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The same thing, he says, happened with his political novel Snow.

Is there an alchemical magic in spending years deep in a distant history only to see it become a potent present-day reality? “Everyone is asking me and partly magic, partly coincidence, partly statistics,” Pamuk says. And it felt as if the coronavirus … spread to the world from my manuscript.” “Then suddenly – bing! The whole world was caught with this coronavirus pandemic and I felt that my intimacy, what I was writing slowly and slowly, was suddenly in the newspapers all over the world. “Writing a long novel is, in a way, psychologically being alone in the world you invented … I was alone for three-and-a-half years, intimate with this book, with a lot of esoteric subjects like lockdowns,” he says. They are minor details but demonstrative of Pamuk’s expansive awareness, a trait that infuses his speech and works. “Now it’s foggy and rainy.” The sun will set in an hour but it’s already dark and he has the lights on. “Last time you called, it was sunny weather, beautiful,” he says, giving me a limited tour of the apartment. He takes a moment to point out the weather. He is a chaired professor at Columbia University, where he teaches every fall semester. Pamuk is speaking on Zoom from a New York City apartment overlooking the Hudson River. And it felt as if the coronavirus … spread to the world from my manuscript.” It’s not luck, you know.” “What I was writing slowly and slowly, was suddenly in the newspapers all over the world. “They switched afterwards: ‘You’re lucky. “I’m proud if people also enjoy these pages.”īefore Covid-19, Pamuk says, no one thought a story about bubonic plague was going to be of interest, which was perhaps disheartening for a novel he had thought about for 40 years. “I’m not proud that I wrote so many pages,” he says. A historical murder mystery set on the imaginary Mediterranean island of Mingheria during an epidemic, it’s Pamuk’s Moby-Dick, weighing in at nearly 700 pages. It seems that Pamuk is still deeply immersed in his latest novel, Nights of Plague, but perhaps this is more to do with its subject matter. But in two or three months, my memory unloads the book, perhaps because it’s now in the new book.” “When the book goes to print, I’m so full with it – read me a sentence, I’ll tell you the next sentence. “When I finish a book, something happens after two or three months that my memory empties, my brain empties itself,” says the Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk.