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The New Life
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 894.3533
EAN: 9780375701719
ISBN: 0375701710
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: March 31, 1998
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: March 31, 1998
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
In his native Turkey, author Orhan Pamuk's novel The New Life is a huge hit. Now English-language readers have an opportunity to sample this unusual book for themselves. The New Life begins with the sentence "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed." That book leads the narrator, a young man named Osman, on a wild journey in the company of Janan, a mysterious young woman in search of her lover, Mehmet. He had actually managed to enter--and escape--the world of the book. In the course of their travels, Osman and Janan are involved in a bloody bus wreck from which they emerge with new identities; they meet several "false" Mehmets; Janan mysteriously vanishes; and Osman eventually encounters a family friend who may or may not be the author of the life-changing book and possibly of The New Life itself.
In case you hadn't already guessed, The New Life is strictly postmodernist fare, where plot and character are minimal and time and space tend to bend and warp in unexpected ways. The author's vision is certainly original, his descriptions of violence and Turkish culture particularly strong.
The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's fiendishly engaging novel is launched into a world of hypnotic texts and (literally) Byzantine conspiracies that whirl across the steppes and forlorn frontier towns of Turkey. And with The New Life, Pamuk himself vaults from the forefront of his country's writers into the arena of world literature. Through the single act of reading a book, a young student is uprooted from his old life and identity. Within days he has fallen in love with the luminous and elusive Janan; witnessed the attempted assassination of a rival suitor; and forsaken his family to travel aimlessly through a nocturnal landscape of traveler's cafes and apocalyptic bus wrecks. As imagined by Pamuk, the result is a wondrous marriage of the intellectual thriller and high romance. Translated from the Turkish by Guneli Gun."[A] weird, hypnotic new novel...It veers from intellectual conundrums in the Borges vein to rapturous lyricism reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez."--Wall Street Journal
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Good Start, Mediocre Middle, Lousy Ending.
Orhan Pamuk's "Snow" left me absolutely speechless. It was a tour de force in literature that made me want to see what else he had to offer so I checked out "The New Life" on someone else's word. Recommendations usually work out well for me but you can't win them all.
This piece starts out great with Osman, a university student in Turkey, coming across a book that changes his life. It literally changes his life as he no longer knows himself and sets out on a journey of self-discovery ... Read More
Rating:  - Bad Literature.
This is a very difficult to read book. It is also very abstract and keeps you guessing about meaning of the story until the very end and even then it is hard to figure out what was this all about. Student of something, named Osman, reads a books which puts certain magical spell on him. He reads it over and over abandoning all his studies. The feeling that his life is transformed overwhelms him. That the new life is right behind the corner, right there with the mysterious Angel. Reading the books he ... Read More
Rating:  - A Novelist's Novel
The first sentence of Pamuk's, The New Life is: "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed." As the main character reads, he is infused with light, literally knocked off the path of his life. From that point on, dear Reader, abandon your preconceptions of what you think a novel should be, for The New Life won't conform to them.
The New Life can best be described as a prolonged, complex and highly poetic metaphor. If you try to take the endless journeys, the long rambling philosphical ... Read More
Rating: - A new mysticism
Orhan Pamuk's main character reads a book and his whole life changes.
My life, unfortunately, was not changed after reading his book. It is far too abstract.
This fluently written search for the sense of life and the unified reality of the world ends in banalities: `What is life? A period of time. What is time? An accident. What is an accident? A life.
The accidents in this book (e.g. a car accident, a mysterious killing by the agents of the CIA and Coca-Cola), the mysterious characters ... Read More
Rating:  - Overrated or impossible to translate?
Having spent some time working for a political organization in Turkey and traveling on buses through Anatolia (Pamuk captures this experience perfectly), I had a small advantage over the average non-Turkish reader. But only a small one. Does the fact that the book sold faster than any other in the history of Turkish literature but to me remains nearly impenetrable mean that I'm missing something? I'm sure that I am missing a great deal. Give it a chance, but don't expect a great deal of satisfaction.
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