[In the following review, Adams lauds Pamuk's accomplishment with The Black Book, calling the novel exciting, imaginative, and intelligent.]

On a winter day in Istanbul, Galip comes home from his languid law practice to find that Rüya, his wife and also his cousin, has run away. He assumes that she has taken refuge with her half-brother Jelâl, a widely read newspaper columnist, but Jelâl is also missing, from both the paper and his formal address. Galip goes sloshing through slush and grime in search of the errant pair. The novel [The Black Book] is constructed in alternating chapters—one describing Galip's wanderings and the strange and garrulous people he meets, who all tell him strange stories; the next reproducing one of Jelâl's old columns, which also contain stories and which Galip studies in the hope of finding a clue to the writer's whereabouts. The flow of seemingly unrelated tales suggests a Thousand and One Nights kaleidoscope, but there is a single concern underlying the shifting surface, and that is the question of identity—What is it, what is its value, what stability does it have? Jelâl's name derives from that of a medieval mystic and poet who advised, “Appear as you are, be as you appear. You are not this body, but a spiritual eye—what the eye of man contemplates it becomes.” Jelâl describes, and Galip experiences, a state in which each is watched by a disembodied eye that is also what it watches. Jelâl refers frequently to historical figures and to Hurufi, a mystical sect practicing a method of divination based upon numbers assigned to letters of the alphabet. Galip tries the method on Jelâl's columns without success. It is likely that only a Muslim or an Islamic specialist can grasp all the implications that the author has embedded in his brilliantly shifting text, but one of them must be Turkey's difficulty in maintaining national identity in its Janus-faced position as the western fringe of the Middle East and the eastern fringe of Europe. With the questions it raises and the author's satirical jabs at literary critics, imported fads, civic authorities, and “small towns where they're big on their religion and their graveyards,” Mr. Pamuk's novel is exciting. It gives both the imagination and the intelligence thorough exercise.