The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
David Ian Paddy

Orhan Pamuk. The New Life. Trans. Güneli Gün. Vintage, 1998. 296 pp. Paper: $13.00.

Have you ever read a book that was so overwhelming, so utterly life-changing that you had to find everyone else who has read it and force it upon those who haven’t? This impulse provides the basis for Turkish writer Pamuk’s latest novel: in The New Life a man, Osman, encounters a book so earth shattering that it changes his entire life. He seeks out others who have read the same book, and he sets out on a bizarre journey to find in this world the new life proposed within the book.

Pamuk’s novel may strike readers as strongly reminiscent of many other works (but in a book about books this should come as no surprise). The stunning opening chapter, which details Osman’s experience of reading the eponymous novel, echoes Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. Osman’s subsequent quest for the new life leads him to a number of conspiracies (one bent on destroying the book itself) that read like plots by Pynchon and Eco. Finally, Osman’s fascination with bus accidents as the apocalyptic means into the new life feels much like Crash-era Ballard. Despite these similarities, Pamuk weaves these voices and ideas into a unique style that addresses particular concerns of contemporary Turkish culture.

The New Life is another volume in the postmodern library of books about books, or to be more precise, books about the experience of reading books. In this wing of the library, The New Life sits a little distance from Borges’s Labyrinths and a little closer to Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars. But The New Life doesn’t sit on a shelf. The book lives and moves. It moves this reader as the book within the book moves the reader within the book. [David Ian Paddy]