According to Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, great novels should evoke a profound sense of the passage of time. In this interview, Pamuk contemplates his own mortality while reflecting on why the experience of time is central to the art of storytelling. Pamuk explores the narrative techniques employed by literary giants like Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf to manipulate readers’ perceptions of time. He admires how Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain effectively suspends the reader in a timeless space, making them “forget about the passing of time.” Pamuk also notes how Conrad’s complex narrative structures, as seen in Nostromo, challenge conventional storytelling by disrupting chronological order, although he humorously admits, “I don’t advise that too much to my readers or to would-be writers.” The author also discusses how his own works reflect his deep engagement with time, both aesthetically and technically. He explains how the structure of chapters in a novel can serve as markers of time, allowing readers to experience the “life’s pace of passing time” in contrast to the narrative’s pace. “Chapters in novels help us to feel the existence of time,” Pamuk notes, highlighting the subtle ways in which time permeates his storytelling. Pamuk acknowledges that time becomes even more precious with age, intensifying the existential questions that arise about life’s meaning. “The most valuable thing, the time is finishing,” he remarks, underlining the urgency that time imposes on both life and art. Orhan Pamuk, born in Istanbul in 1952, is one of Turkey’s most acclaimed novelists. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 and is known for works such as My Name is Red (2001), Snow (2004), and The Museum of Innocence (2009). ‘A Strangeness in My Mind’ (2015) and ‘The Red-Haired Woman’ (2017) and Nights of Plague (2022) He is also the recipient of numerous other prestigious literary awards such as the 2002 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and the 2003 International Dublin Literary Award. Orhan Pamuk lives in Istanbul, Turkey Orhan Pamuk was interviewed by Malou Wedel Bruun at Admiral Hotel, Copenhagen, in February 2024.
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