Book Description

The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's fiendishly engaging novel is launched into a world of hypnotic texts and (literally) Byzantine conspiracies that whirl across the steppes and forlorn frontier towns of Turkey. And with The New Life, Pamuk himself vaults from the forefront of his country's writers into the arena of world literature. Through the single act of reading a book, a young student is uprooted from his old life and identity. Within days he has fallen in love with the luminous and elusive Janan; witnessed the attempted assassination of a rival suitor; and forsaken his family to travel aimlessly through a nocturnal landscape of traveler's cafes and apocalyptic bus wrecks. As imagined by Pamuk, the result is a wondrous marriage of the intellectual thriller and high romance. Translated from the Turkish by Guneli Gun.

"[A] weird, hypnotic new novel...It veers from intellectual conundrums in the Borges vein to rapturous lyricism reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez."--Wall Street Journal

Amazon.com

In his native Turkey, author Orhan Pamuk's novel The New Life is a huge hit. Now English-language readers have an opportunity to sample this unusual book for themselves. The New Life begins with the sentence "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed." That book leads the narrator, a young man named Osman, on a wild journey in the company of Janan, a mysterious young woman in search of her lover, Mehmet. He had actually managed to enter--and escape--the world of the book. In the course of their travels, Osman and Janan are involved in a bloody bus wreck from which they emerge with new identities; they meet several "false" Mehmets; Janan mysteriously vanishes; and Osman eventually encounters a family friend who may or may not be the author of the life-changing book and possibly of The New Life itself.

In case you hadn't already guessed, The New Life is strictly postmodernist fare, where plot and character are minimal and time and space tend to bend and warp in unexpected ways. The author's vision is certainly original, his descriptions of violence and Turkish culture particularly strong.

The New York Times Book Review

Mr. Pamuk's fiction, it has been suggested, is like a Borges story expanded into a novel. But the great Argentine was wise not to overexpose his metaphysical conceits . . . Borges would have been content, one feels, with the first sentence of this novel to establish the premise: "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed." . . . . Mr. Pamuk labors the point for several pages to the extent that I don't believe the narrator; he protests too much. . . . Perhaps Mr. Pamuk, like Turkey, doesn't quite translate into the West. What emerges into English is a skillful play of illusions. Yet what is a book without meat? Incomplete.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　D. M. Thomas

From Kirkus Reviews

A quirky and fascinating exercise in postmodernist metaphysics from the acclaimed Turkish author of The White Castle (1991) and The Black Book (1995). Its protagonist and narrator, Osman, is a young university student in Istanbul who, having seen a beautiful girl carrying a book one day, comes upon another copy, and discovers as he reads it that his life is instantly changed (``the world where I lived ceased to be mine, making me feel I have no domicile'') and that he is compelled to follow wherever the book's spell leads him. He finds the girl (Janan, also a student) and joins her search for her missing lover Mehmet--another student, as it turns out, who has abandoned his studies and spends his days endlessly re-reading and hand-copying that very book, for ``enthusiasts'' who support his labors in order to possess the book themselves. Osman loses Janan, finds her, then loses her again for good following their failure to rescue Mehmet from his obsession. And Osman/Pamuk opens up level beyond level of meaning and implication, as he travels to various locales that seem to promise a solution to the mystery of the book (whose contents are never fully revealed) and its readers--most notably, the mansion of Mehmet's father Doctor Fine, a wealthy merchant, who believes his countrymen's infatuation with the book represents a denial of traditional Turkish culture resulting from a ``Great Conspiracy'' involving ``agents of the CIA and Coca- Cola.'' Years later, having married and fathered a child, Osman learns more about the book's author and the disturbingly mundane sources of its inspiration--and, in a clever surprise delayed until the novel's last page, understands what the promised ``new life'' is and why he and others have sought it so eagerly. Intricate and teasing, this Borgesian chiaroscuro urbanely surveys the intermingling of East and West and adds a brilliant new chapter to Pamuk's ongoing investigation of the enigmas of individual and national identity.

From Booklist

Osman is an ordinary engineering student in Istanbul until he comes across a book that changes his life. A sort of quasimystical tract, it provides a guide to a new life that is so irresistible Osman becomes obsessed by it. Soon he meets up with two more devotees of the book, the beautiful Janan and Mahmet, her boyfriend. When Mahmet suddenly disappears, Janan and Osman, who is now totally in love with Janan, set out to find him. As they head for the provinces, the novel switches gears from the merely mysterious to a sort of Turkish magical realism: the book's author turns out to be the best friend of Osman's father; the couple unearth a CIA-like organization that keeps track of the book and its readers; then they meet up with a Doctor Delicate, who sees the book as a pernicious Western influence. Finally, Osman alone finds Mahmet, bringing the story to a sort of conclusion. Recommended for the reader who wants something truly different.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Brian Kenney

Book Dimension

length: (cm)20.4 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)13.5