Orhan Pamuk's Nobel prize has angered Turkish nationalists, who say he has sold his country out, writes Nicholas Birch.
Towards the end of Istanbul, the part-autobiography and part-memoir that came out in English last year, Orhan Pamuk describes his horror of spring days when the sun "brings every ugly thing in the city into relief". His first reaction is to try to escape what he calls "this hybrid, lettered hell" by conjuring up "a pure and shining moment when the city was 'at peace with itself', when it was 'a beautiful whole'. But as my reason asserts itself, I remember that I love this city not for any purity but precisely for the lamentable want of it."
A similar struggle between attraction and repulsion has characterised the first Turkish reactions to Thursday's news that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Except that, in this case, it remains to be seen whether love will win out over something darker.
Among fellow artists, reactions were overwhelmingly positive. "I am as happy as if I won it myself," commented film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, winner of the 2003 Cannes Grand Prize. The doyen of Turkish novelists, Yasar Kemal, himself once tipped for the Nobel Prize, sent Pamuk an e-mail congratulating him for "this award that you thoroughly deserved . . . I have no doubt you will continue to stand behind what you believe."
In a country that often seems to fall through international cracks, many other authors picked up on Orhan Pamuk's comment that his victory was above all a victory for all Turkish writers. The author of best-selling detective novels, Ahmet Umit, spoke for many when he described it as a "fantastic opportunity for Turkey and Turkish literature to be better known by the world". In Turkey's mainstream media, meanwhile, generosity was in much shorter supply.
"Should we be pleased or sad?" asked Fatih Altayli, the chief editor of Sabah, one of Turkey's two most influential newspapers, in the headline of his Friday column. Unlike the magnificently fork-tongued contributions of other equally prominent journalists, what Altayli wrote next at least had the merit of being relatively straightforward.
In the circumstances, he concluded, the best reaction to Pamuk's victory was pride. And yet, "we can't quite see Pamuk as 'one of us'. Quite the opposite; we see him as someone who 'sells us out' and . . . can't even stand behind what he says."
The same impulse to blacken Pamuk's name was equally in evidence up the road in Hurriyet, Sabah's biggest competitor. Chief editor Ertugrul Ozkok wrote at length in his column about the difficulties his editorial team had when choosing their seemingly banal headline, "Nobel to a Turk".
"We all know that this headline will probably not satisfy anybody's 'Turkish side'," Ozkok simpered, alluding to the conviction of nationalists the world over that they hold a monopoly on patriotism.
On one level, all this ill-disguised bile has a very clear source: Orhan Pamuk's statement to a Swiss magazine last year that 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians had been killed in Turkey. Published in Das Magazin last February, the remarks were a reference to the war Turkey has been fighting against Kurdish separatists since 1984 and to what is widely seen internationally as the 20th century's first genocide: the deaths in 1915 of at least 600,000 Ottoman Armenians.
In Turkey, though, despite the liberalising tendencies of the last few years, free discussion of either issue remains at best difficult. Within hours, Pamuk had become the country's most hated man.
While an ultra-nationalist lawyer hauled him to court on charges of "insulting Turkishness", one local official even went as far as to issue orders for all copies of Pamuk's books to be collected and burnt. His superior countermanded the order a few days later, but he needn't have bothered: no books were found.
"They might have more luck if they opened public libraries round here," local student Nilay Aksu commented acidly.
Orhan Pamuk's sin wasn't just to break nationalist taboos. In a country which sometimes feels positively Sicilian in its insistence that dirty washing be kept in-family, he broke the taboo abroad. That, to a nationalist, can mean only one thing: opportunism.
"This prize was not given because of Pamuk's books, it was given because . . . he belittled our national values," Kemal Kerincsiz, the lawyer who took the writer to court last year, told AP on Thursday.
THE SAME POINT was put more mildly by Sabah's cartoonist, Salih Memecan. "Works that won Orhan Pamuk the Nobel," read his Friday cartoon, above a sketch of the grinning novelist standing in front of two shelves of books. On the upper one, his seven novels. On the lower one, a grey tome with "Turkish Penal Code article 301" - the article used to bring him to trial last December - inscribed on its spine.
"It's tragic, really," comments Elif Shafak, another novelist brought to book under article 301. "This is a huge honour both for Pamuk and the country, and yet so many people are so politicised they forget about literature entirely."
IN FACT, THE hostility of some parts of Turkish society to Orhan Pamuk goes back well beyond last year. While books such as The White Castle and My Name is Red - both set in Ottoman times - largely went down well here, Snow angered many with its bleak, burlesque portrait of a contemporary Turkey peopled with religious and secularist fanatics, separatists and police informers.
For secularists, Pamuk's greatest crime is his critical attitude towards the authoritarian secular legacy of Turkey's Republican fathers. As he writes in Istanbul, while the public manifestations of the new Republic's modernising zeal were occasionally lit with "the flame of idealism", "in private life, nothing came to fill the spiritual void".
"Orhan Pamuk's problem is with his own people and history," Ozdemir Ince, prize-winning poet and secularist, wrote last year. "Shoulder to shoulder with religious extremists, he wants to settle accounts with this Republic's revolutionary past."
Ultimately, though, mistrust of the new Nobel Prize winner seems to go beyond political differences. Many see it as simple jealousy on the part of a parochial-minded intelligentsia. Others present it as just the latest evidence of how much damage the authoritarian military coup of 1980 did to Turkish society.
Recent criticisms levelled at Pamuk by the poet and philosopher Hilmi Yavuz point to another possibility. Writing in the moderate Islamist daily Zaman, Yavuz argues that the year Pamuk spent in the United States after the publication of his second novel changed him for the worse.
"He must have been promised a great future in America if he wrote novels in a particular Orientalist format, like Salman Rushdie or VS Naipaul," he wrote, referring to Pamuk's literary agent. "Look at Turkey and Turkish history as a westerner does. That was the idea."
Somehow, it's an argument that contains all the paradoxes of modern Turkey, a country where westernisation has played such a vital role for so long that the opinion of the West has taken on an almost deadly significance.
It's a painful hesitancy that Pamuk celebrates. As he puts it in Istanbul, the city's greatest virtue is "its people's ability to see the city through both Western and Eastern eyes . . . Western observers love to identify the things that make Istanbul exotic, non-Western, whereas the Westernisers amongst us register all the same things as obstacles to be erased from the face of the city."