In the beginning of The New Life Orhan Pamuk wrote, “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”
I discovered Orhan Pamuk when I read 2004’s Snow, a love story amidst Turkey’s political chaos. I knew nothing about the country then so the politics were as incomprehensible to me as the love story itself (a subject I just don’t always understand even though I have read about it a lot).
Orhan Pamuk would go on to win the Nobel Prize and I would read every one of his books obsessively (My Name is Red and The Museum of Innocence are my favorites), marking places and passages in my memory to relive them for when I finally visited Istanbul a decade later.
I also remember those high school summers when George Orwell’s 1984 (the eerie big brother concept haunts me to this day), Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (that taught me the complexity of the world), Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (that taught me the complexities of our minds and souls) were on my reading lists. It was only required to read two books each summer and my bookworm stepfather would point out his favorites before adding, “But you should read all of them.”
And so I did. Maybe not those exact summers, but in my life eventually – The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Elie Wiesel’s Night...
After reading Chinua Achebe‘s Things Fall Apart trilogy, I would read Adichie and other African writers. South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer has taught me the most about what it means to be human.
Wuthering Heights is one my favorites – Heathcliff and Catherine would inspire my lifelong love of all British literature – Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Dickens, Stevenson, Jane Eyre, A Picture of Dorian Gray, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist…
I even read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment one summer even though it was over my head. It took me years to learn how to spell and pronounce his name, but he inspired my love of Russian literature and Soviet-era writers – Gogol, Zamyatin, and of course Nabokov who wrote and translated in Russian, French and English, making his prose absolutely perfect to me.
I also remember when I first saw Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude on the “recommended table” at my local Barnes and Nobel. This book changed my mind and life forever.
I would read – again obsessively – all his books and discovered the rest of Latin American literature this way – Borges (who was also a master in English), Neruda (my favorite poet), Isabel Allende, Octavio Paz, DR’s Junot Diaz and Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa (whose stories I searched for when I travelled through Peru).
But it is still Marquez that I love most. Searching for the places he wrote about when I finally visited Colombia is one of the most cherished travels of my life.
And I still remember how Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner inspired my obsession with Middle Eastern literature – Iran’s Azar Nafisi, Edward Said, Libya’s Hisham Matar. Writers of exile have taught me about beauty and tragedy in parts of the world I cannot quite reach.
Syria’s Adonis and Nizar Qabbani are among my favorite poets, and I recently discovered Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz whose books are brilliant beyond words.
Amy Tan (who writes so much about women and tradition) introduced me to Asian writers – a literature mostly overlooked. Chinese writers Anchee Min, Gao Xingjian and Ha Jin, and Japanese writers Murakami, Yukio Mishima and Kawabata would open my world to beautiful and intricate histories.
Indian writers Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Kiran Doshi, Sri Lanka’s Michael Ondaatje, Pakistan’s Ali Sethi and Moshin Hamid, and of course V.S. Naipaul introduced me to so many multitudes and layers of so many lives and people I cannot believe they only come from this one small part of the world. Their prose always left me in awe and I believe they are the best English writers in the world.
At one time I took French language lessons so I can read existential writers like Camus and de Beauvoir. When I finally gave up, I realized that French literature is hard even in the English translations.
De Beauvoir is my literary heroine. She once claimed that books saved her from despair and I feel this too. And Camus, like Greene and Kafka, taught me this important lesson – that life is absurd. It’s how I learned to accept mine.
I think of all of this as I pass the time reading – that it has always been literature that has gotten me through.
In his Nobel Lecture, Orhan Pamuk answered the question writers are often asked – why they write.
“I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else… I write because I have a belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and riches into words. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.”
Me too.
So thanks to literature. And to every writer and reader I have loved – you change my life (and sometimes even save it) every single day.
