A year or two before Coetzee won, had come across a list of potential Nobel winners that included Oz, Atwood and Pamuk. Was not at all surprised when Coetzee won and felt very relieved that I had sampled and acknowledged the brilliance that was being given the highest approval.

There is a similar feeling of familiarity and reverence about Pamuk’s work despite my having read very little of his oeuvre. Can claim to have become more variety seeking but I think that the main reason is that a good writer’s fame and books are reaching different corners more quickly.

S. Africa and Turkey have strong links with India and one feels the kind of solidarity with their writers that was once the exclusive privilege of the Russian masters. Turkey is closer both geographically and culturally to India but it took Pamuk to revive the fascination that began with Ataturk and to create a deeper interest.

Poetic Parables for troubled times. The local is immersed in foreign influences since the novel is based in a town that has many gifts of modern age but cannot embrace it as a package and leave in toto its own package of traditions. All the characters are provincial except Ka, the doomed protagonist.

If I, belonging to neither of the two dominant cultures whose supposed clashing alerted the Nobel Academy to the usefulness of Pamuk as an antidote to the warring impulses, felt terrible one can only speculate how much more sad the author, who keeps trying to achieve a beautiful provisional synthesis of seeming opposites and takes a small step forward from ossified tradition for his society with every work, would have felt.

Divorced sweetheart who is available and yet elusive partly because of her own notions of propriety and obligation toward father(cannot indulge herself when he is nearby). Tantalizing pursuits. Regulation of choice and pleasure. A chance to make amends for missed opportunities-sexual, political and religious. Not so much a mid age crisis as a longing for the past. Possessing what was beyond capability but did not seem so. Mellowed now but still not satisfied.

Poet who is an outsider. The local people do not accept him and he himself acknowledges that he is a ‘worthless nobody’ in Germany. (Therefore not sad even if he is ignored or appreciated only as an exotic novelty- many woman authors read because of this) A return to the roots that brings more pain pleasure poems, parables than he can handle/balance. A lot of lectures from inspired men by religion or terror(some are inspired by both and are the most attractive;persuasive?)on the need to remain within tradition and not blindly follow western concepts.