His novels include "The White Castle," "The Black Book," "The New Life," and "My Name Is Red" and "Snow." "It is the failure to experience huzun," Pamuk says of the craving, "that leads him to feel it." According to Pamuk, moreover, huzun is not a mere personal preoccupation but a communal emotion, not the mere melancholy of an individual but the black mood of millions shared, as they share their common history, which if past, is yet ever present.īorn in Istanbul, Pamuk, the first Turkish citizen to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, is now Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches Comparative Literature and Writing. Huzun is therefore,like other bi-polar narcotic addictives, a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of huzun that causes the sufferer distress in withdrawal. The Christian equivilant might be the emotional complex associated with Saint John of the Cross, whereby the seeker's anguish causes the sufferer to plummet so far down in his soul that he will, with innate bouyancy and the operation of the equal and opposite spiritual laws of counteraction, soar to its divine desire. Pamuk's "huzun," a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) thus denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss coupled with historical loss, but also for the living, a hopeful way of looking at life, "a state of mind" as he puts it, "that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating." The "saudade" of Lisbon, the "tristeza" of Burgos, the "mufa" of Buenos Aires, the "mestizia" of Turin, the "Traurigkeit" of Vienna, the ennui of Alexandria, the ghostliness of Prague, the glumness of Glasgow, the dispiritedness of Boston share only on their surface some common sense of Istanbul's melancholy which is rooted even more deeply in the Sufi mystic's sense of spiritual loss on looking back on the fleeting moment of epiphantic bliss, unsustainable in this world, the ever-yearned "close encounter" with God's presence, which if momentarily aproximated, is forever thereafter lost this side of death. The Nobel-Prize winning Turkish author in his remarkable recapturing of the inner life of his native city "Istanbul" describes the concept of "huzun" as the peculiar shared malancholy for an irretrievably lost greatness that lives in the hearts of the citizens of his native city, the past capital and seat of glory of the Ottoman Empire. TURKISH NOBEL LAUREATE ORHAN PAMUK'S "ISTANBUL" AND THE CONCEPT OF "HUZUN" WORLD LITERATURE CLASSICS FROM OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND TURKISH LITERATURE-NOBEL PRIZE LAUREATE ORHAN PAMUK'S "ISTANBUL" AND THE CONCEPT OF "HUZUN," EVLIYA CELEBI-THE TURKISH MARCO POLO'S "BOOK OF TRAVELS," MIHRI KHATUN & MIMAR SINAN-THE TURKISH MICHELANGELO OF ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE, LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU'S "THE TURKISH EMBASSY LETTERS," FUZULI, & NEDIM-FROM THE WORLD LITERATURE FORUM RECOMMENDED CLASSICS AND MASTERPIECES SERIES VIA GOODREADS-ROBERT SHEPPARD, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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