To someone sitting in Ankara, the purpose-built capital of the modern Turkish republic, all this was news.

Even the Bosphorus, arguably the world's most dignified stretch of water, was a source of horror in The Black Book, its waters receding to disclose shipwrecked galleons and soft‑drink bottles while the passengers of passing buses stuffed up the window cracks against 'the stink of flesh and mud', and stared at 'the flames that rise from the fearsome black chasm gaping below'. Pamuk's story of a man called Galip, whose pursuit of his errant wife leads him to take the identity and persona of another man, Jelal, was more disturbed than anything I had experienced in the city – and funnier. We were reading Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book, set miles away, in Istanbul. The novel's first sentences seemed to have been constructed back-to-front, but, after much effort on the part of Emel, I perceived what the author wanted me to: a leaden, wintry light over a sleeping woman, the nape of her neck bowed in slightly freakish declivity this amid noises from the street outside, the salep-seller's jugs scraping against the pavement, the whistle of a minibus superintendent. I was learning Turkish with Emel Hanim, a kind and patient teacher from the language institute up the road, and the first book I rashly suggested we read turned out to be one of the hardest in the language.

I n 1996, I was a young foreigner in the Turkish capital, Ankara.

Istanbul pamuk orhan