[In the following review, Emck comments on the overriding theme of “spiritual yearning in ideology-led times” in The New Life, calling the novel “a satire on the mystique of transformation promulgated by books.”]

Given that Turks don't usually write novels, and that Turkey is in many senses a liminal place—caught between Christian and Muslim, European and Middle Eastern cultures; not quite third-world poor—this book is every bit as paradoxical as a Turkish novel ought to be. It is also the fastest-selling book in Turkish history; 200,000 copies have been bought in less than a year. Pamuk, who is Turkey's foremost novelist, is also a writer of international stature who has been compared to Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Paul Auster.

Culturally and novelistically, The New Life exists between worlds, too. Pamuk, slyly over-modest, apologises for “the clumsiness of my voice” because “I have still not quite figured out how to inhabit this foreign toy.”

For western readers the novel recalls the wry literariness and metaphysical footwork of Borges, Pynchon, Calvino and Eco. For Turkish readers it is a cautionary tale about religious absolutes and cultural xenophobia. Looked at from a western angle, The New Life draws its inspiration from a quintessentially American genre, the road novel; from an eastern angle it is a mystical quest along the lines of Arabic medieval romance.

The novel itself is about a man teetering on a threshold, exchanging his old, mundane life for a new one of love, quest and adventure. Its early chapters are saturated with a sense of acute anticipation and narrated in a blissed-out, trance-like manner that suggests someone who has been either drugged or entrapped by the Moonies: “We are expecting something, perhaps a miracle, or some kind of light, perhaps an angel, or an accident, I just don't know what …”

The New Life is a satire on the mystique of transformation promulgated by books. Osman, an engineering student, reads a book and realises he must change his life immediately. The next day, as if to confirm that everything has changed (and directly echoing Dante's mystical experience of love as rebirth in La Vita Nuova), he falls in love with Janan, another student. “God is everyone's Janan,” says one of the characters.

If so, then God is cavalier with his servants' devotion. Osman ends up travelling across Turkey with Janan in search of her lost boyfriend. He also ends up believing that the couple actually framed him to fall for the book and Janan herself.

Increasingly, it becomes clear that other young Turks have also been reading the book, taking to the road and hanging about the scenes of accidents under the influence of apocalyptic yearnings.

Intimations of a mysterious conspiracy are everywhere. On the one hand it seems to be connected with the spread of political, fundamentalist literature. On the other hand, it seems to have been “fostered by those who wanted to destroy our country and our spirit and eradicate our collective memory”. In other words, there is a western capitalist plot to colonise Turkey with Coca-Cola ads, and there is a nationalist Islamic counterplot.

This is the vintage territory of paranoia that has been given brilliant expression by the American novelist Thomas Pynchon. What seem initially to be a set of random coincidences turn out to have a sort of determinism. The narrator becomes a detective, picking his way through a proliferation of signs and portents which may be the products of his own overheated imagination: “Unfortunate and foolish hero that I am, trying to discover the meaning of life in this land suffering from amnesia.”

Pamuk's novel is about spiritual yearning in ideology-led times. It is also a cautionary tale about reading. Osman allows a book to tell him how to live his life and he goes off the rails because of it. For western readers, the unspecified book might be any mass-produced genre—an airport novel or romance. For eastern readers, it might be a fundamentalist spin-off of the Koran.

The New Life is a plea for scepticism about all doctrines and beliefs, including the cult of romantic love. Nevertheless, the novel winds up with a beautifully poised tribute to love. The narrator comments: “I acquired these pearls without letting myself be taken over completely by blind faith, but also without being swept away by a cynicism that would leave my soul homeless.”

Pellucid, elusive, infinitely suggestive and poignant, it is as though Borges had sustained one of his crystalline fictions for the length of an entire novel. I have never read anything less clumsy. Everyone should read Orhan Pamuk.