Memories of Distant Mountains
Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The journals of the Nobel Prize–winning author, beautifully illustrated with his own paintings
For many years, Orhan Pamuk kept a record of his daily thoughts and observations, entering them in small notebooks and illustrating them with his own paintings. This book combines those notebooks into one volume. He writes about his travels around the world, his family, his writing process, and his complex relationship with his home country of Turkey. He charts the seeds of his novels and the things that inspired his characters and the plots of his stories. Intertwined in his writings are the vibrant paintings of the landscapes that surround and inspire him.
A beautiful object in its own right, in Memories of Distant Mountains readers can explore Pamuk's intoxicating inner world and can have a fascinating, intimate encounter with the art, culture, and charged political currents that have shaped one of literature’s most important voices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nobel Prize winner Pamuk (Nights of Plague) explores politics, his creative process, and the wonders of the natural world in this dazzling illustrated diary. Pamuk selects from 14 years of journal entries, which cover a period when he wrote several novels, taught at Columbia University, and established Istanbul's Museum of Innocence, a collection of everyday objects—from cigarettes to a 1956 Chevy—suggested by his novel of the same name. Other subjects include soccer, dark nights of the soul ("The emptiness of life. A deep-seated dread. It's as if I were in space"), and the persecution he's endured from Turkish officials for publicly discussing the Armenian genocide. His paintings are bright and guileless; most of them depict ships plying the waters near Istanbul or looming mountains rendered in a ghostly style reminiscent of Chinese landscape painting. Pamuk's musings captivate, whether he's registering the sublime ("The idea of disappearing behind the farthest of all mountains is a fantasy of reunion with our ancestors") or poeticizing the mundane ("The sound of waves lapping gently at the shore and the engine of a ship. Folk songs on a radio that's been left on"). It's a rewarding peek inside the mind of a master storyteller. Photos.
