I fell in love
On this kind of day I forgot
To bring home bread and salt
On this kind of day I had a relapse
In my versifying disease.
These fine days have been my ruin.
(translated by Bernard Lewis)

Kanik's favourite poetic device is repetition, which confers upon his lines the rhythm without which poetry is impoverished, and which embodies at the level of form the moment when everything has suddenly become clear, and the connections between disparate things have become visible to the mind. A variety of experiences then appear filtered through some unifying phrase: the wistful "On this kind of day" in the earlier poem, and "All of a sudden" in this one, with its ascending notes of wonder:

All of a Sudden

Everything happened all of a sudden.
All of a sudden daylight beat down on the earth;
There was the sky all of a sudden;
All of a sudden steam began to rise from the soil.
There were tendrils all of a sudden, buds all of a sudden.
And there were fruits all of a sudden.
All of a sudden,
All of a sudden,
Girls all of a sudden, boys all of a sudden.
Roads, moors, cats, people...
And there was love all of a sudden,
Happiness all of a sudden.

Translated by Anil Mericelli

Elsewhere the repetitions evoke a child's querulousness and petulance, as in "Tree":

Tree
I threw a pebble at the tree.
My pebble didn't fall.
Didn't fall.
The tree ate my pebble,
The tree ate my pebble.
I want my pebble.

I always think of this poem when a public phone refuses to return my coin even though my call has not gone through.

And in this six-line poem called "Landscapes", Kanik is found making a cheeky jibe at nature poets:

Landscapes
The moon came up
Behind the house across the street.
Street noises began.
The air is cooler,
From far away comes the smell of the sea.
I am an expert on landscapes.

Five lines of comically jumbled observation ("From far away comes the smell of the sea" is particularly funny) are rounded off by the abrupt claim of the sixth.

The translations of "Tree" and "Landscapes" are by Murat Nemet-Nejat, who has done more than anyone else to make Turkish poetry available to an English-speaking audience. In 2004 Nemet-Nejat brought out Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, and he also has published a book of translations of Kanik's work called I, Orhan Veli, and all of it is available to read online here. Among the poems I like best are "I, Orhan Veli", "I Am Listening To Istanbul", "The Poem of Being Lonely", "Sunday Evenings", and "Rumors".

Nemet-Nejat's introduction to I, Orhan Veli is here, and offers some very interesting thoughts on different approaches towards translation in an essay called "Translation and Style".

Other posts on poets: Osip Mandelstam, Nazim Hikmet, Attila Jozsef, Constantine Cavafy, Antonio Machado, Dunya Mikhail and Jorge Luis Borges.

On Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red

Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red is that rare book: a contemporary work that can already be thought of as one of the truly essential novels. Although the Nobel Prize, which was awarded to Pamuk last week, is given not for a single book but for a body of work, there can be little doubt that My Name Is Red stands at the centre of Pamuk's oeuvre.

The first chapter of the novel is narrated by a corpse. "I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of the well […] no one, apart from that vile murderer, knows what's happened to me," he begins. There is no one to hear the corpse, yet his words assume a listener. That listener is the reader, and My Name is Red is full of such speakers who, like agitated and unruly witnesses at a public hearing, jostle each other to press upon the reader the stories of their lives and the shape of their feelings.

Pamuk's novel is set in sixteenth-century Istanbul, at the time of the zenith of the Ottoman empire, and it is at different levels a murder mystery, a love story, a meditation on the significance of art in man's life, a parable of the relationship between the East and the West, and an experiment in narrative plurality.

The novel's cast of characters (most of whom are also narrators) include the clever and beautiful Shekure, whose husband has gone missing in war and who therefore may be a widow; Shekure's father 'Enishte' ('Uncle') Effendi, a senior functionary of the Sultan's court; and Black, Enishte's nephew and the protagonist of the story, back in Istanbul after having fallen in love with Shekure when younger and being rejected by her and banished by Enishte from his home. There is also Hasan, Shekure's brother-in-law, also obsessively in love with her; and a band of calligraphers and illustrators employed in a thriving art, the production of illuminated manuscripts illustrating old tales and legends under the Sultan's patronage.

The back-story of My Name Is Red is the encounter of some of the men at the forefront of Ottoman art with an entirely different style of art just beginning to take hold of the human imagination in the West: the art of human portraiture. The clash between two views of artistic practice could not be more total. Ottoman art is above all a religious art. Conscious that idolatry - and by extension painting - is forbidden by the Koran, it produces pictures mainly as illustrations of well-known tales and stories, as ostensible aids in their understanding, and with due care taken to portray the world from "an elevated Godlike perspective," as if leading us to "God's vision."

But the new Western art of portraiture, which Enishte Effendi first encounters on an official visit to Venice, privileges the human subject, depicting the unique and individual characteristics of each face it portrays, and treating painting as an end in itself and an attempt to replicate reality. Enishte describes this art to Black as appearing to embody "a sin of desire, like growing arrogant before God, like considering oneself of utmost importance, like situating oneself at the center of the world." But he is also utterly fascinated by it for the same reason: it seems to immortalise each man it depicts, perpetuate in remarkable fashion his finite life. Enishte remarks with wonder:

If your face was depicted in this fashion only once, no one would ever be able to forget you, and if you were far away, someone who laid eyes on your portrait would feel your presence as if you were actually nearby. Those who had never seen you alive, even years after your death, could come face-to-face with you as if you were standing before them.

His Sultan is equally fascinated by the new art of portraiture. Desirous of having his portrait painted in this fashion, he instructs Enishte to prepare in secret, using his workshop's best artists, a book about his reign on the occasion of the thousandth year of the Hegira, to be presented to the Venetians as a marvellous symbol of the Sultan's power. It is to help him with the book - as also the management of skilled and sensitive artists who must now work in secret, and both personally consider as well as provoke in their wider society the question of blasphemy - that Enishte has recalled Black to Istanbul. And Black, still lovestruck after all these years, is obviously keen to re-explore the question of whether Shekure, now probably a widow, is interested in him. Observing the specimens of portraiture shown to him by his uncle, Black thinks:

Had I taken Shekure's portrait with me, rendered in the style of the Venetian masters, I wouldn't have felt such loss during my long travels when I could scarcely remember my beloved, whose face I'd left somewhere behind me. For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.

Black is a solitary, ruminative sort: his troubled life leads him to assert that "for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness". But he pursues Shekure enthusiastically, and all of a sudden she agrees to marry him if he agrees to certain conditions. Suddenly it is Black's wedding day: he can scarcely believe how he has suddenly been presented "the greatest of gifts…after so much suffering". He finds an imam and goes with him across the Bosphorus river in search of a legal functionary, and on the way imagines how a miniaturist might paint this scene of his life, tinged with the slight foreboding that is a characteristic aspect of his thought:

…the miniaturist ought to depict us amid mustachioed and muscled oarsmen, forging our way across the blue Bosphorus towards Uskudar in the four-oared red longboat we'd boarded at Unkapani. The preacher and his skinny dark-complexioned brother, pleased with the surprise voyage, are engaging the oarsmen in friendly chatter. Meanwhile, amid blithe dreams of marriage that play ceaselessly before my eyes, I stare deep into the waters of the Bosphorus, flowing clearer than usual on this sunny winter morning, on guard for an ominous sign within its currents. I'm afraid, for example, that I might see the wreck of a private ship below. Thus, no matter how joyously the miniaturist colours the sea and the clouds, he ought to include something equivalent to the darkness of my fears and as intense as my dreams of happiness - a terrifying-looking fish, for example - in the depths of the water so the reader of my adventure won't assume all is rosy.

Not the least of the novel's pleasures is the whiff and the savour of its keen metaphysical intelligence, its willingness to engage with life's deepest questions. One such instance appears when Enishte Effendi is murdered. His soul ascends to heaven led by an angel and talks of its experiences, like the corpse with whom the book begins. Slowly coming to terms with his existence in this new realm ("Eternal puzzles and dark enigmas that only the dead might understand were now being revealed and illuminated, bursting forth brilliantly one by one in thousands of colours"), Enishte suddenly senses that he is in the presence of the divine. He is overcome by fear and ecstasy, as also anguish over his probable sin of blasphemy. He blurts out some words and hears a response, not aloud, but "in my thoughts". This is how the matter proceeds:

I could barely contain my excitement.
"All right then, what is the meaning of it all, of this…of this world?"
"Mystery," I heard in my thoughts, or perhaps, "mercy," but I wasn't certain of either.

A startling double note is struck here, of confusion and unintentional comedy on the one hand, and profundity and religious awe on the other. Taken by itself, either of the two possible replies would have been anticlimactic, but blurred together as they are here, they are marvellously satisfying.

As these short excerpts may reveal, Pamuk's narrative artistry, his appetite for ideas, his talent for patterning (a method of producing meaning through the repetition or the contrast of words, thoughts, or symbols), and his flair for observation all find expression in the most remarkable sentences, their beautiful and startling cadences transmitting a sense of agile minds roused to a high pitch. It is hard to think of another book in which practically every sentence has such an aesthetically pleasing shape and a ring to it. Erdag Goknar's marvellous translation has produced a book that, had it been written originally in English, would stand alongside the greatest works of English prose.

The first chapter of My Name Is Red can be found here.

And here are some essays by Pamuk: "Freedom to Write", delivered as a PEN lecture earlier this year; "In Kars and Frankfurt", a piece which considers the novel "as a way of thinking, understanding and imagining, and also as a way of imagining oneself as someone else"; "A Private History", in which he talks about the research that went into My Name Is Red and his use of autobiographical matter in the book; "City of Ghosts", an extract from Istanbul, his book about the city that has nourished his imagination; "The Anger of the Damned", a piece written after the 9/11 attacks; "Humour May Be Our Only Hope", on the Turkish elections of 2002; "Road to Rebellion", on driving through the city of Tehran; "A private reading of Andre Gide's public Journal", on the French writer Andre Gide; and "On Trial", an account of going on trial in Turkey last year for a reference to the Armenian massacre of 1915.

Update, October 30: And here's a new essay by Pamuk on himself and his work, "Implied Author" ("To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to enter into that world and believe it to be true - nothing makes me happier, nothing binds me more to life. I also prefer it if the writer is dead, because then there is no little cloud of jealousy to darken my admiration. The older I get, the more convinced I am that the best books are by dead writers.")

Nazim Hikmet in prison

The trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, for having “publicly denigrated Turkish identity” with his remarks about the massacre of Armenians and Kurds by the Ottoman regime early in the twentieth century, makes this an apt time to recall the life and career of another Turkish writer prosecuted - indeed, persecuted - by the state for his controversial views: the most prominent name in modern Turkish poetry, Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963).

In 1938 Hikmet, who like a great many poets of his time (Pablo Neruda, for example) was a committed Marxist, was sentenced to 28 years in prison on charges of sedition for a long poem about a fifteenth-century rebellion against Ottoman rule. Hikmet’s case, like Pamuk’s now, received wide international attention. Indeed, the figure of Hikmet looms in Pamuk’s recent remarks (in an essay in the New Yorker) about his country’s historic persecution of writers, and his joke that it is only with his trial that he has become “a real Turkish writer”. In 1949 an international committee, including on its rolls Picasso and Sartre, was formed to campaign for Hikmet’s release, and in 1950, the year he was released by Turkey’s first democratically elected government, he received the World Peace Prize. Hikmet continued to be harassed even by the new regime, and eventually had to seek refuge in Poland.

His long years in prison, and the experience of hardship, privation and even torture, seemed to have focussed Hikmet’s attention on questions of life and death - on what it meant to be alive, to really live fully and vitally, and on the shadow of mortality that always hangs over life and renders our existence precarious and fragile. There are not many Hikmet poems in which these concerns do not come up in some form or the other. One of his most famous poems, “On Living”, begins: “Living is no laughing matter:/ you must live with great seriousness/ like a squirrel, for example-/ I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,/I mean living must be your whole occupation.” In another poem he speaks of the necessity of living as intensely as possible, of being “caught up/ in the flurry of the world”. His verse often reflects this; it is full of vivid details and small epiphanies. Here is another of his best-known poems, “Today is Sunday”:

Today is Sunday
Sunday today.
Today they took me out in the sun for the first time.
And I just stood there, struck for the first time in my life
by how far away the sky is,
how blue
and how wide.
Then I respectfully sat down on the earth.
I leaned back against the wall.
For a moment no trap to fall into,
no struggle, no freedom, no wife.
Only earth, sun, and me...
I am happy.

And in one of his most beautiful and affecting poems, Hikmet imagines his funeral:

My Funeral

Will my funeral start in our courtyard below?
How will you bring my coffin down three floors?
The lift will not take it
and the stairs are too narrow.

Perhaps the courtyard will be knee-deep in sunlight and pigeons
perhaps there will be snow and children's cries mingling in the air
or the asphalt glistening with rain
and the dustbins littering the place as usual.

If in keeping with the custom here I am to go, face open to the skies,
on the hearse, a pigeon might drop something on my brow, for luck.
Whether a band turns up or no, children will come near me,
children like funerals.

Our kitchen window will stare after me as I go,
the washing on the balcony will wave to see me off.
I have been happier here than you can ever imagine,
friends, I wish you all a long and happy life.

---------------------------------------------------
One stops upon the marvellous images of “the courtyard knee-deep in sunlight and pigeons” and the washing on the balcony waving the corpse off. And the booming final line asserts, just like the glittering details of the lines that precede it, the desire to breathe fully of life, celebrate its colours and textures, even at the point of taking leave of it. Has any poet ever made death seem so much fun?

Some of Hikmet’s other poems can be found here; I recommend in particular “Hymn To Life”, “Last Will and Testament”, "Things I Didn't Know I Loved", and the wonderfully poignant and plaintive “I Come and Stand at Every Door” (“I come and stand at every door/ But no one hears my silent tread”), which was made into a song by the Byrds. Hikmet’s most recent translators, Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, observe, “Like Whitman, Hikmet speaks of himself, his country, and the world in the same breath. At once personal and public, his poetry records his life without reducing it to self-consciousness.”

Pamuk’s essay “On Trial” can be found here, and here is Pankaj Mishra’s recent essay about the Pamuk affair, “Secular Democracy Goes On Trial”. The Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer has an essay called "Literature, Censorship and the State" here, and here is an excellent essay on writing and censorship by the South African novelist JM Coetzee, from his book Giving Offence. And in his essay "Defend the right to be offended", written last February, Salman Rushdie writes: "The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted is absurd. So too is the notion that people should have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted. A fundamental decision needs to be made: do we want to live in a free society or not?"

Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul

People who have travelled comparatively little but read quite a lot (and there is an essay waiting to be written on why, for some, readerly journeys are preferable to real ones) often derive their conception of the world's great cities from novels. Their image of London is from Dickens, they think of Naguib Mahfouz whenever they hear the mention of Cairo, and Chicago for them is the same Chicago that can be found in Saul Bellow's novels. In much the same way, when I think of Istanbul I picture it as it appears in the novels of Orhan Pamuk, one of the leading novelists of our time.

Pamuk's novel My Name is Red, a luminous tale about a group of sixteenth-century Ottoman miniaturists and calligraphers whose conception of art is a religious one and who feel disturbed and threatened by the emerging Western school of portraiture, is a modern classic, containing hundreds of sentences so beautiful and evocative as to move, in Bellow's phrase to describe the effect of great books, 'wonder in the soul'. Also, each chapter of the novel is entrusted to a different narrator, so that the book itself becomes, like a fine Ottoman carpet, a weave of many perspectives, each adding to the effect of the other. Early in the novel a murder takes place, but we do not know who the murderer is. However, the culprit appears every once in a while to narrate a chapter from his point of view, all the while refusing to divulge his identity. In this passage below - note that it is only one long, winding sentence - the murderer follows Black, an artist who is competing with him for a woman's affections, around the city one night:

We were two men in love with the same woman; he was in front of me and completely unaware of my presence as we walked through the turning and twisting streets of Istanbul, climbing and descending, we traveled like brethren through deserted streets given over to battling packs of stray dogs, passed burnt ruins where jinns loitered, mosque courtyards where angels reclined on domes to sleep, beside cypress trees murmuring to the souls of the dead, beyond the edges of snow-covered cemeteries crowded with ghosts, just out of sight of brigands strangling their victims, passed endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leather works and stone walls; and as we made ground, I felt I wasn't following him at all, but rather, that I was imitating him.

What is wonderful about this sentence is the way it gives us a sense not only of an external world - that of various Istanbul scenes at night - but also at the same time through an internal world, that of the murderer. We note his fevered and extravagant imagination, which senses hidden presences in the most deserted places; we feel his intense vexation at his realisation (which the sentence delivers up in its final clause) that he is merely mimicking his antagonist, tailing the man he wishes to dominate and defeat. In a way, this sentence is a story all by itself.

Pamuk's most recent book is a work of non-fiction called Istanbul, in which he makes the case that the city of his birth is the most melancholy (the word for this in Turkish is 'hüzün') of all: "For the poet, hüzün is the smoky window between him and the world." An excerpt from Istanbul can be found here. The first chapter of My Name is Red is available here, and an interview with Pamuk on the subject of the novel here.

And speaking of journeys that involve staying at home instead of travelling, here's Alain de Botton's introduction to Xavier de Maistre's eighteenth-century classic Journey Around My Bedroom, recently reissued by the Hesperus Press.