Product Description

Tells the story of Galip, an Istanbul lawyer whose wife has vanished. Playing the part of private investigator, he soon finds himself descending deeper and deeper into an extraordinary mystery.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38077 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
"'A glorious flight of dark, fantastic invention... It offers many pleasures, Gothic, Borgesian and other, the best of which is a vision of Istanbul as a city of sinister complexity.' Patrick McGrath 'Dazzling... Turns the detective novel on its head.' Joan Smith, Independent on Sunday"

Independent on Sunday
'One of the freshest, most original voices in contemporary fiction.'

Times Literary Supplement
'Quite wonderful . . . It is a fiction which tackles, again and again, the question of Turkey's shaky cultural identity.'

Customer Reviews

Not easy, but amazing - and important
Readers of Snow and My Name is Red will not be disappointed by this long-awaited new translation of Pamuk's most celebrated novel. Pamuk's evocation of Istanbul in the repressive mid-1980s - a crumbling, fearful city of dreams - is masterful. The episodic plot - at once a retelling of Dante's search for Beatrice in the circles of hell and a Kafka-esque quest for what it means to be yourself - can seem slow and ponderous at times, although enlivened by the newspaper columns of the mysterious Celal, but it is the ideas that Pamuk is wrestling with that make this not only an amazing piece of literature, but an important and significant contribution. It isn't an easy read, but it will stay with you long after you have finished reading.

A word about the translation. It is brilliant, one of the best renderings of Turkish into English this reviewer has ever had the pleasure to read.

An inconspicuous classic
Darkly evocative, wackily postmodern, the writing of 2006 Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk is a treasure trove little known in Britain. The decaying and repressed Istanbul of 1980 is brought to life magnificently in The Black Book, which roughly follows a man called Galip as he searches both for clues and for his own identity following the disappearance of his wife. Of all the languages written in Latin characters, Turkish is surely the most unlike English. It was written in Arabic characters until 1928, and so constructing a sentence mainly involves writing one word and adding at least five suffixes. Given this, the quality of the new translation is incredible. Much of this fascinating book is a joy to read, and much of the prose is as good as any I've read in English in a long time.

Weird but well worth it
The back jacket description of this as a book the turns the detective novel on its head is true but a bit of a red herring. Yes, there is a detective story element to this - Galip on a search to find his vanished wife and (by default) her half-brother, a famous newspaper columnist who has gone underground or vanished too. This quest threads the novel together as a whole, but really it is a strange, skewed look at identity and obsession. Pamuk seems to be writing about how anyone can define themselves as 'them' - probing uncomfortably at self-definition and perception - and also nagging away at themes of Turkish identity, history and nationality. I say 'seems' because the book is very densely written, often impenetrable, and while I could not put it aside I'm not sure what it ultimately said. If this sounds off-putting, it isn't meant to be - the book is very arresting, darkly written and quite gripping. The doubt it raised in my mind was an interesting doubt!