“You have to see and read the landscape like a dream,” says Nobel-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk in Memories of the distant mountains, a book composed of excerpts selected from the sketchbooks he has been keeping for several years. Between the ages of 7 and 22, Pamuk had thought he would be a painter. It was afterwards, he says, that the painter in him died and he began to write novels. But when in 2008 he walked into a shop and came out with two big bags full of pencils and brushes, he never stopped drawing in little notebooks. Boats passing on the Bosphorus or the Sea of Marmara, mountain silhouettes fill the writer’s Moleskine diaries. We see his ideas, his mood, the color of the weather. It is also an open window to the interior, a foray into the laboratory of his novels in progress, as we can see him discovering and elaborating the stories of Mingher’s island which are at the heart of the plague nights.
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