13 outubro 2006
Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens sobre Pamuk e um dos seus livros:
«Orhan Pamuk, a thoughtful native of Istanbul who lived for three years in New York, has for some time been in contention for the post of mutual or reciprocal fictional interpreter. Turkey is, physically and historically, the "bridge" between East and West, and I have yet to read a Western newspaper report from the country that fails to employ that cheering metaphor. (I cannot be certain how many "Eastern" articles and broadcasts are similarly affirmative.) With his previous novel, My Name Is Red, Pamuk himself became a kind of register of this position, dwelling on the interpenetration of Islamic and Western styles and doing so in a "postmodern" fashion that laid due emphasis on texts, figures, and representations. After 9/11 he was the natural choice for The New York Review of Books, to which he contributed a decent if unoriginal essay that expressed horror at the atrocities while admonishing Westerners not to overlook the wretched of the earth. In Turkey he spoke up for Kurdish rights and once refused a state literary award. Some of his fellow secularists, however, felt that he was too ready to "balance" his views with criticism of the Kemalist and military forces that act as guarantors of Turkey's secularism.»
