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Zusatztext “Pamuk is a novelist and a great one . . . [Readers will] be lofted by the paradoxical lightness and gaiety of the writing! by the wonderfully winding talk perpetually about to turn a corner! and by the stubborn humanity in the characters’ maneuvers to survive. It is a humanity whose lies and silences emerge as endearing and oddly bracing individual truths.” —Richard Eder! The New York Times Book Review “A modern classic . . . Rich and essential.” — Los Angeles Times Informationen zum Autor Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. The author of The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul, and Snow, he lives in Istanbul and New York City. Klappentext One of the Nobel Prize winner's best-loved novels, in a special edition featuring an introduction by the author and a chronology of Islamic and Western art history that provides additional context for this dazzling story of a murdered artist in sixteenth-century Istanbul. From the Introduction by the Author From 1959 to 1974, from the age of seven until I was twenty-two, a good fifteen years, I spent a lot of time painting and dreaming of becoming a painter. I grew up in a large family of engineers with a keen interest in mathematics and brain games and little use for art — except my father who had written and translated poems in his youth and had a good library. My father and uncle were both civil engineers, following my grandfather, who'd been a railway engineer in Anatolia in the 1930s. Still, the family crowd found nothing strange about my attraction to painting — in fact, quite the opposite: they assured me I had a talent for it. Now, fifty years later, I would like to add that my desire to paint was at least as strong as any talent. In fact this strange desire, this instinct to paint and draw shapes on paper, as much as any talent, was, mysteriously, the definitive element in my life. Just like the sexual desire that would suddenly come to overtake me even when nothing to excite it had passed through my mind, or the melancholy, whose slow but steady encroachment I would invariably detect too late to take cover from it, or the sudden fits of anger I felt, for no clear reason, toward the entire world and everyone in it, the desire to paint would rise up within me out of nowhere and quickly expand to permeate my entire soul. I could postpone satisfying the desire for a while, but experience showed that I would soon be unhappy if I put off painting for too long. To sit at the table with a piece of paper, a notebook, a canvas, and to apply paint, to draw shapes and to make pictures of things using the different types of paint relatives had given me for my birthday, this used to bring me great happiness. (The Swedish writer Strindberg compared this happiness to that awakened by hashish.*) In childhood and in youth, when I painted I felt myself carried beyond the life taking place inside apartment blocks in dark, cluttered rooms, and I became part of a world more colorful and real. Painting a street scene, I almost felt as if I were walking along that street; just as, while I was happily depicting the black chimney smoke of a ferry plying toward the Princes' Islands, I felt as if summer had come and I was traveling to the islands with my family. Immersed in this happiness, painting, one by one, the waves on the sea or the leaves of a tree, I would be pained, and sometimes in fact afraid, to discern the craftsmanlike aspect of painting and to understand that my second beloved world could only be realized by means of patience and persistence of imagination. An even greater pleasure was derived from my hand's discovering, almost of its own accord, the shapes of objects it rendered on a piece of paper. It would sometimes seem as if a power beyond me were guiding the pencil in my hand. I would watch with a kind of surprise my hand's rapid progress across t...
