Egyptian publisher, Dar El Shorouk, has recently published two novels by renowned Turkish writer and recent Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, in Arabic. Pamuk, a literary giant celebrated by enthusiasts globally, is one of the most valuable contributors to world literature, whose works have been translated into 37 languages.
The Museum of Innocence, is the first novel which Dar El Shorouk translated It was first published in 2008 and translated to English in 2009. Set up in Turkey in the 1970s, it is an impossible love story of Kemal, a descendent of a wealthy aristocratic family, and the beautiful but impoverished Fusun – a distant relative of Kemal.
The storyline surpasses the traditional love story to reveal the perplexity and clash of cultures between East and West, which runs against a backdrop of social and political changes Istanbul was experiencing at that time. It offers a comprehensive portrait of Turkey and its affluent class living in a unique world – one that Pamuk is trying to make readers understand through his gripping prose.
The second novel, titled Cevdet Bey and His Sons was written in 1982, and was Pamuk’s debut novel. It addresses the social, economic and political changes, which Turkey was experiencing in the 20th century, played out by the three generations of the Cevdet Bey family – beginning in the early 1900s and ending in the 1970s, a decade famous for coups d’états and political struggles in the country.
