The black book

If in another article we talked to you about the works of Orhan Pamuk, the truth is that we did not tell you each and every one of the books you have by the author. One of them, a detective novel, is The Black Book. Do you know what it's about?

If you are a lover of crime novels and want to know a little more about this book by Orhan Pamuk, take a look at what we have collected about him.

Works by Orhan Pamuk

Before telling you about The Black Book, we want to tell you some details about Orhan Pamuk. To begin with, he is Turkish, he was born in 1952 in Istanbul. He studied Architecture and Journalism and has lived in the US for many years., specifically linked to the Universities of Iowa and Columbia.

His works have always stood out, and that made him one of the literary phenomena within Turkish literature. But really, the one who catapulted him was John Updike when he recommended one of his novels, The Astrologer and the Sultan.

Throughout his career he has won awards, the most important being the Nobel Prize in Literature which he won in 2006.

Synopsis of The Black Book

Orhan Pamuk's black book was written and published in 1990 in his country (He arrived in Spain a few years later, in 2001). Below, we leave you the synopsis so that you can get an idea of ​​what you will find among its pages.

«A totally original mystery novel, which combines the immense possibilities of Western and Eastern, medieval and contemporary literature, and embarks us on an enigma like we had not known until now.
«One day the beautiful wife of a man who loved her very much abandoned him. He started looking for her. Wherever he went through the city he found traces of her but not her..."
This is how Galip, a young lawyer who lives in Istanbul and wants to reunite with Rüya, his wife and cousin, tells his case. He suspects that he has run away with another man, with a man who could very well be someone very close, almost as close as his own half-brother, Celâ, an eccentric journalist who has also disappeared. In the hallucinatory pursuit of him, Galip travels day and night through the streets of a real and fabulous Istanbul that houses a secret story in every corner, and where all the clues, as if they were Chinese boxes, hide new mysteries. But when Galip takes his boldest step and assumes the identity of Celâ, he is unaware of the risk he is exposing himself to. Because there are games that lead to unexpected crimes.
The Black Book is a detective novel, as spectacular as it is unconventional, where the investigation focuses on identity and writing. With this work, which in Turkey became both cult and mass reading, Orhan Pamuk established himself as one of the current masters of world literature.

Reviews and critiques of The Black Book

If you are looking for reviews or criticisms of The Black Book of Orphan Pamuk, you will find quite a few. One that the DeBolsillo publishing house itself promotes within the synopsis of the work is by Juan Goytisolo, which goes like this: "The black book excited me... When I finished reading it I did what I had to do: go back to the first page and start rereading it."

However, if we rely on buyers who have given the book a chance, we find comments such as the following:

• «A delight, like everything from Pamuk. Dense and delicious.
• "Unbearable, repetitive and soporific, the worst thing I have read in a long time,... and look, I have read books,... It has cost me the unspeakable to finish it."
• «I understand that some here point out that Pamuk's work is difficult to read - precisely because of his long sentences with few pauses, but I particularly love that way of narrating as I feel it enveloping. It's easy to want to stop reading it halfway through, due to its complexity, but if you manage to get to the end you will see that all the effort was worth it. You end up with a strange feeling, which leads you to question many things about the meaning of life, in addition to introducing you to real, human Istanbul. The Black Book was my first reading of Pamuk, and from there he became my favorite writer.
• «A totally original mystery novel, which combines the immense possibilities of Western and Eastern, medieval and contemporary literature. It gives us hints of the profound change of Turkey and its people, some anchored in the past, the Ottoman Empire, and others seeking their identity in the future. Ruya, Galip's lost wife, he and Cèlai take us on a tour of a mystical and mysterious Istanbul.
• “Make sure you have time and energy before starting a Pamuk novel. Each of her books is a puzzle for the reader and they are usually very difficult to read and understand. There are sentences that last up to 8 or 10 lines.

As you can see, there are several opinions on this matter. There are those who call the book too complex, with a very dense and thick pen, which makes it more difficult to follow a quick reading (here it seems as if you are not progressing in the reading). Others, for their part, praise the author's way of writing, which takes all the time to detail to the millimeter and treat a topic as thoroughly as possible.

A comment to keep in mind that we want to highlight to you is the fact that It is not a detective novel like the ones you may have read so many other times. The background, although it is a crime novel, focuses more on existentialism than on adventures or the detective genre.

The decision about whether or not to read The Black Book is yours. You have to weigh the pros and cons of this author. For starters, the fact that his feather is quite dense. He has a very cultured language that can be boring or not 100% understandable, in addition to sentences so long that, if you are not attentive, halfway through you will have already forgotten what he was saying. But, on the contrary, the way he sees or reflects situations gives a lot to think about to have a different vision. And analyze the events more objectively.