BY ORHAN PAMUK
There is a past tense in Turkish -- it does
not exist in English -- that allows the writer to distinguish between hearsay
and what he has seen with his own eyes.
"When we are relating dreams,
fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this
tense," Pamuk explains.
This is the tense in which his book seems to be
written, in a voice on the edge of reality, halfway between what he knows has
happened and what he believes imaginatively to be true.
This voice, this tone,
this tense, is perfectly suited to describing melancholy.
--The Washington Post
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