The novel, like orchestral music and post-Renaissance painting, is in my opinion one of the cornerstones of European civilisation; it is what makes Europe what it is, the means by which Europe has created and made visible its nature.

I cannot think of Europe without novels. I am speaking now of the novel as a way of thinking, understanding and imagining, and also as a way of imagining oneself as someone else. In other parts of the world, children and young people first meet Europe in depth with their first ventures into novels: I was one of them. To pick up a novel and step inside Europe’s borders, to enter a new continent, a new culture, a new civilisation – to learn, in the course of these explorations, to express oneself with new desire and new inspiration, and to believe, as a consequence, that one was part of Europe – this is how I remember feeling. Just to read a novel is to prove that Europe’s borders, histories, and national distinctions are in constant flux. The old Europe described in the French, Russian and German novels in my father’s library is, like the postwar Europe of my own childhood and the Europe of today, a place that is forever changing, and so, too, is our understanding of what Europe means.

Orhan Pamuks tale i Frankfurt er gjengitt i Guardian.

As others see us

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk faces trial next month for referring to his country’s massacre of Armenians. He argues that the great European writers have revealed a continent in constant flux, in which modern Turkey has earned its place.