> D'autres couleurs, par Orhan Pamuk. — C'est à une flânerie à la fois gourmande et cultivée que nous invite Orhan Pamuk, prix Nobel 2006, dans ce recueil de près de quatre-vingts textes.
Articles de presse, préfaces, chroniques, scènes du quotidien, souvenirs, réflexions politiques, interviews, c'est à une flânerie à la fois gourmande et cultivée que nous invite le Nobel 2006 dans ce recueil de près de quatre-vingts textes. On y croise la famille d'Orhan Pamuk, sa fille Rüya, quelques barbiers échappés des Mille et une nuits, des chiens errants, et toute l'imagerie baroque d'un Bosphore empanaché de nostalgie. Mais il y a aussi le "grondement terrifiant" du séisme qui frappa Istanbul en août 1999 et un autre très mauvais souvenir : celui du procès dont l'auteur de Neige fut victime en 2006, pour avoir évoqué la responsabilité de la Turquie dans le génocide arménien. A ces confidences s'ajoutent les réflexions du citoyen Pamuk sur la question de l'Europe, qui est pour lui une réalité politique complexe et, surtout, une promesse pour l'avenir. Dans d'autres textes, il butine l'air du temps en expliquant pourquoi l'art d'écrire est un art de vivre, et pourquoi les romans sont une formidable réserve de liberté dans un pays comme le sien. Ils lui ont valu la récompense suprême et son livre se referme sur la conférence qu'il a prononcée devant les jurés du Nobel, en décembre 2006 : c'est à la fois un vibrant hommage à son père et un mode d'emploi de la littérature, un travail de bénédictin qui consiste à "creuser un trou avec une aiguille".
—L'Express

Interesante, aunque en momentos se vuelve algo lenta y pesada. ( )

Mr Pamuk; dalam dunia kata, nyata kamu adalah salah seorang pemegang tongkat kekuasaannya. ( )

Pamuk has inspiring observations about other writers. His short story is autobiographical and presented from both a naive and scheming viewpoint. His repeated considerations of why he writes do wear thin, but each one has a small, creatively inspirational gem within. ( )

This book by Orhan Pamuk was published after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. The title is a reference to the titles of his other books, most of which contain a color in their names. For example, The White Castle, The Black Book, and My Name is Red. Pamuk says Other Colors is a compilation of essays organized in such a way that they mimic the narrative flow of a novel. He includes essays on his love of books, his favorite authors such as Dostoyevsky, Turkish politics, and his relationship with his father.

While this book is one of the less satisfying of the many published by Pamuk, it reveals many sides of him as a writer. He says he always wanted to be a novelist, and so he has made himself famous through his novels. As a collection of short essays, this book reveals why he has not earned much success as an essayist. Many of these pieces are clearly writing exercises or thought pieces that Pamuk perhaps uses as warm ups to his novel writing. They provide brief and not very deep or powerful reflections on a variety of topics of interest to Pamuk. Most of these essays are forgetable.

Still, we learn much about Pamuk and we see some of his true gifts as a writer come through. He has an uncanny ability to be intimate and tender with his reader. He says he locks himself in a room ten hours a day every day. It is a lonely life, one that he questions regularly in these essays. But it is one that creates a stillness necessary for a writer to communicate one-on-one with his or her reader.

Pamuk was twenty-three when he abandoned a potential career as an architect and decided to become a novelist. It wasn't until he was about 27 that he wrote his first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons, which is not yet translated into English. His next book, The White Castle, was published when he was thirty. This second book launched his writing career. It is sobering to learn how much time it took for Pamuk to achieve the fame he needed to convince others he could be a writer. Thirty years later, he became the second youngest person to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. ( )