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Museum of Innocence is out in English…

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Museum of Innocence
Museum of Innocence

last updated: 30 Oct 2010

I have read the novel, The Museum of Innocence,  in Turkish last year. In strictly literary terms, this is his weakest novel. However, a very different sort of project intended here. An actual museum has been built in Istanbul and will be opened soon. This book  is a novel-catalogue that actual museum and a great documentary of a particular section of Istanbul’s everyday life. Another intervention to the lives of republican Turkish elites. In the mean time, I have a plan to assign the first 100 pages to my first year students which has a very rich account of approaches to relations, sex and gender roles which are still valid in contemporary Turkish lives.

I was not in love with the literary level of narratives particularly but towards the end I fell in love and in the last pages  I remember feeling sad and crying… Thank you Orhan Pamuk. You do enrich our lives.

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Farewell to our beloved, Dicle Koğacıoğlu

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Funeral services will take place at lunch time, Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009 at the Zincirlikuyu Mosque; burial services will be at Zincirlikuyu Cemetery. There are two persons whom I will always be grateful for my academic survival. Prof. Aydın Uğur who employed me as a teaching assistant at Bilgi U. in 2000 and Prof. Nükhet … Read more

Days before the defense

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Despite several attempts I could not go back to writing and I did not hear from my professors. Because there are sections that need more work, my readers’ feedback could be overwhelming. I have to do some preemptive work, but so far I could not do. I did some more reading. I did have a … Read more

New Orhan Pamuk novel released today and Erkan republishes his piece on Pamuk novels

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Turkey’s Nobel laureate Pamuk to release new novel

World-famous Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, focuses on love as well as details in daily life in his latest novel ‘Masumiyet Muzesi’, (the Museum of Innocence).”

Originally published on October 20, 2006

A brief -recent- history of Erkan thru Orhan Pamuk’s novels…

Here is my most personal take with Orhan Pamuk. I had always a particular taste for his literary talents- I know this will annoy some of my loyal readers though:(- and here is an experiment of writing inspired by Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch

I don’t exactly know when the first time I read a Pamuk novel. It was probably in my first or second year in college and I should have worked hard to go beyond the intellectualist consensus not to read him. That is, there was already a Pamuk buzz and? intellectuals? do not read the popular. His current publisher in Turkey, Iletisim, had transferred him from another, Can, and though I hadn’t read him yet, I already heard the transfer price, that was a first in the history of Turkish literature I guess, and this had a negative effect on some of his would-be readers. But things change and I have a taste for the popular anyway. When I started to read Pamuk I had realized that he didn’t deserve to be popular (!), and hence Erkan’s infatuation with Pamuk novels begins.

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