Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks 2009–2022

Nobel Prize winner Pamuk (Nights of Plague) explores politics, his creative process, and the wonders of the natural world in this dazzling illustrated diary. Pamuk selects from 14 years of journal entries, which cover a period when he wrote several novels, taught at Columbia University, and established Istanbul’s Museum of Innocence, a collection of everyday objects—from cigarettes to a 1956 Chevy—suggested by his novel of the same name. Other subjects include soccer, dark nights of the soul (“The emptiness of life. A deep-seated dread. It’s as if I were in space”), and the persecution he’s endured from Turkish officials for publicly discussing the Armenian genocide. His paintings are bright and guileless; most of them depict ships plying the waters near Istanbul or looming mountains rendered in a ghostly style reminiscent of Chinese landscape painting. Pamuk’s musings captivate, whether he’s registering the sublime (“The idea of disappearing behind the farthest of all mountains is a fantasy of reunion with our ancestors”) or poeticizing the mundane (“The sound of waves lapping gently at the shore and the engine of a ship. Folk songs on a radio that’s been left on”). It’s a rewarding peek inside the mind of a master storyteller. Photos. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Nov.)