Orhan Pamuk. The New Life

I reread “The New Life” by Orhan Pamuk. I reread it because I am convinced that in a first reading, of any book, there is only an impression, a flavor, an image of whether or not that is a good book.

I also reread it because I hardly remember anything from the first reading five or six years ago. How odd! Usually, at least, I always have a good taste, an image, or a tacit disapproval when I read a book; but not in this one. So, with all my heart I start a second lecture.

With the advance of the pages, I confirm that Pamuk writes a lot but in reality, says nothing, or very, very little. I say, something worthwhile, because to write descriptions, anyone can do it. In addition, I do not identify a single truth, nor a philosophical phrase that shakes me or makes me think deeper; I also identify that the plot is not complicated or complex, nor interesting. Of course, the book is full of nooks and crannies and descriptions of bus stations, routes and accidents that last for five or six pages, or more, to discover in their outcome that they do not clarify anything and that it is not known what they were used for.

With that feeling I advance to the end of the book and discover that it is practically impossible for me to write a good, helpful and constructive review.

Yes, I know. Pamuk is the 2006 Nobel Prize winner, but not for that I will say that “The New Life” is a book that deserves to be read. And although it sounds catastrophic, here it goes my most honest recommendation.

Don't waste your time reading it. Save yourself time and money and go and read other authors worthwhile... Because a book must have philosophy to understand or "to discover" how life should be lived, or how it should not be lived, it has to have suspense and mystery. The New Life has it, but it is a suspense and a mystery without meaning and without grace, and it has very little philosophy, and even so you have to know how to identify it.

So, save yourself having to read hundreds of pages of long and boring texts. The recommendation of the same book already says: "Recommended for the reader who wants something really different."

Oh wow! Who will be that reader who wants something really different? Will he be a fool, a forgetful or an incoherent one...?

I look for other comments on the internet. A reader (Tabascas) writes:

 “...it seemed to me that the plot was leading nowhere, or that it had become absurdly convoluted and without much sense. Very strange characters, "secret" societies that I never understood and above all a very punctual insistence on bus routes; the search for Canan, the girl with whom Osman (the protagonist) has fallen in love and who is lost; the will to find the angel of death that appears in traffic accidents and of course, the mysterious presence and unknown content of the book that leads everyone to run amok like crazy.”

 Another comment from a third reader (Ariel López) says:

 “I don't like to leave a book half done, I think it's in bad taste. However, this book has done it. A teenager finds a book that promises him a "new life" and begins a long journey in search of that new life, alongside a woman with whom he is deeply in love. However, this journey seems immense, endless. On each page he repeats the same stories "he stayed on the bus in search of that new life" over and over again. Tedious, meaningless and lines that do not reach any destination and above all do not reach that new life that the author promises.

I left it in the truck on the way home hoping someone will find the magic that the back cover promises.”

By the way, in “The New Life” it is never remotely said that it contained the mysterious book, the one that deserves the first sentence of the book:

" I read a book one day and my whole life was changed".

Not even a sentence or explanation of the content of that terrifying and wonderful book. Could it be that Pamuk wanted to see us as stupid ones?

Here I have nothing more to say than the analogy of that joke that elementary school children tell, that of a text on a piece of paper that when people read it they suffered a collapse, disgust or deep sadness; so that in the end, when asking the evil man what the mysterious piece of paper said when he went to hell because of his wickedness, he innocently replied: "Oh, it burned when I entered hell."

Well, but there are readers who did understand him at first and comment that it is a very introspective work and that it is a profound novel.

Perhaps they are right. But I, as a writer, and after a second reading, as patient as the first, if it were my book, I would never have ventured to publish it.