Reviewed by: Nights of Plague: A Novel by Orhan Pamuk Matt A. Hanson ORHAN PAMUK Nights of Plague: A Novel Trans. Ekin Oklap. New York. Knopf. 2022. 704 pages. TO PASS BETWEEN history and fiction is to walk a road so wide that either side is almost always inconspicuous from the other. But, at times, they converge along one-way streets, through invisible cities built with books, populated by intellectuals, ruled, as it were, by historians. Novels, there, are at the mercy of historical discipline, such as the canonization of art, the fixing of time to a master record of events, the search for facts that can be upheld in a court of law. Turkey's Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, has, especially since winning the prize in 2006, indulged his readers in the evocative, multilayered, and still-contested historiography that gurgles up from the wells and springs of the former Ottoman Empire, the sphere of influence that radiates from the decadence of its late capital, Istanbul, the largest Turkish metropolis, stamping the ink of its legacy, as yet unfaded, from the postmodern, orientalist imagination. His eleventh novel, Nights of Plague—translated with a neoclassical bent by the exceptionally talented Ekin Okalp, ostensibly to capture the temporal harmony of the turn-of-the-century plot—pivots around the year 1901 on the fictitious island of Mingheria in the Aegean Sea, a sedate yet restive Ottoman province. The trigger of its native discontent is a particularly timely trope in literary history—namely, pandemics—from Boccaccio to Camus. Distinct from Turkey's earlier contenders for the Nobel, the magical realism of Kurdish folklore in Yaşar Kemal or the avant-garde feminism of Leyla Erbil, Pamuk assumes establishment airs. His voice competently and craftily parallels the tone of state function with its bureaucratic armies of armchair intellectuals, proper and appropriate for a contemporary man [End Page 66] of letters steeped in the dusty troves that beset all who feast on the behemoth grandiloquence of the Ottoman era. Mingheria is a theater for Pamuk's fantasy of world-building realism. His clean sentences are fortified with the self-styled authority of scholarship, at times risking documentary dryness. Amid a host of well-articulated and often seamlessly intertwined metafictional devices, referring to the memoirs and histories of the personalities he invents, he conjures the roving, meticulous observations of society, architecture, and fashion that inspired the modern, social novel. The themes of Nights of Plague are common to the last years of Ottoman decline, particularly during Abdul Hamid's infamous reign when the sultan lost his dynasty's remaining territories in Europe to burgeoning nationalist movements in the Balkans. Pamuk novelizes the making of the fractious political identities that ignited the powder keg of World War I and which later supported the foundations of the Turkish republic up from the ashes of its sick, old-man imperialism. As a Turkish novel, Nights of Plague remains topical, perhaps even prescient. Pamuk, despite his tendency to rarified elitism, is a bold critic of present-day Turkey. The story of the novel reflects certain political currents that hold fast. A key character, known as Bonkowski Pasha, working directly for the sultan as chief inspector of public health and sanitation, is dispatched to Mingheria—which is half-Muslim, half-Christian—prior to the declaration of outbreak. The cloak-and-dagger assassination of Bonkowski Pasha, a chemist of Polish extraction whose surname is a measure of integration into palace service, is revealed to have been perpetrated by the gang of a pernicious man named Ramiz, who is also the nephew of the religious sectarian, Sheikh Hamdullah. Before the end of the novel, Hamdullah rules the post-revolutionary island like a strongman reminiscent of Turkey's populist, Islamist president. Pamuk frequently recalls Abdul Hamid's fascination with Sherlock Holmes, and webs of intrigue spin out to encompass the emperor as part of the murderous scheme. The narrator speaks of herself in the first-person as great-granddaughter to the Ottoman princess, who quite diplomatically helped Mingheria transition from imperial province to independent nation. "I am a direct descendant of one of this novel's principal characters," Pamuk writes, as her. Subjective identification...
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Nov 1, 2024
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