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By Root 1005 0

Name Is Red (2002), The New Life (1998), Snow (2004), and The White Castle (1998), all published in easy-to-pack paperbacks by Vintage. If forced to pick one favorite, I might say My Name Is Red—though it’s hard not to immediately love The New Life, with its opening line, “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” However, Maureen Freely, who translated The Black Book and Snow, has referred to The Black Book as “the cauldron from which [his other books] come.” Based on her comment, I started with The Black Book, and later, after I’d read three more, I understood what she meant. In her “Translator’s Afterword” in The Black Book, she talks about the difficulties of translating from Turkish to English. For starters, there is no verb to be in Turkish, nor is there a verb to have. “It’s an agglutinative language, which means that root nouns in even the simplest sentences can carry five or six suffixes. (‘Apparently, they were inside their houses’ is a single word.)” For Snow and Pamuk’s nonfiction book, Istanbul, Freely explains, “The author and I worked out a system whereby I worked straight to the end without consulting him. He then went over the finished draft, measuring his Turkish against my English and inserting his praises, curses, and exhortations in the margins. Only then did we sit down together and go through each manuscript, sentence by sentence, hour after hour, no matter how high the sun in the sky, or how hot.” Before Pamuk’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the introducer noted that “Orhan Pamuk has made his native city an indispensable literary territory, equal to Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg, Joyce’s Dublin, or Proust’s Paris—a place where readers from all corners of the world can live another life, just as credible as their own.”

No matter which one you pick up first, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. Each is filled with memorable passages, such as this one, from The Black Book, when a character, Bedii Usta, brings the mannequins he’s made to all the big stores in Istanbul, but is turned down by all of them.

For his mannequins did not look like the European models to which we were meant to aspire; they looked like us. “Consider the customer,” one shopkeeper advised him. “He’s not going to want a coat he sees worn by someone who looks like the swarthy, bowlegged mustachioed countrymen he sees ten thousand times a day in our city’s streets. He wants a coat worn by a new beautiful creature from a distant unknown land, so he can convince himself that he, too, can change, become someone new, just by putting on this coat.” One window dresser who was well versed in this game was good enough to confess, after admiring Bedii Usta’s mastery, that he thought it a great shame he could not earn his keep by using “these real Turks, these real fellow citizens” in his shop windows; the reason, he said, was that Turks no longer wanted to be Turks, they wanted to be something else altogether. This was why they’d gone along with the “dress revolution,” shaved their beards, reformed their language and their alphabet. Another, less garrulous, shopkeeper explained that his customers didn’t buy dresses but dreams.

The Burnt Pages (Random House, 1991), Disbelief (Carcanet, 1987), Parthian Stations (Carcanet, 2007), and To the City (Talisman House, 2004), all books of poetry, all with Turkish themes, by John Ash.

The Delights of Turkey, by Edouard Roditi (New Directions, 1972). This collection of twenty stories—some with Istanbul as backdrop and some based on popular Turkish folklore—is unique and is a fine traveling companion in the spirit of A Thousand and One Nights.

Nâzım Hikmet poems and novels, notably Beyond the Walls: Selected Poems (Anvil, 2004), Human Landscapes from My Country: An Epic Novel in Verse (Persea, 2008), and Poems of Nâzim Hikmet (Persea, 1994). Like Atatürk, Hikmet was born in Salonica. Though he embraced Communism and became an enemy of the Turkish state, he was always revered by the Turkish people but was imprisoned numerous times, and was awarded the International Peace Prize by the