Orhan Pamuk’s sparkly, almost mischievous blue-grey eyes and endearing persona are like a smokescreen to his erudition. Good-humoured and generous with his answers, he doesn’t take himself seriously all the time. With works that have been translated in over 50 languages, translation is bound to be an issue. “It is the most damning aspect of my life. It is a drama that is sometimes happy and sometimes unhappy, because we need a translation not just of words but also of a culture,” he admits with a Cheshire cat grin.

“I joke that I am a postmodern historical novelist. I found my voice, just like Narayan found his with Malgudi,” he says referencing the nature of his narratives. His books, largely about Turkey, straddle the conflict of eastern and western values. “People pay attention when civilizations clash, I pay attention when civilizations come together,” as evidenced in works like My Name is Red in which the Islamic art of miniature painting touches on Agra. “You write within circles of familiarity. Tolstoy may have written from a woman’s perspective even though he is a man, about an unhappy marriage even though he was happily married, that is because he still writes about a comfortable milieu,” he drives the point home and teasingly adds, “Professors at Columbia (where he teaches) ask me about writing a book based in New York, and I tell them I’m not going to write a campus novel.”

The Turkish Nobel Laureate who had a criminal case against him in 2006 for insulting ‘Turkishness’ insists, “I don’t feel at home either in the West or in non-Western civilizations. If I feel at home, then I lose the fear, the anger and the energy to write. I have an anxiety of belonging wherever I go.” His equation with Istanbul, his home and the subject of his works, is melancholic. ‘... It comforts me to know that for the night at least we are safe from Western eyes, that the shameful poverty of our city is cloaked from foreign view,’ he writes in Istanbul: Memories of a City which is as much a travelogue as it is an autobiography. “Hüzün (melancholy) was a dominant feeling, not in terms of culture but in terms of poverty. Istanbullus felt that during the 50s and 60s that they would be eternally poor. Being torn between tradition and modernity is the core of Turkish identity.” He submits that the past decade has seen tremendous growth in Turkey and India, both countries that are grappling with a Western complex.

Having just published Museum of Innocence, a love story that spans 25 years in Istanbul, he is also working on a sequel to Istanbul: Memories of a City. Pamuk, who had painterly aspirations as a child and enrolled in architecture courses only to drop out, maintains that his background in architecture helps him pay attention to details. “My desire to be a painter was associated with the visuality of this city.” And in unravelling layered experiences of Istanbul in his many books, he marries his vision as an artist and a writer.

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