The results have been prodigious: six novels that recapitulate in Turkish the twentieth-century novel's major modes. When literary success dawned, he married, and now, living in Istanbul with his wife and daughter, he composes, according to an interview he gave Publishers Weekly in 1994, from eleven at night till four in the morning and again, after arising at noon, from two in the afternoon till eight. Until the age of thirty, he lived with his parents, writing novels that did not get published. From a family of engineers, he studied engineering, architecture, and journalism, and practiced none of them. Pamuk, the grandson of a wealthy factory director and railroad builder, has been privileged to write without needing to make a living by it. His eminence, like that of the Albanian Ismail Kadare, looms singularly Western culture-consumers, it may be, don't expect Turkey and Albania to produce novelists at all-at least, novelists so wise in the ways of modernism and postmodernism.

Orhan Pamuk is a fifty-year-old Turk frequently hailed as his country's foremost novelist.

Pamuk my name is red