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Inprint Brown Reading Series: Orhan Pamuk, a Special Event

Presented by Inprint at Hobby Center - Zilkha Hall

November 16, 2009

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Now in its 29th year, Inprint is proud to present the 2009/2010 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series, one of the finest reading series in the country, giving Houstonians a chance to hear from and meet some of the world’s leading writers. From September through May, 12 renowned authors will come to Houston, many for the first time, sharing their work and insights.

Since the readings series began, Inprint has hosted more than 300 of the world's great writers, including winners of 4 Nobel Prizes, 44 Pulitzer Prizes, and 43 National Book Awards. The Series ranks among the nation's leading literary showcases and continues to be accessible to all.

Each reading features an on-stage interview, followed by a book sale and signing, run by Brazos Bookstore.

2009-2010 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series Schedule:

Joseph O'Neill & Marilynne Robinson
September 21, 2009
Zilkha Hall, Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, 800 Bagby

E.L. Doctorow
October 19, 2009
Hubbard Stage, Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Avenue

Orhan Pamuk, a Special Event
Monday, November 16, 2009
7:00 pm
Zilkha Hall, Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, 800 Bagby

The great cities have their great chroniclers: Paris has Balzac, Dublin has Joyce—and Istanbul has Orhan Pamuk (pictured, photo by Jerry Bauer).   In 2006, announcing his Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy celebrated Pamuk’s “quest for the melancholic soul of his native city.” In epic novels such as The Black Book and My Name is Red, Pamuk “has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” A Pamuk book can blend together history and politics, love and murder, art and intrigue.

Like his beloved Istanbul, Pamuk is a writer who stands at a crossroads—between East and West, modernity and tradition, the individual and the nation state. Born in 1952 into a family of engineers, Pamuk was destined to become an engineer of the imagination. As an adolescent he was interested in painting and architecture, but became a full-time writer in his early twenties. A published novelist since the 1970s, Pamuk did not receive real international recognition until the 1990s. In the last fifteen years, however, readers around the world have come to savor the way that Pamuk writes about Istanbul and its people, using one to inform the other, so that, as he has put it himself, “it’s impossible to distinguish the character from the city, the city from the character.”

Orhan Pamuk lived in the United States for three years in the 1980s, when he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University and the University of Iowa. Currently he is Robert Yik-Fong Professor in the Humanities at Columbia. On November 16, he reads from his new book, The Museum of Innocence, in Houston, another city that knows about the “interlacing of cultures.”

It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.” So begins the new novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize. It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal, scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie—a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, restaurant rituals, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay—until finally he breaks off his engagement to Sibel.

But his resolve comes too late. For eight years Kemal will find excuses to visit another Istanbul, that of the impoverished backstreets where Füsun, her heart now hardened, lives with her parents, and where Kemal discovers the consolations of middle-class life at a dinner table in front of the television. His obsessive love will also take him to the demimonde of Istanbul film circles (where he promises to make Füsun a star), a scene of seedy bars, run-down cheap hotels, and small men with big dreams doomed to bitter failure. In his feckless pursuit, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress and his afflicted heart’s reactions: anger and impatience, remorse and humiliation, deluded hopes of recovery, and daydreams that transform Istanbul into a cityscape of signs and specters of his beloved, from whom now he can extract only meaningful glances and stolen kisses in cars, movie houses, and shadowy corners of parks.

A last change to realize his dream will come to an awful end before Kemal discovers that all he finally can possess, certainly and eternally, is the museum he has created of his collection, this map of a society’s manners and mores, and of one man’s broken heart.

A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and of the mysterious allure of collecting, The Museum of Innocence also plumbs the depths of an Istanbul half Western and half traditional—its emergent modernity, its vast cultural history. This is Orhan Pamuk’s greatest achievement.

Mary Karr
January 11, 2010
Zilkha Hall, Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, 800 Bagby

David Wroblewski
January 25, 2010
Hubbard Stage, Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Avenue

John Banville & Abraham Verghese
March 1, 2010
Zilkha Hall, Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, 800 Bagby

Tracy Kidder
March 22, 2010
Hubbard Stage, Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Avenue

Dorianne Laux & Patricia Smith
April 12, 2010
Neuhaus Stage, Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Avenue

Oscar Casares & Gwendolyn Zepeda
May 3, 2010
Hubbard Stage, Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Avenue