Imagination and Empathy

The power of imagination that fiction provides!  They help us understand the world, and somehow make order of the chaos that is outside.

With the Indian fiction, especially like in RK Narayan's Swami and Friends, there was no need to imagine much.  Because I ate the same kind of foods. Like Swami, I too hoped to have a good cricket game every single day.  Swami's grandmother reminded me a lot of my own grandmothers.  I could absolutely relate to this fictional kid in a fictional town.  His Malgudi was my Neyveli, plus Sengottai, plus Pattamadai.  The pains and pleasures of his were mine as well.
 
I had to imagine a lot, a considerable lot, when I read fictional works by British and American authors. And, of course, the Russian authors too.  The people and the settings in Somerset Maugham's were unlike Swami and Malgudi.  London was anything bigger and grander than I had ever seen.  Moscow and New York seemed like alien planets!  

It was never a one-to-one matching between me and the characters.  But, the human condition bore plenty of similarities.  Similarities to what I felt and experienced, or to what I observed around me.  I could imagine the situations in which the Artful Dodger was trapped in a world of child criminals in a Dickensian world.  I could empathize with him and Oliver Twist.  I could feel for Anna Karenina.

As one whose imaginations are highly circumscribed, and as one with no creativity, I have always turned to storytellers to help me understand the world in all its complexity.  In all my years of reading fiction, I haven't read works by writers who grew up in Muslim countries telling stories that were set in the Islamic world. 

Orhan Pamuk's Silent House fills that gaping hole. 

I suppose in a way it is only fitting for me to bridge the gap with story that is set in Turkey, which itself is the land bridge between Europe and Asia, between Christianity and Islam, between antiquity and modern.  A country that was "reformed" in a hurry by Kemal Ataturk.

The names of people and places were different from what I have been used to.  Unlike many of the Russian ones that I read in translation in which a page listed the characters' names and their relationships, there is no cheat sheet here that I can refer back to.  Heck, it took me a while to figure out that bey means gentleman!

Now that I am familiar with the characters and halfway into the novel, I cannot understand why I never read any of Pamuk's novels all these years!