Orhan Pamuk: Fear of Corona is my pleasure and solution in a strong world government

The interview was conducted by Juan Cruz from the Spanish newspaper Elbais

Translated by: Mahfoud Fadili

Several years ago, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk - who won the Nobel Prize in 2006 - began writing a novel about epidemics, and suddenly an outbreak in the world - including Istanbul - spread the Corona virus, which is the most severe threat in the twenty-first century.

Off the Bosphorus strait, which inhabits the best pages of the novel he wrote about his favorite city, he saw Pamuk disease while the novel was brewing in his head, and now that has become tangible. From there he wrote an article published by "Babylonia" listing all the historical and literary effects of successive epidemics, and he spoke not only of the fear that he himself suffered, but also of the fear that enslaved everyone because of the worst threat suffered by man in this century.

From his workroom where he lives in quarantine, Pamuk spoke to the Spanish newspaper "El Pais" via the "FaceTime" application.

Do you currently feel fear for your health?

- I have not experienced many health problems in my life, and what I experienced was the health troubles of my children, as I mentioned in the book "Istanbul". As far as Corona is concerned, I feel fear and do not get out of the house .. Yes, I feel fear..Fear is a good feeling..Fear drives you to adhere to the conditions of isolation and hand washing .. I am happy for my feeling of fear..The problem is that sometimes you cannot control it, and sometimes this exacerbates .

There are bad times when you think this will not go away, unlike (US President Donald) Trump who thinks he will disappear ... and this scares me ... irrational fear. In general, I am not afraid, but I fear death, loneliness, and meaningless life .. All of this is related to the fear of death .. I feel it, but it is not a very strong feeling .. Praise be to God.

I do not feel panic .. My mind is under control .. I firmly believe that we should fear, but this should not make us irrational .. We must not let fear dominate us, but we need fear. There are people who don't care..I think all quarantine units will work if people are afraid..Cooperation of people is necessary to live with quarantine standards, no matter what. Quarantine will work if people are afraid, if they believe that the rules of quarantine are established by fair and rational people.

- In your book about Istanbul, you capture two real heroes from your home, which are the sounds and smells of the city .. How are they?

- I think that all cities have their sounds and smells ... every sound takes root in memory, but we never talk about these things .. I think the writer's mission is to discover these sounds exactly.

In the book that I mentioned there are examples .. There are Bosphorus ships, their wooden structures and wheels .. They have certain sounds, each wheel has its own voice .. or the metro sounds .. The metro in London has a different voice .. Or buses, trucks and streets .. All voices are different.

Sounds of advertisements .. In the port cities there are sirens for ships, and they differ from one city to another .. There are the sounds of local ships.

The same thing with the smell .. I can talk about the smell of Bosphorus when it blows south winds .. You feel moisture, and you feel the smell of the sea.

- And Istanbul in silence, what is her voice? What is its smell?

They are not really different .. Many things do not change .. What is surprising here is that everything is the same in some way, except that we live inside .. nothing has changed .. There are no earthquakes or fires, but of course there are people who die in hospitals .

We hear the sounds of ambulances, etc., as in New York, Madrid, or Italy .. Every ambulance's voice is different .. In my city it was as if there was a curfew, and here sometimes there is a real curfew.

Here, now, during the quarantine, all the space I live in is my private space, it limits me and I am one of them .. It is amazing, it is a new life .. If you ask me if it is like a prison, I will say: No .. It is a beautiful cage .. I am in A house with 20,000 books, I can watch and read movies all the time.

In this sense, I am lucky ... but there are citizens who are required to work to maintain the economy ... compared to them, my problems are limited, but this situation has caused many problems.

- In the book "The Woman with Red Hair", you say that the old stories one reads are actually fulfilled .. You were writing a novel about pests and an outbreak of corona .. How did you feel when your metaphor was achieved?

- It was very deep .. The first thing I felt was "Oh my God, I wrote a book about pests during these four years and see what happens", but it is difficult to say this when people suffer .. For my books, I search a lot, and therefore the reader will find very valuable information .. I find all this valuable information now in the newspapers .. All the things I imagined are now in the newspapers too! It is shocking and surprising.

Many people ask me about this .. I felt guilty for a while, because I had known it before .. I knew about Bill Gates ’articles predicting an imminent pandemic .. I was ready for that. Although I was ready, I was also surprised .. I felt that what I was imagining actually happened, and I understood the seriousness of the truth of what I was doing with the outbreak of the epidemic.

Faced with the harshness of the situation, I could not walk around without feeling shy and repeating to myself, "I was writing that, I was writing that" .. I am embarrassed to say that .. I can only tell one person through the language of literature, but I cannot tell people Ordinary people who die, or who are afraid of death, that I expected what happened.

What did you learn from the reality in this regard?

- I learn more about this situation, I learn more about fear, about my own fear .. I learn more about people, whether they have HIV or not .. When all this happened I was in New York giving a lesson at Columbia University, everything was fine, A sudden panic ensued, and I returned to Turkey.

In the first two weeks, I felt that all the symptoms appeared on me ... Did I have the virus? On some days I have suffered from these fears, to the point that I sometimes thought this would befall us. The panic made me fear that I would turn a blind eye to many things.

Somewhere, she cited the French poet Stephen Malarmée saying that "everything exists in the world to write a book", and something like this has happened to you.

- Initially, everything was in my book, and that will later go to reality, to the readers .. The sequence has changed: I wrote the book for four years, and suddenly the book began to be realized in reality.

- Because there is something predictive in literature, about looking ahead, even when the past matters.

- My friends say now that writing a book on epidemics for a period of four years is a prophecy .. No .. this happens often, so what is surprising is the presence of a very small number of books that expected the spread of epidemics.

The most important in this sense is the "Diaries of the Plague Year" by Daniel Defoe, and the novel "Engaged" by the Italian Alessandro Manzoni, but it is historical or fictional novels that were not written by people who lived in the days of the plague.

- She cites Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the creator of modernity .. Suppose that this era is prolonged, so are we at the end of modernity? Where are we now in this cosmic world?

- For me Rousseau is a great thinker that was influenced by him, not for his political theories, but more through his confessions and his biography .. It is wonderful .. I am surprised and amazed at how a person like him was possible, and how his character turned in the modern world.

I think Russo is the only one in the modern world who reads books himself and thinks about himself .. But I am not a sociologist. For me, modernity is a state of mind or freedom to judge the world with your limited means. There are now middle-class people reading books and gaining the ability to see and judge the world .. I think this is modernity.

I returned from the United States and currently live in Istanbul. From here you look at the modern world. How do you see this global crisis?

- I would like to suggest a political solution, which is undoubtedly a utopia: a necessary global government capable of saying: They closed the world for two weeks .. Thus all infection ends .. We are wasting time, because every country closed when it saw this appropriate, while the virus was already present On its territory, or in the air.

New viruses will emerge, there will be mutations, and this cannot be controlled if there is no strong government interested in them .. In the end, the virus has spread as a result of flights, and this must be controlled .. there is no other way.

And it will happen again, so we must organize ourselves .. Sometimes I feel optimistic, and I think humanity has intelligence to solve these problems .. And somehow people die because there is no global government that can deal with this situation.

Is the novel now open to reality?

- I ask myself all the time the eternal question about the relationship between realism and symbols, after all these events .. And the other question: Is the writer's job really to be realistic and a mirror, or is his job to show the demons inside, and not to be a copy of what the newspapers publish? The answer will appear in the novel.

- You say about your city at some point: "Fatigue, weakness and the human face of poverty" .. How do you feel about Istanbul today?

- Now I do not see anyone on the street .. The faces are absent from me, but, look .. here I am .. this is my table .. There was a building process, I stopped .. I see many things from my window .. There is a mosque that was crowded on Friday .. I see the door from here .. There is a sign saying "Forbidden" .. I see Istanbul without ships, without planes, and without helicopters flying .. This is rare.

- I said at the beginning that you feel fear ..

Currently I am learning to respect my fear .. My fear taught me to be humble, and led me to think about others, to feel solidarity and to be part of my surroundings.

An epidemic like this arouses the ire of people who express their national anger .. I am not like them .. A spirit of solidarity is necessary .. Sometimes I think I take these things seriously so that I may lose my sense of humor and be anxious .. It is very difficult to maintain a sense of humor and sarcasm While many people face some problems .. these are also the challenges facing the writer.