Close Reading: The Black Book

Tomorrow, the Solipsist begins teaching his "Grammar and Style" class. One of the class objectives--really the primary one--is to teach students to think carefully about the way writers use words and construct sentences--in short, how they write. To practice what he preaches, the Solipsist occasionally does some close reading of his own. Thus, we present here a brief style-analysis of the opening paragraph of The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk. What makes writing work (or not)? How do writers utilize the tools of their trade to affect their readers?

(A caveat: Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist. The novel under discussion was translated by Guneli Gun. Along with our readers, we are left to ponder how much of what we discuss here reflects choices of the novelist as opposed to the translator.)

The opening paragraph:

Ruya slept on her stomach in the sweet and warm darkness under the blue-checkered quilt which covered the entire bed with its undulating, shadowy valleys and soft blue hills. The first sounds of the winter morning penetrated the room: carts passing by sporadically and old buses, the salep maker, who was in cahoots with the pastry man, banging his copper jugs up and down on the sidewalk, the whistle of the shill at the dolmus stop. The navy-blue drapes leached out the leaden winter light that came into the room. Galip, languid with sleep, studied his wife’s head which poked out of the quilt: Ruya’s chin was buried in the down pillow. In the curve of her brow there was something surreal that brought on anxious curiosity about the wondrous events that took place inside her head. “Memory,” Jelal had written in one of his columns, “is a garden.” Then Galip had thought: Gardens of Ruya, Gardens of Dreaming. Don’t think, don’t think! If you do, you will suffer jealousy. But Galip couldn’t help thinking as he studied his wife’s brow.

It is significant that the novel begins with the (non-)action of a man (Galip) staring at his wife (Ruya), who is mostly hidden underneath a blanket: This foreshadows the primary action of the novel, which consists of Galip's search for his wife, after she mysteriously disappears later on that day.

The style of the paragraph, too, sets the tone. Notice that, while the paragraph is dense with description, heavy with words, it features comparatively few clauses--less than twenty subject-verb units. Moreover, only a third of the verbs are transitive (i.e., possessing a direct object). This helps create a feeling of "internality": Characters like Galip have very little impact on things in the world; their actions are self-contained. Note also that two of the transitive verbs have Ruya as their object: "Galip. . .studied his wife's head"; ". . .he studied his wife's brow." As she will be in the rest of the novel, Ruya is the primary object in Galip's life.

Play with the paragraph yourself. See what you come up with.