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(10-12) 15:02 PDT NEW YORK, (AP) --
The Nobel Prize committee could not have picked a more divisive winner for literature than Orhan Pamuk, a writer from a predominantly Muslim country whose life and works illustrate the struggle to find a balance between East and West.
That was reflected in the range of reaction in his homeland Thursday, from Turkish nationalists professing shame at the selection of a man who speaks of the oppression of Armenians and Kurds, to Turkish writers calling it a historic moment for their rich literary tradition.
Pamuk has long been beloved in Europe as the lyrical voice of a society in flux, and to some, his victory was another symbol of Turkey's emergence as a Western nation after decades of self-conscious cultural reform. To others, he is just another example of the West telling Turkey it should be something it's not.
From an early age, Pamuk has had a troubled love affair with his native Istanbul, raised in a city and by a family that had known better times, imagining he had a double, another Orhan, who remained in his childhood home while the author moved on.
"Here we come to the heart of the matter," Pamuk writes in "Istanbul," a memoir published last year.
"I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood. Although I've lived in different districts from time to time, fifty years on I find myself back ... where my first photographs were taken and where my mother first held me in her arms to show me the world."
The real Orhan, the famous one, is now an international symbol of literary and social conscience, whose frank talk about the slaughter of Armenians brought the threat of imprisonment, and whose poetic, melancholy narratives brought him the book world's ultimate blessing.
Pamuk, a fellow at Columbia University, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that he was overjoyed by the award and accepted it not just as "a personal honor, but as an honor bestowed upon the Turkish literature and culture I represent."
The selection of Pamuk, whose recent trial for "insulting Turkishness" made headlines worldwide, continues a trend among Nobel judges of picking writers in conflict with their own governments. British playwright Harold Pinter, a blunt opponent of his country's involvement in the Iraq war, won last year. In 2004, it was Elfriede Jelinek, a longtime critic of Austria's conservative politicians and social class.
Pamuk, whose novels include "Snow" and "My Name Is Red," was charged last year for telling a Swiss newspaper that Turkey was unwilling to deal with two of the most painful episodes in its recent history: the massacre of Armenians during World War I, which Turkey insists was not a planned genocide, and recent guerrilla fighting in the overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast.
"Thirty-thousand Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it," he said in the interview.
The controversy came at a particularly sensitive time for the overwhelmingly Muslim country. Turkey had recently begun membership talks with the European Union, which harshly criticized the trial. The charges against Pamuk were dropped in January.
The reaction to Pamuk's honor was predictably mixed.
Kemal Kerincsiz, the lawyer who led a group of ultranationalists in bringing the charges against Pamuk, said he was "ashamed."
"This prize was not given because of Pamuk's books. It was given because of his words, because of his Armenian genocide claims. ... It was given because he belittled our national values," Kerincsiz said. "As a Turkish citizen, I am ashamed."
Ozdemir Ince, a prominent Turkish poet, reacted angrily.
"If you ask serious literature people, they would place Pamuk at the end of the list," he said. "Turkish literature did not win the Nobel prize, Orhan Pamuk did.
"Tomorrow, the newspaper headlines will be Orhan Pamuk, who accepts the 'Armenian genocide,' won the Nobel Prize."
In an e-mail to the AP, historian Ron Chernow, president of the PEN American Center, the U.S. chapter of the international writers-human rights organization, called Pamuk "a splendid choice ... not only for the evident literary merit of his work, but because of his courageous defiance of political pieties in Turkey."
Virtually the only Turkish author widely known to U.S. readers, Pamuk embodies the push and pull between East and West, between writers and the state, between what we know and what we want to know. He has become a celebrated and resented reminder of his country's ever-present past, like such Nobel laureates as Germany's Guenter Grass and Mississippi native William Faulkner, whose tormented narratives of the American South became models for Pamuk.
"I have so much respect for Faulkner," Pamuk told the AP. "What Faulkner did was to combine complicated history with modernist literature, experimental literature, with an art that is authentic and new and daring. I have also tried to do that."
"Snow," a deeply sad and dreamlike novel published in the United States in 2004, is among the most political of Pamuk's works. It tells of the despair young women in a small Turkish town feel when the state decrees that they can't wear their Islamic headscarves at their university, a divisive issue for many in Turkey, where most women cover their hair in the Muslim tradition.
Many of the educated, liberal Turkish women who read "Snow," Pamuk said in a 2004 interview with the AP, "felt I should not pay so much understanding to the humiliation of a woman who is not allowed to wear a head scarf."
He has spoken up for others in peril. Pamuk was the first Muslim writer to defend Salman Rushdie when Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned Rushdie to death because of "The Satanic Verses," a satire of the Prophet Mohammed published in 1989. Pamuk has also been supportive of Kurdish rights.
Pamuk himself had little religious upbringing. Growing up in Istanbul, his extended family was wealthy and privileged — his grandfather was an industrialist and built trains for the new nation — and in decline. Religion, Pamuk once told the AP, was considered to be something for the poor and the provincial.
Instead, Pamuk was educated at the American school, Robert College, founded in the 1860s by secular Americans, where half the classes were taught in English. Among the Turkish graduates are prime ministers and corporate executives.
Pamuk's first novel, "Darkness and Light," came out in 1979 and was a multigenerational tale about a wealthy Turkish family in Istanbul. His reputation grew with "The White Castle" and "The Black Book," and his following widened even as his work turned more surreal and self-conscious, like "My Name Is Red," a story of forbidden art and palace politics with a ghoulish opening line, "I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of the well."
Western writers such as Margaret Atwood and John Updike are among his fans and more than 200,000 copies of "Snow" have sold in the United States alone. Publisher Random House, Inc., announced Thursday that an additional printing of more than 100,000 has been commissioned for "Snow," along with smaller reprintings for "My Name Is Red,""The Black Book" and the memoir "Istanbul."
Within hours of the Nobel announcement, five of Pamuk's books were among the top 100 sellers on Amazon.com.
Pamuk will receive a $1.4 million check, a gold medal and diploma, and an invitation to a lavish banquet in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 10, the 110th anniversary of the death of prize founder Alfred Nobel.
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Associated Press writers Benjamin Harvey, Mattias Karen, Matt Moore and Karl Ritter contributed to this report.
thats why one must not bag all turks
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