Authors : Ashutosh M. Popate and K. K. Askar
Page Nos : 65-68
Description :
The postmodernist novels of Orhan Pamuk are overtly Turkish in the context of their exploration of issues that are essentially national like the East-West dichotomy, the interlacing of cultures, cultural hybridity imposed by the modernisation of Turkey, conspiracy and counter-conspiracies, military coups and curfews, Sufism and the rise of political Islam. His novels are interpreted as typical of the Turkish view of the world outside, either the European or the North American, and also of their perception about themselves. In the fruitless, spiritual, and satirical Sufi journey of Galip, whose name itself is a pun on the 18th-century mystic poet of Turkey Sheikh Galip, Galip fails to find out his wife Ruya and his half-brother Celal, the newspaper columnist, and both of them are found murdered in the last. However, the novel does not unveil the identity of the murderer but rather plays with the genre of detective fiction by deliberately violating the traditional conventions by incorporating others: newspaper columns, confessions, and the history and culture of Turkey and myths. The novel exposes and questions the grand cultural and political narratives of Turkey, Islam, and Sufism in its postmodern absurdist misadventure and incorporates intertextuality and identity crisis to the extreme.
