The Black Book

Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel–loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband or Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl's identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.

With its cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul, The Black Book is a brilliantly unconventional mystery, and a provocative meditation on identity. For Turkish literary readers it is the cherished cult novel in which Orhan Pamuk found his original voice, but it has largely been neglected by English-language readers. Now, in Maureen Freely’s beautiful new translation, they, too, may encounter all its riches.

Orhan Pamuk: Winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature

The Black Book is a stunning tapestry of Middle Eastern and Islamic culture, and confirms Pamuk's reputation as a writer of international stature. Richly atmospheric and Rabelaisian in scope, this work is a labyrinthine novel suffused with sights, sounds, and scents of Istanbul as it plumbs the mystery of identity, fiction, and reality.

Publishers Weekly

Turkish novelist Pamuk's inventive, digressive new novel is a dazzling arabesque stuffed with fantastic tales, metaphysical thought experiments, dreams, symbolic fables, absurdist humor, childhood memories, social and political satire and excursions into history. Galip, an Istanbul lawyer, is alarmed when his wife, Rya, and her half-brother, newspaper columnist Jelal Bey, vanish. To ferret out leads, Galip assumes Jelal's identity and pseudonymously takes over his popular columns. A former classmate of Galip's turns up, confessing that for years she obsessively fantasized that she was Rya. A mysterious caller phones, threatening to kill Jelal, who had tried to instigate a military coup in the early 1960s but allegedy betrayed the revolutionary cause. Galip's feverish research, which climaxes in two assassinations, is strewn with red herrings, allusions to Turkish and American films and digressions on the Messiah, Sufi mysticism, human faces and the art of making mannequins. As Pamuk (The White Castle) erects a dazzling hall-of-mirrors meditation on identity, memory and reality, he elliptically condemns a society that uses informers and secret police to enforce obedience. (Jan.)

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