This is a review of a book review.

Apparently Orphan Pamuk is cleaning out his closets and has swept the oddments into a new book: Other Colors.

Just in case his name doesn’t ring any bells, he’s a Turkish writer who won the Nobel for literature in 2006. (I was a bit miffed, as I could make a list of people I think deserve it more.) I read Snow and thought it was passable. I came across a review of his new book by chance and was skimming through the beginning, which listed his creds when I bumped into this:

Pamuk is a talented writer, but no one in his right mind believes this was an award based on literary merit.

Ooow. Now she’s caught my interest. A lot of book reviewers tirelessly swoon about many an emperor’s tattered or non-existent garments. It frequently feels like a cosy, elite club. Everyone knows a certain author is brilliant and so everyone praises and grovels and they are obviously floating in the same ethereal circles since they’re brilliant enough to appreciate such talent.

And even holier, is when all this is done for political reasons. Sometimes a… not a hero exactly, but a face, a representative for a certain idea or movement is needed. (Sadly, many truly heroic people are overlooked — I can’t help but think of Hrant Dink: obit and excerpts from his last article.)

So openly criticizing the writings of the symbol of intellectual freedom in Turkey is not something most are prepared to do.

Enter Claire Berlinski:

The collection has been received with rapture by many critics, who celebrate this offering as a unique window into Pamuk’s interior life. Indeed, it is precisely that. Unfortunately, it seems that Pamuk’s interior life is largely that of a lugubrious poseur.

Now here is someone not afraid to have their own opinion.

For page upon page, Pamuk stresses in these self-enamoured tones that he is a man who really likes to read books. Good ones, too, by famous writers like Dostoyevsky and Borges - not, you know, easy ones. He’s different from other Turks, you see. But he’s not like the Europeans, either. He’s an outsider, eternally apart, rejected by all, accepted by no one (the Nobel committee aside). Life hurts. A seagull croaks.

Oh, I almost peed myself at that last line.

“Time passes,” Pamuk scribbles in his notebook. “There’s nothing. It’s already nighttime. Doom and defeat. … I am hopelessly miserable. … I could find nothing in these books that remotely resembled my mounting misery.” I suppose sentiments like these are not uniquely Turkish; teenagers around the world fill their diaries with this kind of drivel. But usually they read those diaries when they grow up, cringe, then throw them out along with their old Morrissey albums.

But the rest of the book is the kind of thing you can only publish if you have won a Nobel Prize and feel entirely confident that no matter what you say, everyone will buy it and the critics will be too afraid to point out the obvious: Sometimes it is best to keep your interior life to yourself.

Read the witty and well-written article here on her website. I plan to check out her new book. And don’t miss the gorgeous photo slideshow of the stray cats of Istambul (her partner is a photo journalist).

So, thanks to a delightful and thoughtful review, I’ve discovered a new author. A good day.

I liked it, then I didn’t like it, then I wasn’t sure, then I liked it.

Final verdict: worth reading.

After I read it, I looked up the author and wasn’t surprised to find that he’d written for TV and film. The book is quite visual, but unlike most books that read like this, it’s not a blatant screenplay-in-waiting.

Like most modern fiction, it is thin. The main premise of the book — the “ghost” story part — doesn’t really work. Everything else in the book is much more interesting. He would have been much better off just doing a straight character study.

Overall, it felt more like a young adult novel. Not just because of the simplicity, but because it had an adolescent mentality. I did like the main character, though, and his situation was interesting.

Modern angst in general is getting a little dull, however: I don’t know who I am and what I want, except it’s not what I’ve got. Plus I have no interests. Why am I so unhappy?? Come on folks, get a hobby, figure it out, peel your ass off the sofa, wake up, get therapy if you need it, change your life. It’s all too short.

Any day now I will be crushed by the teetering stack of books beside my computer that I’ve read but not yet reviewed here. Hopefully that will happen before I get around to Julian by Gore Vidal.

Anyhow, unwilling to break with tradition and downright frightened at the thought of approaching the Stack, I feel compelled to mention The Digested Read by John Crace. A regular column in The Guardian books section, The Digested Read is the anti-hype answer to the publishing world’s gushing. It creates a bit of balance. In the columnist’s words:

The idea of rewriting a book in the style of the author in just 500 or so words is a gift to any satirist, and it remains the only outlet in the print media where publishers’ hype always gets treated with the irreverence it deserves.

The basic premise for the Digested Read is that it should be the book that has created the most media noise that week.

I’ve always had a great deal of admiration for parody and satire as it takes a great deal of writerly skill and wit to pull off. Besides which, when done well nothing is more hilarious. John Crace is not always brilliant, but is nevertheless an enjoyable and necessary voice in today’s media-mad world.

This from the re-write of Life Class by Pat Barker:

They lay on the dingy bed as the trains rattled past the window. “My husband will kill us,” Teresa said nonchalantly. “Look, he’s even written me a note to that effect.”

I normally have a policy of not mentioning contemporary fiction that I didn’t like. The reason being that all the published writers I know google themselves. I absolutely hate the idea that I might discourage anyone or make them feel bad. The only time I break this rule is if the book is truly, deeply awful and the author needs to be stopped from wasting trees or, if the author is insanely over-hyped, winning awards (therefore quite likely to be delusional about the quality of the work) and rolling in piles of money.

The Kite Runner falls into the second category.

The covers of this book were bristling with those familiar, gushing clichés: “Powerful.” “Haunting.” “Moving. “Genuine.” “Riveting.” “Unforgettable.” Exhausting. Ooops, that last one is mine. But it’s how I feel being assaulted by all this manic, hysterical selling. There was even a review quote on the spine, as well as a NYT Bestseller warning — I mean boast. The word “powerful” actually appears six times on the outside of the book. Strangely, three of those six times are from the same NYT review. Guess they were proud of that one. As the too oft quoted Shakespeare line goes: “I think the lady doth protest too much.”

So I ended up starting this book with Dostoevsky-level expectations, when all I originally had in mind was reading something based in Afghanistan–as I know shamefully little about it, past or present.

The impression I had throughout was of a rather strained first novel with a lot of structural flaws. Not to mention that emotionally, it felt dishonest. I didn’t get much of a feel for the country and virtually none at all for the people because the narrator is a little overprotected rich kid. The “harshness” is TV-style and the violence clichéd and unreal. The first third is the better crafted, after that it devolves and by the last third we are reading an outline for a screenplay: plant, pay off, plant, pay off. It almost gives you motion sickness. And he just keeps hitting the beats; again, bad TV comes to mind. The ending is insultingly TV-ish: unreal and neatly tied up. Does anyone actually think that life is that simplistic?

There was one section that completely stood out, in a very odd way. It’s a scene in a hospital where a doctor is described as having a “Clark Gable” mustache, blinding white teeth and looking like a soap opera star. Then there is a highly technical one-page description of the character’s injuries. At the time, I thought, okay, he did some research and shoveled it in a bit heavily. But that scene kept coming back to me as just being, well, strange. Like it had some subliminal neon thing going on. Why? I did a bit of rooting around on the web… and wouldn’t you know it, the author is a doctor.

Now, I’m going to say something completely politically incorrect, so brace yourself. I think the reason this book is so hyped and popular is because people are always curious about the people they are–how shall we say it–subjugating? crushing? bombing the crap out of? Britain was obsessed with India, France with everything Egyptian (Napoleon), then the South Pacific, then Africa… Chinese scholars are fascinated with the Tibetan cultures China is doing its best to annihilate. If you look at the front page of the author’s website, you can see the two active ingredients here: guilt (note the author’s UN work video and the “ways to aid Afghanistan” section) and curiosity (”Buy the book!”).

If it hadn’t been hyped to death, I wouldn’t be angry. This is a slipshod “product”, more marketing than substance.