The Black Book: Roy Elal 8B

Roy Elal 8B

05/09/11

The Black Book

By: Orhan Pamuk

Pages Read: 231 Pages read this week (Part one of the book. 19 Chapters.)

Genre: Epic

Book Rating: 5

The Black Book is an immense piece of work. What i mean by that, is that probably most readers who have are enjoying this book so far think, there is plot. The content is that Galip wakes up one morning and his wife has vanished. He guesses she has gone off to look for her first husband, Celal, a well- known newspaper columnist. Galip sets off to find Celal, and his wife, but strangely enough the journalist has also vanished. As a way to help him track down the two missing people, Galip immerses himself in Celal’s life, his writing and, slowly, his identity. Effectively he turns into the person he is finding. He re-reads his past work and discovers unknown things about his own past, his wife’s and her former husband’s past. By then, we cannot even be sure if we are approaching a memory of Celal's, Galip’s understanding of them, Galip’s reworking of them, or Galip’s own words presented as if they were the words of Celal's. 

But the plot is almost irrelevant in this story. I would actually say this is not a book one would read to discover what will happen, but it is a book abounding with feeling, experience, and history, and the reader gets to appreciate and be entertained by all three.

"Ruya was lying face down on the bed, lost to the sweet warm darkness beneath the billowing folds of the blue-checked quilt. The first sounds of a winter morning seeped in from outside: the rumble of a passing car, the clatter of an old bus, the rattle of the copper kettles that the salep maker shared with the pastry cook, the whistle of the parking attendant at the dolmus stop. A cold leaden light filtered through the dark blue curtains. Languid with sleep, Galip gazed at his wife's head: Ruya's chin nestling in the down pillow. The wondrous sights playing in her mind gave her even as it suffused him with fear. Memory, Celal had once written in a column, is a garden. Ruya's gardens, Ruya's gardens... Galip thought. Don't think, don't think, it will make you jealous! But as he gazed at his wife's forehead, he still let himself think."

This was the first paragraph of the book. The colossal amount of description and thought put into this first paragraph of the book just makes the reader think to themself 'I need to continue reading this!' At least that was how it was for me. In a statement I had above saying in the book the reader gets to appreciate the feeling, experience and history of the book, I can definitely think of a hundred ways this can be expressed for this paragraph alone.