Perhaps it was the urge to show the drawings to the world, despite the initial shyness; perhaps it was the remarks of random people who praised the paintings that acted as the inducements. Whatever trigger led to the publishing of this book, it certainly could not have been the writing, such as it is. Mere jottings of the highlights of the lived day, these entries are likely to strike the reader as dull and brief, opaque and repetitive.<\/p>\n
Vanity project<\/p>\n
Shorn of animated investment, each day as recorded in the book proceeds much like the one before or the one after. Jean-Paul Sartre would agree that banality marks existence, and Pamuk\u2019s jottings reproduce the banal substratum, the dregs of lived time. The absence of a narrative and, for those who do not know much about Pamuk the person, the lack of courtesy in not introducing the reader to the various people he meets, lives with, or bumps into turn these monotonous notes into so much undigested information.<\/p>\n
The little notes on his own writings and of others he meets or whose works he teaches (of Joseph Conrad, for instance) are either nondescript and non-committal, or incomplete assertions that are never substantiated. The jottings on the cultural\/literary festivals he travels to as an invited speaker, such as the Jaipur Literature Festival in India, read like a list of who\u2019s who in the literary field. We get bland, one-line descriptions of the stars that speak of a colossal authorial indifference.<\/p>\n
![\"Memories](\"https:\/\/fl-i.thgim.com\/public\/newsletter\/reading-with-frontline\/ezb0tp\/article69771542.ece\/alternates\/FREE_1200\/Orhan%20Pamuk%20Memories%20of%20Distant%20Mountains%20cover.jpg\" "\\"Memories")
<\/p>\n
Memories of Distant Mountains\u00a0seems like the self-indulgence of a privileged male writer at the height of his fame.
\n | Photo Credit:
\n By special arrangement\n <\/p>\n
The inexplicable decision to organise the selected miniatures in a non-linear, \u201cEmotional\u201d (as Pamuk puts it), order adds to the reader\u2019s confusion. The frustratingly non-chronological jumble is bound to bewilder the reader who may, not unreasonably, expect reproduced diary entries to follow the order in which they were first recorded. If it is memory that forms the basis of the\u00a0re-ordering, the writing and\/or the illustrations need to necessarily encode an emotional structure, map the coordinates of the creative process, as it were, to guide the tenor and mood of the organisation.<\/p>\n
Neither the vapid writing nor the pretty pastel miniatures allow a peek into the writer\u2019s mind. In an early entry, Pamuk records: \u201cBefore I die\u2014I would like to write a book called distant mountains. A book about painting and imagining distant realms and misty mountain scapes.\u201d This book faithfully executes that early wish: title, painting, distant mountainscapes, all boxes tidily ticked.\u00a0Memories of a Distant Mountains\u00a0seems more like a vanity project, the self-indulgence of a rather privileged male writer at the height of his fame and literary reputation.<\/p>\n