Fugue state in Istanbul

The Black Book - Orhan Pamuk (Vintage International, 2006)
(originally published in Turkey in 1990)

Part One
I might be using the word "fugue" wrong, but whatevs. One thing I've noticed is that for all I love Orhan Pamuk, I really haven't read all that much by him. I am slowly trying to remedy this shortfall.

So far this novel reminds me of nothing so much as Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, which I read last summer. In both, a wife has "disappeared," and in both the husband's search takes on fantastical qualities and I find myself utterly unable to determine what, if anything, is real. Instead of trying to puzzle it out, I am instead just letting Pamuk's prose wash over me. It's too difficult to be an entirely passive reading experience, but it's less active than one might expect.

There are moments when I found myself making connections to his other work. For example, how much did Galip's opinion of detective novels come into play when he later wrote My Name is Red:

the only detective book he'd ever want to read would be the one in which not even the author knew the murderer's identity. Instead of decorating the story with clues and red herrings, the author would be forced to come to grips with his characters and his subject, and his characters would have a chance to become people in a book instead of just figments of their author's imagination.

And then I found that I utterly understand what Pamuk meant when in this putative column by Celâl:

But as I watched this person from the outside, as if in a dream, I was, in fact, not at all surprised to see that this person was none other than myself. What surprised me was the strength, the implausible tenderness, of my affection for him. I could see at once how fragile and pitiful he was [...]. Only I knew this person was not as he seemed, and I longed to take this unfortunate creature - this mere mortal, this temperamental child - under my wing, be his father or prehaps his god.

Lastly, for now, how can you argue this: "It was stories that kept them going."

A descent into...?

Atmospheric Disturbances - Rivka Galchen
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

This book had been on my To Read list since sometime last year, but it got bumped to the library request list when it appeared as a Slate audio book club selection in May. (Then I had to wait to actually get and read the book, so finally just listened to the podcast last week.)

This is one of those books that's so clever that I sort of feel like I won't be able to say anything sufficiently clever about it. But not in an annoying way, just in a "it is what it is" sort of way. Leo is a psychiatrist, which somehow gives him enough mental credibility that you want to believe him when one day an impostor comes home instead of his wife. Despite being right to almost the slightest detail, he knows she's not his Rema. So he goes off looking for here, and gets caught up with the Royal Academy of Meteorologists, with which one of his clients (also missing, like Rema) claims to be a secret agent. Long story short, the line between what is real and what is in Leo's head is constantly shifting as the simulacrum tries to persuade Leo to come home to her.

I expected this to be mostly a meditation on the ways in which we fall out of love, or love changes, and the person you loved is suddenly gone and replaced by someone else. It's a great metaphor. But it's that, and more and less than that too. It's about perception and love and loss and the lies we tell ourselves and those around us, and the impossibility of ever perfectly knowing another person. And it's about the ache you feel for Leo (and his wife) when you see how he almost loves this replacement Rema, and wants to love her, and yet there is this block that prevents him from seeing her for who she is.

Some points:

• I noted some similarities - in title mostly, but also in style - with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and was annoyed with the book club for pointing out the same thing and making me feel less original.
• Completion error: "with any incomplete perception - and needless to say all perceptions are incomplete - the observer 'fills in' by extrapolating from experience. Or from desire. Or from desire's other face, aversion. So basically, we focus fuzzy images by transforming them into what we expect to see, or what we wish we could see, or what we most dread to see." I love this quote in its own right, but I love it even more for Leo's further statement of being reassured that he knew right away that the impostress wasn't Rema instead of falling into completion error, without having considering that he is just committing the opposite completion error.
• Too lazy to check whether Leo's attribution to Freud is accurate, but he credits Freud with the belief that "there's always a thicket of past people between any two lovers." Leo then goes on to disagree, but really, isn't love about sorting one's way through the thicket in order to truly find each other?
• The book gets surprisingly and randomly funny toward the end, perhaps to mitigate how tragic everything is starting to feel, with a set of mistranslated drinks on a menu: Bloody Girl & Bloody Great. Also "I crash." (The first two seem to be sangria, the last maybe cocoa?)

And so that's it. Clever to be sure. But also quite touching. And disturbing too. But it was melancholy and yearning that stuck with me.