Motley thoughts on The Black Book

Some childhood memories are poignant... vividly etched in memory, they are hard to forget.

I imagine a sieve in my mind that filters snatches of memory all through my life, letting slip the tiny, inconsequential thoughtlets, and hoarding the important ones. Ever so often, I imagine, some not-so-important thoughtlet remains in the sieve, persisting in active memory... and I would be amazed as some shards of memory come back to me, wondering why the mind ever thought that it was worthy of preserving on the sieve.

Ever since I discovered my love of books as a little child, I was haunted by a lingering fear: That some day, I would have exhausted my capability of understanding books, and reach a stage where I would no longer be able to comprehend the book that I had to read, that somehow, inexplicably, there existed a barrier that would be a test of my skills and which, if I could not cross, I would languish for the rest of my life with the books of early childhood.

Years later, I read a certain book, and I knew instantly that, this was the hurdle and that I had cleared it... and I need fear no more.

It was this thoughtlet that floated up to my mind several years ago when I read Dosteyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and again, and most recently, today as I finished reading Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book.

Beginning as the story of a man trying to solve the mystery of his missing wife, The Black Book builds into the most unconventional form of detective story. There are clues everywhere, but not all of them add up, and most of them have no bearing on the mystery. With each clue the protagonist Galip follows, with each new idea of his, the author develops yet another theme, slipping in a short story in the guise of a newspaper column that Galip is shown to be reading. The result: a multitude of themes, all beautifully woven in the twin forms of the protagonist’s experiences and reproductions of a celebrated local journalist’s daily columns.

Throughout the book, Turkey’s East vs. West dilemma runs as a raging undercurrent. As civilizations come to increasingly resemble one another, with some attaining aspirational value, a process of imitation sets in. This process turns people, customs, cities into mere ghosts of an earlier rich past, in attempting to fashion themselves to the culture they aspire to. The portrayal of Istanbul and its changing landscape, and its people and their changing preferences symbolizes this essentially Turkish dilemma, equally adaptable to cultures like ours.

Another dominant theme is “I must be myself”. The novel is replete with points and counterpoints on imitation as Galip tries to slip into the character of his cousin in a bid to find his missing wife. Another twist is added to this theme, culminating in the power of writing and storytelling as a weapon in “being oneself”.

Layer on layer of abstractions reveal glimmerings of subtle subthemes, ideas within ideas, intertwining of themes. Nothing is what you think it is at first read, and the book may leave one vexed with its pace at times, flummoxed by seemingly irrelevant interpolations and wholly mystified by the last page, where the author and protagonist speak as one.

Maybe my childhood fear was not so unfounded after all… some books call for more than a “reading”, they demand to be pondered over, to be read not just for the words, but for the elusive meaning behind the strings of letters, to involve oneself as an active participant and to engage with the book beyond the words, at the level of ideas.