Writing in the New York Times, Dwight Garner dismissed Orhan Pamuk’s Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022 as “breezy and frictionless,” “a book of paintbox colors and pastel moods. It’s a kiddie pool when one is hoping to body surf.” In short, he wonders if this is “the most embarrassing book published in modern times by a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature?”
Harsh, Dwight. Very harsh.
Granted, a few of Garner’s criticisms ring true. Pamuk, who in his many novels has written with great sensitivity about suffering and pain and loss, seems rather tone deaf as he jets from a writers’ conference to a film festival to a gallery opening, living the good life in Goa and Berlin, Paris and New York, usually on other people’s dimes. As he listens to Mozart on the train to Lyon or runs through the rain in Harvard Square to an event for Nobel Laureates, he can seem rather full of himself.