In the darkening days of spring 2020, Turkey’s first Nobel laureate in literature, Orhan Pamuk, found himself hard at work on a novel three decades in gestation. Its subject: a plague (the bubonic kind) at the turn of the last century.
Pamuk had set his tale of illness, death, and social upheaval on a gorgeous, mythical Ottoman isle he calls Mingheria, idyllically located in the clear blue Mediterranean Sea near Crete and Cyprus. Pamuk was living in New York City at the time and teaching at Columbia University.
When lockdown arrived, he swiftly returned to his beloved Istanbul to ride out a now familiar mixture of Zoom and seclusion, while a crush of fans and friends who knew about his project queried him about his prescience. In response, in a memorable opinion piece in The New York Times, Pamuk wrote of his passionate exploration of cyclical—and, therefore, predictable—reactions to previous worldwide pandemics and their literary counterparts. (First step: denial! Then: blame someone else!)
With renewed commitment and unwanted lived experience to draw from, Pamuk went back to work on the novel, laboring now under the acute pressure of timeliness. The result of all that heavy contemplation is this fascinating, wearying, and, dare I say, oddly timeless book, although Pamuk clearly has an eye on the present.
Orhan Pamuk sets his tale of illness, death, and social upheaval on a gorgeous, mythical Ottoman isle.
In the endnotes to his novel as well as in his New York Times essay, he wisely remarks upon how our many modes of contemporary communication can protect our health and build compassion, but also spread quackery, demonization, and hate.
By inference, he also explains why he chose the complete isolation that befalls the inhabitants of his fairy-tale island. Blockaded by its offshore rulers, the tiny realm of Mingheria, half Muslim and half Christian, makes a perfect stage (and petri dish) for diseases of the body and soul. It also provides Pamuk with a vehicle to explore the tensions that beset the waning years of the Ottoman Empire.
Given these ambitions, it’s no surprise that Nights of Plague is a behemoth at almost 700 pages. It is also a complex and intriguing amalgam of form and genre. Some passages read like a textbook, others like a murder mystery. Mina Mingher, the stated “author” and our narrator, declares in the book’s opening line, “This is both a historical novel and a history written in the form of a novel.”
As we ultimately learn, Mina is the great-granddaughter of the heroine and hero of this story, Princess Pakize and her beloved husband, Dr. Nuri, who at the start of this saga are on their way from their home in Istanbul to China to nurse the sick when their boat is forced to dock on Mingheria’s tainted shores.
Princess Pakize is Pamuk’s practically perfect enchanted creation, but her puppet master in this complex fusion of fact and fantasy is her controlling uncle, Abdul Hamid II, the actual sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1909. Mina proves to be as devout a researcher as Pamuk: much of the story she unspools derives from the letters the princess writes daily to her sister, Hatice, none of which we read. (Fun fact: Hatice is the name of the real-life niece of the real-life sultan; she shares a real-life father with make-believe Pakize. Thank you, Google.)
Some passages read like a textbook, others like a murder mystery.
At times, Nights of Plague reads like the work of someone who fell down the well of their own research and imagination, lost to an excess of details, characters, and events. While I do not know Turkish, and am always slightly wary of translations, the prose itself can feel ploddingly academic, clotted with events as if this were truly an exercise in historical documentation.
Elsewhere, there are gorgeous passages of description, surprising moments of lightness, narrative sections full of drama and old-fashioned cliff-hangers, and memorable sentences throughout. Here’s one I won’t soon forget: “Then the diarrhea began, sharp as a corkscrew.” (He nailed it.)
Mostly, I was enthralled by the ways in which the islanders’ crimes, misdemeanors, and fatal missteps mirror those committed during our current worldwide coronavirus and political meltdowns. Nationalism, tribalism, vanity, ignorance, and avarice are all viruses of a different ilk, ones that feed off the loneliness and fear, plus sad opportunities, that accompany pandemics.
Potential saviors such as discipline and science are no match for these human-bred ailments, as when the Mingherian prisoners revolt, setting loose hundreds of patients held in sequestration to roam the streets freely once again, spreading plague like wildfire.
Quarantine is a bitch; most of us, even if we understand and accept its necessity, fail at it. Humans are built to crave company, so everyone ends up cheating a little. It’s hard to be good for very long.
In his 15th book, Orhan Pamuk makes all of this achingly clear. Masterfully imagined and relentlessly inventive, Nights of Plague is worthy of the time a prepared reader will need to invest in it. Although it sometimes feels a little homework-y, that can be a virtue, too, encouraging one to rethink the present and bone up on Ottoman history simultaneously. Indeed, asking much of the reader is in keeping with Pamuk’s impressive, multifaceted, and swaggering intentions.
Helen Schulman is a New York City–based writer and professor. She is the author of several books, including, most recently, Come with Me