The Last Word: Orhan Pamuk; 'I Wanted to Be a Painter'.(Interview)

Byline: Malcolm Jones

The three most important things to remember about the new Nobel laureate in literature, Orhan Pamuk, are location, location, location. No author better explores the divisions between East and West, in precise yet strange novels like "My Name Is Red" and "Snow," as well as the melancholy memoir-cum-mashnote to his native city, "Istanbul." Hours after winning the Nobel, Pamuk spoke to NEWSWEEK's Malcolm Jones. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: How important is a sense of place in your work?

Very important since I am the sort of person who stayed at home, who let myself become attached to streets and neighborhoods. But on the other hand, it was never self-conscious. Then I began to write "Istanbul" [a memoir that is both autobiography and a bittersweet love letter to his native city], and I began to be a bit self-conscious about my attachment to my streets.

In all your books, there seems to be a deep importance attached to where you are--and to the effect of place on how we live.

Yeah. I agree. Partly it may have had something to do with the fact that 20, 30 years ago, when I wanted to make myself a writer [Ihad] one of these things that every aspiring author has, this feeling of, Well, who cares about Turkey? Who cares about what Faulkner called his "little postage stamp of native soil"? Deciding to become a writer in a place made provincial by the fall of the Ottoman Empire, where the future for an aspiring author was not so great, that gives you a stubborn, almost reactionary attachment to your places, to your neighborhoods, to the imagery the town gives you. And you insist, Now I'm going to make this also known.

Some of your early work seems fairly fantastical compared with your later books.