The Black Book

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

“An extraordinary, tantalizing novel.” —The Nation

The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation about The Black Book, one of Orhan Pamuk’s most brilliant and intriguing novels, now in a new translation by Maureen Freely.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Istanbul, a lawyer called Galip comes home from work to find his beloved wife Rüya—who is also his first cousin—missing. She has taken no suitcases, and she has left a brief note that doesn’t say where she’s gone or why. Could she have left him for her ex-husband or Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? Galip thinks Rüya must be with Celâl, because Celâl has disappeared too. Thus begins an extravagantly playful tale that is both a murder mystery and an absorbing journey through Istanbul’s fabled past and its troubled present. In its mind-bending exploration of identity and meaning, memory and love, The Black Book brings to mind the unforgettable urban odysseys of Joyce and Proust.

Reader's Guide

1. The story opens as Galip muses about his wife’s dreams, then moves directly into a long sequence of memories of his childhood, which introduces the family and its history. The narrative does not move back to the present until page 12. Pamuk seems to suggest that both the past and the Celâl story are more important than Galip’s life in the present moment. How does the novel’s back-and-forth structure shape your reading experience and your sense of Galip’s character?

2. Celâl never appears as a speaking character in the novel, yet his columns are crucial to understanding the mystery as well as the attraction of his character for Rüya, Galip, and many others. Why is Celâl’s writing so appealing?

3. What is the significance of the underground mannequin museum described in chapter 6, “Bedii Usta’s Children” and visited by Galip in chapter 16? How is it related to the underworld depicted in Virgil’s Aeneid or Dante’s Inferno? Why was Bedii Usta’s dream that he’d one day see his mannequins in shop windows never fulfilled [p. 59–61]?

4. In his column called “The Eye” [chapter 10], Celâl writes, “We all have a second person buried inside us, a dear friend to whom we whisper to our heart’s content, and some of us even have a third” and “The eye was the man I wished to be” [p. 117]. Is it true that we live with the presence of an ideal self—the person we wish to be—to whom we constantly compare ourselves? Is it also true that we involuntarily create this being in our own imaginations? If Celâl is the person Galip wants to be, who is the person Celâl wants to be?

5. The whole family lived for a time in the City-of-Hearts Apartments, and when a new building went up next to theirs, an air shaft was created. This pit has powerful symbolic implications for Celâl and Galip; it is the place of lost objects, of memory, of the past [pp. 205–209]. How does Pamuk manage to make the pit resonate so profoundly with loss?

6. As Maureen Freely notes in her afterword, the story “takes place at one of the darkest moments of recent Turkish history” [p. 463] and “a brutal coup that will end ‘the anarchy’ is nine months away” [p. 466]. How is the nation’s political situation expressed in The Black Book? What part does Celâl play in the politics of the novel’s historical moment?

7. Like Proust’s Paris, Joyce’s Dublin, or Dickens’s London, Pamuk’s Istanbul is as much a state of mind as a geographical reality. How does Pamuk bring the city into the story, and what role does it play in Galip’s and Celâl’s mental worlds?

8. One of Pamuk’s notable stylistic habits is his fondness for lists. See, for instance, the contents of Alâaddin’s shop [p. 41], the things that have fallen into “the dark air shaft” between the buildings [p. 207], the contents of Celâl’s desk [p. 95], or the anonymous caller’s list of what Celâl has written about police stations: “so many associations:—midnight blue, darkness, beatings, identity cards, the woes of being a citizen, rusting waterpipes, black shoes, starless nights, scowling faces, metaphysical inertia, misfortune, being a Turk, leaking faucets, and of course, death” [p. 349]. What is the effect of these lists, with their often fantastic juxtapositions, on the reading experience?

9. Galip decides that “whatever meaning a person found in the world, he found by chance” [p. 26], yet his search through Celâl’s papers, photographs, and columns, and Celâl’s study of faces, ancient mystical texts, and so on, show he believes meaning is to be found through deliberate seeking. Which of these approaches seem to be correct? Does the novel’s opening epigraph from Ibn’ Arabi shed any light on this question?

10. Rüya’s name means dream or fantasy; it’s also the name of the cinema in Beyoglu [p. 353]. How is the whole phenomenon of movie-going and movie star worship used in the story?

11. Pamuk has a great deal of fun with other texts and authors, both real and imagined, throughout The Black Book. For instance, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet Celâlettin Rumi to whom the story refers many times has the same name as Celâl. One of the later poets who carried on the tradition of Rumi and the Divan school was Sheikh Galip, who is quoted in the epigraph to chapter 9 [p. 93] and elsewhere. What purpose do these historical figures serve in the story? What is the nature of Celâl’s interest in Islamic mysticism and his obsession with the relationship between Rumi and the Shams of Tabriz [chapter 22]?

12. Reflecting on his marriage, Galip says, “Throughout the three years they spent together, it was Rüya . . . who’d seemed haunted by the life, the joys and pleasures that had slipped beyond her grasp” [p. 54]. Elsewhere he mentions “the bottomless well of Rüya’s indifference” [p. 458]. What kind of a person does Rüya seem to be? Why might she have married Galip? What motivates her to join Celâl in his return to “the garden of memory”?

13. What is the “dreadful message” that Galip is finally able to read in his own face, and why does the realization of this “truth” cause him such sadness [pp. 323–24]?

14. “Galip had once told Rüya that 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” [p. 50]. Is The Black Book such a book? If “every detail in a detective novel served a purpose”—that purpose being to provide the clues about the villain—does The Black Book also provide everything we need to know to figure out who the killer is?

15. The Black Book alludes not only to a number of eminent Western modernist works, but also to classics of Islamic literature such as the twelfth-century Persian masterpiece, Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, the late eighteenth-century Ottoman romance Beauty and Love by Sheikh Galip, and Celâlettin Rumi’s extravagant encyclopedic narrative Mathnawi. What do you think are Pamuk’s intentions in referring to the canon of Islamic literature?

16. What is the relationship between memory and identity, and why is the fact that Celâl is losing his memory so important to what happens in the story? Celâl’s colleague Nesati says, “It’s not just his memory Celâl Bey has lost it’s his past—and this was his last link with his country. It’s no accident he can no longer write” [p. 322]. Does Pamuk’s work suggest that he would agree with this statement of Nesati?

17. What challenges does the book present for the non-Turkish reader? How might The Black Book be transposed to an American city and an American cultural and historical context? Is there a novel you have read that does something similar with American culture, history, and identity?

18. The Black Book plays with the familiar idea that sacred books, like the Koran or the Bible, contain mysteries that must be interpreted. In provoking the need for interpretation, the novel suggests, they are not unlike detective fiction, or maps of cities: all provide clues that will bring the diligent reader closer to a desired goal—the presence of God, the solution to a mystery, the end of a journey. How convincing is Pamuk’s parallel between religious stories and fictional ones? For whom might this parallel be considered blasphemous?

19. Galip finds a poem that describes a “distant golden age” in which “action and meaning were one and the same. Heaven was on earth, and the things we kept in our houses were one with our dreams” [p. 301]. How does this “heaven,” in which every object, every word, means only itself, compare with the world in which Galip lives? What is ideal about having no distance between a sign and its significance, between stories and reality?

20. Who is F. M. Üçüncü? The journalist Nesati says he was “a real-life person,” an army officer who was a reader of the paper, who then disappeared, and turned up again, “as bald as an egg,” “babbling about signs and omens” [p. 329]. Note also that the weapon used in the murder was a gun “of the sort issued to retired military personnel” [p. 446]. Is he the murderer?

21. The Black Book is concerned with ideas of national identity and memory. Looking at the “ordinary” Turks in the mannequin museum, Galip realizes “Once upon a time, they had lived all together, and their lives had had meaning, but then, for some unknown reason, they had lost that meaning, just as they’d also lost their memories. . . . They felt the helpless pain known only by those who have lost their homes, their countries, their past, their history. . . . Their only hope was to stop trying to remember the secret . . . to hand themselves over to God, to wait in patient silence for the hour of eternity” [p. 194]. What are the forces that cause such a loss of memory and identity? How does a culture come to be unrecognizable to itself? Has American culture suffered a similar loss?

22. By reading stories, The Black Book tells us, we get to inhabit the mind and life of someone else; yet we also prevent ourselves from being ourselves. Is it better to embellish one’s life with stories, or to attempt, as the Ottoman Prince in Galip’s story did [chapter 35], to eradicate them in order to be oneself? Do reading and writing doom us to live in a series of illusions, or is it in the end, as Galip concludes, “the only consolation” [p. 461]?

SUGGESTED READING

Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds and The Arabian Nights; Jorge Luis Borges, Everything and Nothing and The Aleph and Other Stories; Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler; Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland; Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer”; Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor; Seyh Galip, Beauty and Love; Jason Goodwin, Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire; Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled; James Joyce, Ulysses; Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time; Mickey Spillane, One Lonely Night; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire; Kabir Helminski, editor, The Rumi Collection; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Orhan Pamuk’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Istanbul.