Rick Simonson

Nobelity on Stage

A pause in the Mist Place action here, but now back to it. Sometimes the day job becomes a day AND night job, to wit, these past weeks having a number of sales reps with winter lists, and then our (Elliott Bay) being party to evenings that have included Zakes Mda, John Bowe, Peter D. Ward, Jeffrey Toobin, Jonathan Kozol, Garrison Keillor, Walter Mosley, Sherman Alexie, Ann Patchett, Jack Prelutsky, Orhan Pamuk, Carl Bernstein, Edwidge Danticat, Oliver Sacks, Laurence Hillman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Richard Russo, Francisco Goldman, Colleen J. McElroy, Thom Hartmann all in a sequence just concluded, with David Barsamian, Henry Petroski, Paul Prud'homme and others all on deck - and these are only the ones I've tended to. There have been others. And yes, other bookstores are going through this, too. 'Tis the season, though at least, mercifully, this year publishers are publishing and promoting as if November is a real month. Last year, with Congressional and Senate elections about, the month was almost totally avoided for major authors and touring, save for the late-month publications of novels by Isabel Allende and Thomas Pynchon. Otherwise, everything and most everyone we were going to see, we saw by October's end. For the purposes of this, one bit of here and there catching up ...

Among the visitors cited was the 2006 Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk. He spoke Monday, October 15 to a full house of nearly 2500 as the opening speaker in Seattle Arts & Lectures' 20th anniversary season. His appearance came within days of this year's Nobel bestowings: Doris Lessing receiving the literature prize and former vice presdent (and author, as we know him) Al Gore sharing the peace prize. Leaving the Nobel honors aside for a time, Pamuk's visit here was occasioned at least in part by the recent release of his newest book, Other Colors (Knopf).

The trajectory - and reception - of Pamuk's books in the U.S. over the past two decades is interesting. His first three novels - The New Life, The Black Book, and The White Castle - published variously by Braziller, Farrar, and Harcourt, all had fairly quiet lives. Things started changing with Knopf's 2001 publication of My Name is Red. Our store's experience changed radically when Pamuk visited in October 2004, traveling the U.S. for the novel Snow. He drew a full house. As has happened with other writers from other countries - Shahrnush Parsipur, Abdelrahman Munif, Haruki Murakami, Dinaw Mengestu, and many others, who have read here (for Murakami, with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle it was still a point where none of his books' hardcover sales had cracked the 10,000 mark), the audience was a mix of enthusiasts from the author's home country along with readers from here who in many cases felt they were championing this secret writer no one else knew about.

Pamuk's Elliott Bay night for Snow had a large contingent there from Seattle's Turkish community - including University of Washington scholars and translators who have worked with Pamuk - all there with their Turkish editions, but also buying up copies of the various titles in English. Their intensity couldn't help but inspire more avid interest in others - not only in Snow, which many there had read in Turkish, but also in the then-forthcoming book Istanbul, which we all got to see would be a book of text laced with family and historical photographs, as indeed the Knopf/Vintage editions would also show in time.

Two years later, the Nobel Prize along the way, and a fair amount of other controversy that he has been drawn into (a celebrated case where he was officially charged with anti-Turkishness for giving voice to the Armenian genocide view of history, which has included death threats, and his being part of the European Union/Turkey discussion), Pamuk was back in Seattle, 2500 people on hand as opposed to the 250-plus of two years before. He read a brief passage from My Name is Red, then kept most of his presenting part to talking about Other Colors. The book is a good one for a talk such as this was, a bit of a guided tour through passions, influences, and enthusiasms over the years. One sensed a little feeling out of this vast audience - I think he could sense they weren't totally read-up on his work - the most recent books, Istanbul and Snow, have been the ones most sold, the former probably the most read. He seemed loosest and the audience most responsive when he talked about and read the little pieces that were the most personal, the most quickly-conjured - for a small newspaper he did a regular column for. Often at deadline point with nothing in mind to write of, he wrote about who and what was literally at hand - his young daughter, their doings, outings, concerns. To his consternation, he charminglly offered, these quick-cooked pieces, done in two hours' time or less, would get a bigger popular response than writing he'd labored endlessly over.

When it was over, pre-signed copies of Other Colors and hardcover editions of Snow, Istanbul, and My Name is Red, along with paperbacks of everything were quickly plucked up - in a way we've never quite experienced after one of these evenings. (Generally, though there are these large audiences, bookbuying isn't always proportionate to what some might think, most attending having shelled out $20-$30 - or more - to attend. And some speakers in the series aren't there with new books. There's no patent way to gauge it all. Longterm, a writer's work is well-served by the exposure.)

For myself, part of the task-oriented time I had around Pamuk (oh, the flapping and opening of books ...) in his busy day of interviews, meetings, writing, and a spontaneous guided tour of the Seattle Art Museum (on a closed day, no less), was in hearing of the many projects he has cooking, and seeing how passionate and urgent he was feeling about so many things. No heavy-handed weight of Nobel gods or Literary Judgment seeming to weigh on his shoulders, Pamuk seemed almost boyishly buoyant, bubbly about so much.

Our eyes at one point fell upon a scribbled in notebook and some typed-out pages with corrections marked: yes, this was how the novels are written, and yes, this was the next one, and yes, it will be soon. You who read Turkish have approximately until this coming March to get your hands on it. Someone in New York, writing back about my hearing this, said, let's hope for spring 2009 or so. We'll know it as The Museum of Innocents (or Innocence?). Maureen Freely (translator of the most recent books), we hope you're on it ...

Posted by Rick Simonson on October 25, 2007 | Comments (0)