帕慕克诺贝尔受奖演说

父亲的手提箱 -- 帕慕克诺贝尔受奖演说


父亲在去世的两年前给了我一个小手提箱，里面装的是他的作品，手稿和笔记。他装作以前那样轻松玩笑地要我在他走后再看，这个“走”当然是说的是他死了以后。

　　他说：“翻翻就行了。看看有没有对你有用的东西。或许在我走后你可以挑选一些发表。”

　　说这话时是在我的书房里。在四面全是书的墙的包围之中，父亲想找个地方放下箱子。他左右徘徊，就仿佛一个想把自己身上的痛苦的负担赶紧卸下去的人。最后，他悄悄地把它放在了一个不起眼的角落里。那真是个有点尴尬却又难忘的时刻。但随后我们就恢复了常态。平常的轻松，俏皮和嘲讽性情立刻显现出来。我们照例聊了些家长里短，土耳其的政坛丑闻，还有父亲一直没有起色的商业投资，说这些时我们一点都不伤心。

　　父亲走后，我围着那个箱子转了几天，却碰都没有碰一下。这个小小的黑皮箱子我太熟悉了。父亲旅行的时候总是带着它。有时上班也用它来装文件。我还记得小时候父亲出差一回来，我就会打开箱子，把里面的东西都翻出来检查一番，感受一下古龙水和异域的情调。这个箱子就像是一个老朋友，承载我的童年及过去的记忆。可现在我却不能碰它一下，为什么？当然是因为其中的沉重的内涵。

　　现在就来说说这沉重的内涵。这是一个人把自己关在一个房间里面，坐在桌子面前，完全把自己投入到自己的思想表达中——这正是文学的意义。

　　我摩挲着父亲的箱子，还是不敢打开它，可我却非常了解那些笔记本上记的是什么。我曾经见过父亲往它们上面写东西。这也不是我第一次见到箱子里的东西了。四十年代的时候，父亲有一个很的图书室。他也曾想当一名伊斯兰诗人，还把瓦雷里的诗译成了土耳其语呢。但他不想过那种在一个穷地方写几首没人看的诗的生活。父亲的父亲——我的祖父——是一个有钱的商人；父亲小时和年轻时过得都是很富足，所以他也没打算要为了文学，为了写作忍受贫穷。他喜欢生活中精致的东西——对此我也深表理解。

　　当然，让我无法打开父亲箱子的第一条就是我害怕我会看到我不愿意看到的东西。父亲就是知道这一点才装作不把它当回事的样子。作为一个写了25年书的人，这一情景实在让我痛心。但我对于父亲没能认真投身文学事业不是生气……我真正的担心是发现父亲是个优秀作家的可能。这正是我不敢开父亲的箱子所担心的。更糟的是我都不敢公开的承认这一点。因为如果从父亲的箱子里拿出来的真是伟大的文学作品，我就必须面对父亲身体里面存在着完全不同的另外一个人。这个可能性太可怕了。因为即便是一把年纪了，我也只希望我父亲就是我父亲而不是一个作家什么的。

　　作家是一种能够耐心地花费多年时间去发现一个内在自我和造就了他的世界的人。当我谈到写作时，我脑子里想到的不是小说，诗歌或是文学传统，而是一个把自己关在房间里，单独面对自己的内心的人；在自己的内心深处，他用言语建造了一个新的世界。这个男人或是女人，可能用的是打字机，也有可能利用电脑的先进技术，或者只是拿笔在纸上写。他写作的时候可能喝茶，喝咖啡，抽烟，还时不时会站起来，望着窗外在大街上嬉戏的儿童，如果幸运的话，可能还能看到绿树或是风景；也许他只能面对一堵灰墙。他可以像我一样，写诗，写戏剧，写小说。同样都是坐在桌子后面，努力的思考，结果却大不一样。写作就是将他内在的凝视集中到文字上、研究在他回归自我的内心后，依然人来人往的外部世界。他这样做时还得从容、执着、兴趣盎然。我坐在桌前，日复一日，月复一月，年复一年，不断用文字填满空白的稿纸，我感觉自己是在创建一个全新的世界，就像是在自己内心加入了许多人的性情。同样地，一个人也可以一块石头一块石头地建起一座大桥或是大厦，我们作家用的材料就是文字。我们把它们放在手中掂量着，揣摸着他们相互之间的衔接关系，有时需要后退到远处瞧瞧，有时需要用手指和笔尖细细摩挲，衡量再三，东移西凑，在时光流逝中创造出新的世界。


　　作家的秘诀不在于灵感——因为谁也不知道它来自哪里——而是靠固执，耐心。有一句老话——就是用根针挖井——我觉得就说出了作家的概念。在那些老故事中，我最喜欢Ferhat的那份决心，他可以愚公移山似的追求爱情——我非常理解他。在我的小说《我的名字叫红》中，当我写到那个老波斯画家以一种不变的热情长年画着一模一样的马，一笔一画都能倒背如流，闭着眼睛也能画出那些漂亮的骏马。我知道我在谈论写作的职业化，和我自己的生活。如果一个作家讲的是自己的故事——要慢慢的讲，要当它是别人的故事来讲——假如他感觉到这些故事在他心里已经成熟，他就该坐下来，把自己完全交付这一艺术——它已经被赋予了期待。灵感天使（通常经常光顾一些人而对另一些人却不大理睬）喜欢有期待，有信心的人。而正是在一个作者感到最孤独，对自己的努力，梦想及作品的价值最困惑的时候——这时他会认为自己的故事仅仅是自己的故事——天使就是选择在这个时刻给他以故事，图像和梦来帮他描绘出他想象中的世界。回头想想那些我为之奋斗一生的书，我自己都对那些时刻感到惊讶。那些让我如此痴迷沉醉的句子，仿佛根本不是来自我自己的想象，而是冥冥之中的慷慨礼物。

　　我害怕打开父亲的箱子，看到他的笔记本还因为我知道他忍受不了我在创作过程中经历的艰辛。他不喜欢孤独，而喜欢朋友、人群、沙龙、玩笑和伙伴。可后来我的想法又改变了。这些想法，这些所谓放弃和忍耐才能实现写作梦想的说法，其实是我在自己的写作生活和经历中养成的偏见。不是也有无数才华横溢的作家是在人群中，在家庭生活里，在朋友的陪伴和愉快的闲聊中创作的吗？还有，父亲还在我小时候也曾厌倦了家庭生活的单调，离开我们去了巴黎。在那儿——和许多有名的作家一样——他一个人呆在旅馆的房间里，看自己的笔记。我也知道，那就是现在躺在箱子里的这些笔记。因为在把箱子给我之前的几年间，他陆续地告诉我他那一段时期的生活。他甚至还告诉我我孩提时的种种往事，但却绝口不提他的致命弱点，他的作家梦，还有他在旅馆时的身份等烦人问题。他只是大谈他在在大街上碰过几次萨特，看过些什么书和电影，说起来眉飞色舞，一脸虔诚，就像宣布什么重大新闻似的。我成了作家之后，我一直认为这要部分归功于我有一个大侃世界知名作家远胜于政坛高官和宗教领袖的父亲。所以我必须在这种背景下来读父亲的笔记，同时牢记对他的图书室对我的巨大裨益。我要记着父亲和我们一起生活的时候，和我一样就喜欢一个人看书，思考——而并未过多地注意自己的写作水平。


　　可当我如此热切地注视着这个父亲留给我的箱子时，我还是感觉到我做不到。父亲有时会从一摞书前面的长沙发里站起来，放下手上的书或杂志，恍然若梦，长时间的沉静在自己的思绪中。每当我看到他脸上一幅与我们开玩笑，找乐子和耍贫嘴大不一样的神情时——也就是他开始内省的迹象——我（尤其是在小时候）就会不安地猜想他又不满意了。如今，许多年过去了，我体会到这种不满其实是成为一个作家的特性。要当一个作家，光有耐心和辛劳是不够的。首先要从人群、同伴、家常琐事，日常生活中逃离出来，然后把自己关在一个房间里。我们乞求耐心和希望，以在笔下创造一个深刻的世界。但这种把自己关在房间里的冲动正是推动我们作为的动力。蒙田——一个为内心愉悦而读书，一个只聆听自己的心声而抗拒他人的嘈杂的人，一个和自己的书的对话发展自己的思想以及自己的世界的人——当仁不让地可作为早期现代文学独立作家的先驱。蒙田是父亲经常反复咀嚼的一个作家，也是他一直向我推荐的作家。我喜欢把自己看成是一个作家传统中的一位成员，不管他们是谁，来自世界的那个角落，他们都一无例外的与世隔绝，把自己关起来只跟书呆在一起。真正的文学始于一个把自己和书关起来的人。

　　一旦把自己关起来，我们很快就发现这其实不是想象中的那么孤独。我们有前人的话语为伴。它们在别人的故事里，在别人的书中，我们把它们称作传统。我认为文学是人类在认识自我的追寻中最有价值的宝藏。各种各样的社会，部落，人群变得越来越智慧，丰富，先进，就是因为他们重视自己作家们的话，而且，我们都知道焚书坑儒就意味着黑暗无知的到来。但文学从来都不仅是一个民族的事，那个把自己关起来的作者首先是进入自己意志的旅程，积年之后，就会发现文学的永恒规则；这时他就需要把自己的故事当作他人的故事来讲和把他人的故事说成自己的故事的艺术才能，因为文学就是这样的。但前提是我们通揽别人的故事和书籍。

　　父亲有一个很好的图书室——总共有1500册藏书——对一个作家来说也足够了。22岁时，我虽然还没读完这些书，可我却对他们却了如指掌——我知道哪本很重要，我知道哪本不重要却容易读，哪本是经典名著，哪本是任何教育都缺少不了的，哪本看完就忘却不乏一些当地历史有趣掌故，以及父亲对哪个法国作家评价甚高。有时，我会远远地注视着这个图书室，想象有一天，在另一个房子里，我能建起自己的图书室，一个更好的图书室——给自己建一个世界。从远处看父亲的图书室，在我看来就是一个真实世界的一个小缩影。是一个从伊斯坦布尔我们自己的角落看过去的世界。这个图书室在这方面尤其明显。父亲的图书主要来自一次又一次到巴黎和美国的旅行，也有从专卖四五十年代外版书的商店和伊斯坦布尔大大小小的书商里淘来的，那些书商我也认识。而我的世界是国内的——民族的——和西方的混合物。七十年代时，我也曾雄心万丈地要打造一个自己的图书室。那时我还没决心成为一个作家——正如我在《伊斯坦布尔》提到过的，那时我意识到自己根本成不了一个画家，但我也不知道我该走哪条路。在我的内心有一股强烈的好奇心，一种有着强烈希望的欲望促使我去阅读和学习。同是我也觉得生活中好像缺了点什么，好像我没法过的跟别人一样的生活。这种感觉部分跟我看着父亲的图书室是的感觉有联系——生活得距离事务中心很遥远，因为那时我们住在伊斯坦布尔的人都觉得有一种住在乡下的感觉。我的焦虑和些许的失落感还有另一个原因，因为十分清楚自己生活在一个对艺术家丝毫不感兴趣的国家——不论是画家还是作家——这就令他们绝望了。七十年代时，我拿着父亲给我的钱在从伊斯坦布尔的旧书商那里贪婪地购买那些褪色的，灰头土脸的卷角旧书。那些旧书店的可怜情形就像那些书一样深深的打动了我——穷困潦倒的书商们的毫无生气，凌乱不堪。他们在路边，在清真寺的院子里，在歙簌掉土的墙脚下随便摊开自己的家什。

　　至于我在这个世界上的位置——在生活中和在文学上一样，我的基本感觉就是“远离中心”。在这个世界的中心，有一种比我们自己的生活要更丰富，更激动人心的生活，在伊斯坦布尔，在土耳其，到处都有，可我不在其中。今天，我想这个世界上有很多人会和我有同感。同样的，世界文学，也有它的中心，离我也很遥远。其实我脑子里想的是西方而不是世界文学，我们土耳其人不在其中。我父亲的图书室就是一个很好的明证。在图书室的一端，是伊斯坦布尔的书——我们的文学，我们本地的世界，有着无数亲切的细节——而在另一端，是个外来者，西方或是世界文学，一个截然不同的，让我们又痛又爱的世界。阅读、写作，就像是离开一个世界到另一个不同的、奇怪的和令人惊异的世界中去找寻安慰。我感觉父亲就是靠读这些小说来逃往西方世界——就像后来我做的一样。或者，在我看来，那时的书就是我们捡起来逃避我们自己的文化的工具，因为我们对自己的文化感到如此的失落。为了充实自己的笔记，父亲赶到巴黎，把自己关起来，然后又带着手稿回土耳其。我看着父亲的箱子，这就是让我坐立不安的源头。在一个房间里写作25年之后，我成了土耳其的作家，当看到父亲把自己的想法紧紧地锁在了箱子里，就像写作是一项秘密工作，要远离社会、国家，和人们的视线。这让我羞愧。这可能是我对父亲不能像我一样认真对待文学而倍感气愤的原因吧。

　　事实上我就是因为父亲没选择和我一样的生活生气。可他从未和自己的生活过不去，他一辈子都快乐地和朋友亲人在一起。但我自己又有点知道我与其说是“生气”不如说是“妒忌”，后者要准确得多了，而这一点又让我尤其不安。每逢想到这点，我就会轻蔑，恼怒地大声问自己：“幸福是什么？”幸福是孤独的关在暗无天日的房间里吗？或者是与芸芸众生一起，过着或装出过着舒适生活的样子？还是不管幸福与否，都和周围的人事和谐一致，享受生活的同时悄悄地写下来？这些问题实在是太让人烦恼了。谁说幸福是衡量生活的唯一标准的？大众，报纸，每个人都把幸福当作评判生活的重要尺度。这事本身是不是说明其反面也很值得探寻一番？毕竟，父亲也曾多次从家里逃跑——我又能说我对他有多少了解，我对他的焦虑又有多少理解呢？

　　我第一次打开父亲的箱子时就是受这种情绪影响的。父亲生活中是不是有什么我毫不知情的秘密或是不幸而他只能默默忍受，倾泻在纸上？一打开箱子，旅行的气息就扑面而来。我认出了其中的几本笔记，父亲多年前曾给我看过，但我却从没仔细读过。我现在拿在手里大多数笔记是我们还年轻时父亲到巴黎去做的。我就想读我所崇拜的作家的手记一样急切地想要了解父亲在我那个年级的时候都想了些什么，写了些什么。不久我就意识到不是那么回事。最让我不舒服的是我在笔记中时不时能读到作家的腔调。我知道那不是父亲的声音。一点都不真实，至少不属于我认识的我的父亲的声音。在对父亲写作时可能不是他自己的担心之下，还有更深的担忧：害怕内心深处的自己也不真实，害怕在父亲的作品里找不到什么好东西。这又增加了我对父亲受太多作家的影响的忧虑。我年青的时候也为此深受折磨，几乎陷入绝境，差点就放弃我的本性，我的写作欲望，我对生活拷问的习惯。在我当作家的前十年里，我对此倍感焦虑，尽管后来有所摆脱，我还是会担心某天我还得承认自己的失败——就像我在绘画上的努力一样——最终屈服于这种烦躁，放弃小说的创作。

　　我曾经提到过我关上父亲的箱子时产生的两种情绪: 在外省的被放逐感觉和我自己缺乏真实性的感觉。这当然不是我第一次有这样的感觉。多年来他们就一直在我的阅读、写作当中存在着，我也就一直在研究，发现甚至深化这些各式各样的、出人意料的，既让人精神崩溃也让人情绪高涨的情感和色彩。我的灵魂是早已被混乱，敏感和来自生活中和书本里的稍纵即逝的痛苦所困扰，这些大多来自年轻时的体会。只有当我写书的时候才对真实性的问题（比如《我的名字是红》和《黑书》）和边缘性的生活(比如《雪》和《伊斯坦布尔》)有了更全面的理解。对我来说，做一名作家就是去挖自己内心深处的隐秘伤疤，他们是如此的隐秘，有时甚至我们自己都不知道他们的存在，还要不辞辛苦地去研究、了解、揭示它们，真正的去拥有这些伤和痛，把他们变成我们的精神和作品中的看得见的部分。


　　作家谈论的是大家都知道但却不知道自己知道的事。他要去探讨它们，关注他们的成长，这是一件令人愉快的工作；读者们看到的是一个既熟悉而又不可思议的世界。当一个作家经年累月地把自己关在房间里磨练自己的技艺的时候——他是在创造一个世界——如果他是从揭开自己的秘密伤口开始的话，不管他是否意识到了，他都是对人性赋予了最大的信任。我的信心就来自一个信念即所有的人都是一样的，他们也有着和我一样的伤痛的——因而他们会理解我。真正的文学都来自于那份充满童真和希望的信心，就是所有的人都是相像的。但一个作家闭门数十载，就是在用这种姿态宣示一个基本的人性，揭示一个没有中心的世界。

　　但是从我父亲的箱子和伊斯坦布尔人苍白的生活可以看出，这个世界的确有一个中心，而且离我们很遥远。在我的书中，我曾详细描述这个事实是如何激起过契诃夫式的边缘感受，以及他是怎么从另外一方面引起了我自己的真实性的怀疑。根据经验我知道这个星球上的大部分人都有这种情绪，相对于我，有些人可能还遭受着更为深刻的物质匮乏，没有安全感和堕落感折磨。人类面临的重大难题还是土地缺乏，无家可归和饥饿……但今天的电视和报纸可以比文学更为迅速简洁的报道这些基本问题。而文学最迫切的任务是要讲述并研究人类的基本恐惧：被遗弃在外的恐惧，碌碌无为的恐惧，以及由这些恐惧而衍生的人生毫无价值的恐惧；集体性的耻辱，挫折，渺小，痛苦，敏感和臆想的侮辱、还有民族主义者的煽动和对即将到来的通货膨胀的担心……不论何时我面对这些伤感，烦恼，通常以夸张的语言表达出来的时候，我就知道他们触及了我内心深处的黑暗。我们曾看过西方社会以外的民族，社会，和国家——我很容易认同他们——常常因为被恐惧折磨得犯一些愚蠢的错误，仅仅是因为害怕受到羞辱和敏感。我也知道西方——我也同样容易认同的一个世界——一些国家和民族对自己的财富，对他们把我们带进了文艺复兴，启蒙运动，现代主义有着不一般的自豪，但他们时不时的也由于自我满足干出一些同样愚蠢的事来。

　　这就意味着我父亲不是唯一把一个有中心的世界看得太重的人。而那促使我们闭门数十年写作的是一个相反的信念；那信念是相信有一天我们的文字会被读到而且被理解，因为世界上的人都是相似的。可从我父亲及我自己的作品来看，似乎是有点过于乐观了，因为里面充满了对被挤在边缘，排斥在世界外围的怒气留下的伤痕。陀思妥耶夫斯基一生对西方爱恨交织——现在我也许多方面体会到了。但如果说我认识到了一个基本的真理的话，如果我要为这一乐观主义辩解的话，就是因为我和这位伟大的作家一起经历了对西方的爱恨情仇，一起关注了他在另一方向上建立的另一个世界。

　　所有献身这一任务的作家都明白这样一个现实：不论远来的目的是什么，我们历经数十载满环希望创建的一个世界最终将转移到另一个完全不同的地方去。他将把我们带到一个远离那张我们带着伤感和怒气工作的桌子，到伤感和怒气的另一面，另一个世界。我父亲可能还没到那里吗？就像一块正在形成的大陆，慢慢的从五彩缤纷的薄雾中升起，就像经过长途的海上旅程，终于见到了小岛，这个新世界一直在迷惑着我们。我们就像当年西方的旅行者飘洋过海寻找伊斯坦布尔一样，被雾霭魅惑了。在这个以希望和好奇开始的旅程结束时，一座满是清真寺和尖塔，密密匝匝布满屋舍，街道，山峦，桥梁，斜坡的完整的城市展现在你的面前了。看到它，我们都希望走进去，藏身其中，就像我们读一本书那样。因为感到土气，被排斥，气愤，或是极端孤独，我们坐下来看书，却发现了一个超越这些伤感情绪的全新世界。

　　我现在的感受和我孩童和青年时期正好相反：对我来说世界的中心就是伊斯坦布尔。这不仅是因为我一辈子都生活在此，而且因为过去33年里，我一直在讲述它的街道，桥梁，居民，购，房舍，清真寺，喷泉，传奇英雄，商店，名人，污点，它的日日夜夜，我把它变成了自己的一部分，完全接纳了它。当我亲手建成这个世界时，目标就达到了。这个世界存在我的脑海中，它比那个我所生活的世界还要真实。这是因为，在我的世界中，所有的人和物还有建筑都开始相互交流，以一种我不曾预料的方式互动起来，就像是它们不适依赖于我的想象和书，而是独立存在一样。

　　看着那箱子，我觉得父亲在他写作的那些年里可能也发现了这些乐趣：我不应该对他预先判断。我很感激他。不管怎么说，他从来不是一个呼来喝去，惩罚不分的平庸父亲，而是一个让我自由选择，对我表示最大限度的尊敬的父亲。我常想，要是我当初偶尔能对父亲谈谈我的想象该多好啊，不管是放肆的还是幼稚的。因为跟我其他朋友的童年不一样，我从来没怕过我的父亲，我有时还认为我之所以能成为一名作家就是因为我父亲当初就想当作家。我必须要一颗容忍心来阅读它——看看他在旅馆房间里究竟写了些什么。

　　正是带着这种希望，我又走到了那个箱子跟前。它还静静地立在父亲放置的地方。我全神贯注地通读了几本手稿和笔记。我父亲写了些什么呢？我记得有一些是巴黎旅馆窗外的景致，几首诗，一些似是而非的观点，分析等等……我写作的时候就像一个出了车祸的人拼命要回忆起到底发生了什么事，却又害怕会记起太多的可怕场景。在孩提的时，我父母一到吵架的边缘——就是他们相互不说话的时候——爸爸就会打开收音机来调节一下情绪，而音乐就会帮助我们很快地忘掉不愉快。


　　现在让我来说几句像音乐一样能调节情绪的好话吧。你知道，我们作家问得最多的一个问题也是最喜欢的一个问题就是：为什么写作？我写作是因为内心的冲动，也因为我不能像别人一样做好其他的工作，还因为我想读到像自己一样的人写的书。我写作是因为生所有的人的气，每一个人。我写作是因为我喜欢整天地坐在桌子前面子写东西。我写作是因为只有改变真实的生活来分享经验。我写作是因为我想让其他的人，世界上所有的人都了解到我们在土耳其伊斯坦布尔过的是一种什么样的生活，我们还将继续生活下去。我写作是因为我喜欢纸张、钢笔和墨水的芬芳。我写作是因为相对其他东西，我更信仰文学，信仰小说艺术。我写作是因为是一种习惯和热情。我写作是因为我害怕被遗忘。我写作是因为我喜欢写作带来的荣耀和乐趣。我写作是因为我享受孤独。也可能我写作是因为我希望你们能理解我为什么对你们这么的愤怒，对每一个人都这么的愤怒。我写作是因为我喜欢别人读我的故事。我写作是因为我曾经写过一部小说，一篇文章，某一页的开头，我想把它写完。我写作是因为每个人都希望我写下去。我写作是因为我有一个孩子般的执著：要有一个不朽的图书室，书架上还要有自己的书。我写作是因为把生活中的美和丰富转变成文字是一项激动人心的工作。我写作不仅仅是要讲述一个故事，而是要创造一个故事。我写作是因为我希望能逃脱那不祥的预兆，就像在梦里一样我有个地方要去却总也到不了。我写作是因为我从来没让自己快乐过，写作能让我快乐。

　　在把箱子留在我办公室后一个星期，父亲又来看过我一次；一如既往，他给我买了巧克力（他忘了我都48岁了）。也一如既往，我们聊了些生活，政治和家庭琐事。后来他终于看到他放的箱子被我移动过了。我们就互相看了看，陷入了尴尬的沉默。我没说我打开了箱子，看了里面的内容，相反，我只是把视线移开了。他立刻明白了。就像我明白他明白了一样。就像他明白我明白他明白了一样。但所有的明白就在几秒钟之内明白了。因为父亲是一个快乐，懒散但却对自己有信心的人；他只是照例冲我笑了笑。当他离开时，没忘记把他作为父亲该说的赞扬鼓励之词又重复了一遍。

　　我也同往日一样，注视着他离开，无比羡慕他的快乐，无忧无虑和处世不惊的脾气。我也记得那天我心里有一小会儿的窃喜让我感到羞耻。那是由我感觉到我可能生活上可能过得不如他舒适的念头引起的。可能我不如他过得快乐，自由自在，但我献身于写作了——你明白……我为自己对父亲有这样的想法感到羞愧。在所有的人中，父亲从来没让我痛苦过——他完全让我自由发展。这些都让我们想到写作和文学是和生活中中心的缺失，和我们的幸福与负疚相联系的。

　　我的故事同时也相应地提醒我那天还有一件事让我更加内疚。在父亲把箱交给我的二十三年前，在我决心放弃一切把自己关起来去当一名小说家四年之后，就是我22岁时，我完成了第一步小说《杰夫德贝伊与其子》。我用颤抖的手将打印稿拿给父亲看，想听一点他的意见。这并不仅是因为我相信以他的品位和智慧，或是他的意见对我来说非常重要，还因为他不像母亲那样，反对我成为一个作家。在这点上，父亲远比我们有远见多了。我迫不及待的等着他的消息。两个星期之后他来了，我跑过去把门打开。父亲没有说任何话，只是张开手臂给了我一个拥抱，用这种方式告诉我他非常非常喜欢这部作品。有一会儿，我俩陷入了那种由于异常激动带来的无言沉默。后来，等我们平静下来开始说话，他用了一种夸张的语言对我和我的处女作表达了他的强烈信心：他告诉我说总有一天我会赢得像站在这里接受这个奖项这样的无限快乐。

　　他说这话不是因为想用好听的来安慰我，或是把这个奖项作为目标来刺激我；他像所有的土耳其父亲那样给自己的儿子以支持，并鼓励我说：“总有一天，你会获得荣誉并成为帕夏！”许多年来，无论何时，他看到我都以同样的话语鼓励我。

　　我父亲在2002年12月去世了。

　　今天，我站在这里，站在给予我这无尚光荣的奖项的瑞典文学院的同事们和尊敬的来宾们面前，我深切地希望此刻他就在我们中间。

　　（根据瑞典文学院官方网站英文稿译出 翻译：湘洋）
Nobel Lecture
December 7, 2006

My Father's Suitcase

Two years before his death, my father gave me a small suitcase filled with his writings, manuscripts and notebooks. Assuming his usual joking, mocking air, he told me he wanted me to read them after he was gone, by which he meant after he died.

'Just take a look,' he said, looking slightly embarrassed. 'See if there's anything inside that you can use. Maybe after I'm gone you can make a selection and publish it.'

We were in my study, surrounded by books. My father was searching for a place to set down the suitcase, wandering back and forth like a man who wished to rid himself of a painful burden. In the end, he deposited it quietly in an unobtrusive corner. It was a shaming moment that neither of us ever forgot, but once it had passed and we had gone back into our usual roles, taking life lightly, our joking, mocking personas took over and we relaxed. We talked as we always did, about the trivial things of everyday life, and Turkey's neverending political troubles, and my father's mostly failed business ventures, without feeling too much sorrow.

I remember that after my father left, I spent several days walking back and forth past the suitcase without once touching it. I was already familiar with this small, black, leather suitcase, and its lock, and its rounded corners. My father would take it with him on short trips and sometimes use it to carry documents to work. I remembered that when I was a child, and my father came home from a trip, I would open this little suitcase and rummage through his things, savouring the scent of cologne and foreign countries. This suitcase was a familiar friend, a powerful reminder of my childhood, my past, but now I couldn't even touch it. Why? No doubt it was because of the mysterious weight of its contents.

I am now going to speak of this weight's meaning. It is what a person creates when he shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and retires to a corner to express his thoughts – that is, the meaning of literature.

When I did touch my father's suitcase, I still could not bring myself to open it, but I did know what was inside some of those notebooks. I had seen my father writing things in a few of them. This was not the first time I had heard of the heavy load inside the suitcase. My father had a large library; in his youth, in the late 1940s, he had wanted to be an Istanbul poet, and had translated Valéry into Turkish, but he had not wanted to live the sort of life that came with writing poetry in a poor country with few readers. My father's father – my grandfather – had been a wealthy business man; my father had led a comfortable life as a child and a young man, and he had no wish to endure hardship for the sake of literature, for writing. He loved life with all its beauties – this I understood.

The first thing that kept me distant from the contents of my father's suitcase was, of course, the fear that I might not like what I read. Because my father knew this, he had taken the precaution of acting as if he did not take its contents seriously. After working as a writer for 25 years, it pained me to see this. But I did not even want to be angry at my father for failing to take literature seriously enough ... My real fear, the crucial thing that I did not wish to know or discover, was the possibility that my father might be a good writer. I couldn't open my father's suitcase because I feared this. Even worse, I couldn't even admit this myself openly. If true and great literature emerged from my father's suitcase, I would have to acknowledge that inside my father there existed an entirely different man. This was a frightening possibility. Because even at my advanced age I wanted my father to be only my father – not a writer.

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love – and I understand it, too. In my novel, My Name is Red, when I wrote about the old Persian miniaturists who had drawn the same horse with the same passion for so many years, memorising each stroke, that they could recreate that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew I was talking about the writing profession, and my own life. If a writer is to tell his own story – tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people – if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art – this craft – he must first have been given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favours the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing – when he thinks his story is only his story – it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him stories, images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination – that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

I was afraid of opening my father's suitcase and reading his notebooks because I knew that he would not tolerate the difficulties I had endured, that it was not solitude he loved but mixing with friends, crowds, salons, jokes, company. But later my thoughts took a different turn. These thoughts, these dreams of renunciation and patience, were prejudices I had derived from my own life and my own experience as a writer. There were plenty of brilliant writers who wrote surrounded by crowds and family life, in the glow of company and happy chatter. In addition, my father had, when we were young, tired of the monotony of family life, and left us to go to Paris, where – like so many writers – he'd sat in his hotel room filling notebooks. I knew, too, that some of those very notebooks were in this suitcase, because during the years before he brought it to me, my father had finally begun to talk to me about that period in his life. He spoke about those years even when I was a child, but he would not mention his vulnerabilities, his dreams of becoming a writer, or the questions of identity that had plagued him in his hotel room. He would tell me instead about all the times he'd seen Sartre on the pavements of Paris, about the books he'd read and the films he'd seen, all with the elated sincerity of someone imparting very important news. When I became a writer, I never forgot that it was partly thanks to the fact that I had a father who would talk of world writers so much more than he spoke of pashas or great religious leaders. So perhaps I had to read my father's notebooks with this in mind, and remembering how indebted I was to his large library. I had to bear in mind that when he was living with us, my father, like me, enjoyed being alone with his books and his thoughts – and not pay too much attention to the literary quality of his writing.

But as I gazed so anxiously at the suitcase my father had bequeathed me, I also felt that this was the very thing I would not be able to do. My father would sometimes stretch out on the divan in front of his books, abandon the book in his hand, or the magazine and drift off into a dream, lose himself for the longest time in his thoughts. When I saw on his face an expression so very different from the one he wore amid the joking, teasing, and bickering of family life – when I saw the first signs of an inward gaze – I would, especially during my childhood and my early youth, understand, with trepidation, that he was discontent. Now, so many years later, I know that this discontent is the basic trait that turns a person into a writer. To become a writer, patience and toil are not enough: we must first feel compelled to escape crowds, company, the stuff of ordinary, everyday life, and shut ourselves up in a room. We wish for patience and hope so that we can create a deep world in our writing. But the desire to shut oneself up in a room is what pushes us into action. The precursor of this sort of independent writer – who reads his books to his heart's content, and who, by listening only to the voice of his own conscience, disputes with other's words, who, by entering into conversation with his books develops his own thoughts, and his own world – was most certainly Montaigne, in the earliest days of modern literature. Montaigne was a writer to whom my father returned often, a writer he recommended to me. I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who – wherever they are in the world, in the East or in the West – cut themselves off from society, and shut themselves up with their books in their room. The starting point of true literature is the man who shuts himself up in his room with his books.

But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people's stories, other people's books, other people's words, the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people's stories and books.

My father had a good library – 1 500 volumes in all – more than enough for a writer. By the age of 22, I had perhaps not read them all, but I was familiar with each book – I knew which were important, which were light but easy to read, which were classics, which an essential part of any education, which were forgettable but amusing accounts of local history, and which French authors my father rated very highly. Sometimes I would look at this library from a distance and imagine that one day, in a different house, I would build my own library, an even better library – build myself a world. When I looked at my father's library from afar, it seemed to me to be a small picture of the real world. But this was a world seen from our own corner, from Istanbul. The library was evidence of this. My father had built his library from his trips abroad, mostly with books from Paris and America, but also with books bought from the shops that sold books in foreign languages in the 40s and 50s and Istanbul's old and new booksellers, whom I also knew. My world is a mixture of the local – the national – and the West. In the 70s, I, too, began, somewhat ambitiously, to build my own library. I had not quite decided to become a writer – as I related in Istanbul, I had come to feel that I would not, after all, become a painter, but I was not sure what path my life would take. There was inside me a relentless curiosity, a hope-driven desire to read and learn, but at the same time I felt that my life was in some way lacking, that I would not be able to live like others. Part of this feeling was connected to what I felt when I gazed at my father's library – to be living far from the centre of things, as all of us who lived in Istanbul in those days were made to feel, that feeling of living in the provinces. There was another reason for feeling anxious and somehow lacking, for I knew only too well that I lived in a country that showed little interest in its artists – be they painters or writers – and that gave them no hope. In the 70s, when I would take the money my father gave me and greedily buy faded, dusty, dog-eared books from Istanbul's old booksellers, I would be as affected by the pitiable state of these second-hand bookstores – and by the despairing dishevelment of the poor, bedraggled booksellers who laid out their wares on roadsides, in mosque courtyards, and in the niches of crumbling walls – as I was by their books.

As for my place in the world – in life, as in literature, my basic feeling was that I was 'not in the centre'. In the centre of the world, there was a life richer and more exciting than our own, and with all of Istanbul, all of Turkey, I was outside it. Today I think that I share this feeling with most people in the world. In the same way, there was a world literature, and its centre, too, was very far away from me. Actually what I had in mind was Western, not world, literature, and we Turks were outside it. My father's library was evidence of this. At one end, there were Istanbul's books – our literature, our local world, in all its beloved detail – and at the other end were the books from this other, Western, world, to which our own bore no resemblance, to which our lack of resemblance gave us both pain and hope. To write, to read, was like leaving one world to find consolation in the other world's otherness, the strange and the wondrous. I felt that my father had read novels to escape his life and flee to the West – just as I would do later. Or it seemed to me that books in those days were things we picked up to escape our own culture, which we found so lacking. It wasn't just by reading that we left our Istanbul lives to travel West – it was by writing, too. To fill those notebooks of his, my father had gone to Paris, shut himself up in his room, and then brought his writings back to Turkey. As I gazed at my father's suitcase, it seemed to me that this was what was causing me disquiet. After working in a room for 25 years to survive as a writer in Turkey, it galled me to see my father hide his deep thoughts inside this suitcase, to act as if writing was work that had to be done in secret, far from the eyes of society, the state, the people. Perhaps this was the main reason why I felt angry at my father for not taking literature as seriously as I did.

Actually I was angry at my father because he had not led a life like mine, because he had never quarrelled with his life, and had spent his life happily laughing with his friends and his loved ones. But part of me knew that I could also say that I was not so much 'angry' as 'jealous', that the second word was more accurate, and this, too, made me uneasy. That would be when I would ask myself in my usual scornful, angry voice: 'What is happiness?' Was happiness thinking that I lived a deep life in that lonely room? Or was happiness leading a comfortable life in society, believing in the same things as everyone else, or acting as if you did? Was it happiness, or unhappiness, to go through life writing in secret, while seeming to be in harmony with all around one? But these were overly ill-tempered questions. Wherever had I got this idea that the measure of a good life was happiness? People, papers, everyone acted as if the most important measure of a life was happiness. Did this alone not suggest that it might be worth trying to find out if the exact opposite was true? After all, my father had run away from his family so many times – how well did I know him, and how well could I say I understood his disquiet?

So this was what was driving me when I first opened my father's suitcase. Did my father have a secret, an unhappiness in his life about which I knew nothing, something he could only endure by pouring it into his writing? As soon as I opened the suitcase, I recalled its scent of travel, recognised several notebooks, and noted that my father had shown them to me years earlier, but without dwelling on them very long. Most of the notebooks I now took into my hands he had filled when he had left us and gone to Paris as a young man. Whereas I, like so many writers I admired – writers whose biographies I had read – wished to know what my father had written, and what he had thought, when he was the age I was now. It did not take me long to realise that I would find nothing like that here. What caused me most disquiet was when, here and there in my father's notebooks, I came upon a writerly voice. This was not my father's voice, I told myself; it wasn't authentic, or at least it did not belong to the man I'd known as my father. Underneath my fear that my father might not have been my father when he wrote, was a deeper fear: the fear that deep inside I was not authentic, that I would find nothing good in my father's writing, this increased my fear of finding my father to have been overly influenced by other writers and plunged me into a despair that had afflicted me so badly when I was young, casting my life, my very being, my desire to write, and my work into question. During my first ten years as a writer, I felt these anxieties more deeply, and even as I fought them off, I would sometimes fear that one day, I would have to admit to defeat – just as I had done with painting – and succumbing to disquiet, give up novel writing, too.

I have already mentioned the two essential feelings that rose up in me as I closed my father's suitcase and put it away: the sense of being marooned in the provinces, and the fear that I lacked authenticity. This was certainly not the first time they had made themselves felt. For years I had, in my reading and my writing, been studying, discovering, deepening these emotions, in all their variety and unintended consequences, their nerve endings, their triggers, and their many colours. Certainly my spirits had been jarred by the confusions, the sensitivities and the fleeting pains that life and books had sprung on me, most often as a young man. But it was only by writing books that I came to a fuller understanding of the problems of authenticity (as in My Name is Red and The Black Book) and the problems of life on the periphery (as in Snow and Istanbul). For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.

A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader is visiting a world at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end to hone his craft – to create a world – if he uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he knows it or not, putting a great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble each other, that others carry wounds like mine – that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble each other. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a centre.

But as can be seen from my father's suitcase and the pale colours of our lives in Istanbul, the world did have a centre, and it was far away from us. In my books I have described in some detail how this basic fact evoked a Checkovian sense of provinciality, and how, by another route, it led to my questioning my authenticity. I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with these same feelings, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, lack of security and sense of degradation, than I do. Yes, the greatest dilemmas facing humanity are still landlessness, homelessness, and hunger ... But today our televisions and newspapers tell us about these fundamental problems more quickly and more simply than literature can ever do. What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kind ... Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations outside the Western world – and I can identify with them easily – succumbing to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West – a world with which I can identify with the same ease – nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid.

This means that my father was not the only one, that we all give too much importance to the idea of a world with a centre. Whereas the thing that compels us to shut ourselves up to write in our rooms for years on end is a faith in the opposite; the belief that one day our writings will be read and understood, because people all the world over resemble each other. But this, as I know from my own and my father's writing, is a troubled optimism, scarred by the anger of being consigned to the margins, of being left outside. The love and hate that Dostoyevsky felt towards the West all his life – I have felt this too, on many occasions. But if I have grasped an essential truth, if I have cause for optimism, it is because I have travelled with this great writer through his love-hate relationship with the West, to behold the other world he has built on the other side.

All writers who have devoted their lives to this task know this reality: whatever our original purpose, the world that we create after years and years of hopeful writing, will, in the end, move to other very different places. It will take us far away from the table at which we have worked with sadness or anger, take us to the other side of that sadness and anger, into another world. Could my father have not reached such a world himself? Like the land that slowly begins to take shape, slowly rising from the mist in all its colours like an island after a long sea journey, this other world enchants us. We are as beguiled as the western travellers who voyaged from the south to behold Istanbul rising from the mist. At the end of a journey begun in hope and curiosity, there lies before them a city of mosques and minarets, a medley of houses, streets, hills, bridges, and slopes, an entire world. Seeing it, we wish to enter into this world and lose ourselves inside it, just as we might a book. After sitting down at a table because we felt provincial, excluded, on the margins, angry, or deeply melancholic, we have found an entire world beyond these sentiments.

What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: for me the centre of the world is Istanbul. This is not just because I have lived there all my life, but because, for the last 33 years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days and its nights, making them part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings would seem to begin to talk amongst themselves, and begin to interact in ways I had not anticipated, as if they lived not just in my imagination or my books, but for themselves. This world that I had created like a man digging a well with a needle would then seem truer than all else.

My father might also have discovered this kind of happiness during the years he spent writing, I thought as I gazed at my father's suitcase: I should not prejudge him. I was so grateful to him, after all: he'd never been a commanding, forbidding, overpowering, punishing, ordinary father, but a father who always left me free, always showed me the utmost respect. I had often thought that if I had, from time to time, been able to draw from my imagination, be it in freedom or childishness, it was because, unlike so many of my friends from childhood and youth, I had no fear of my father, and I had sometimes believed very deeply that I had been able to become a writer because my father had, in his youth, wished to be one, too. I had to read him with tolerance – seek to understand what he had written in those hotel rooms.

It was with these hopeful thoughts that I walked over to the suitcase, which was still sitting where my father had left it; using all my willpower, I read through a few manuscripts and notebooks. What had my father written about? I recall a few views from the windows of Parisian hotels, a few poems, paradoxes, analyses ... As I write I feel like someone who has just been in a traffic accident and is struggling to remember how it happened, while at the same time dreading the prospect of remembering too much. When I was a child, and my father and mother were on the brink of a quarrel – when they fell into one of those deadly silences – my father would at once turn on the radio, to change the mood, and the music would help us forget it all faster.

Let me change the mood with a few sweet words that will, I hope, serve as well as that music. As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

A week after he came to my office and left me his suitcase, my father came to pay me another visit; as always, he brought me a bar of chocolate (he had forgotten I was 48 years old). As always, we chatted and laughed about life, politics and family gossip. A moment arrived when my father's eyes went to the corner where he had left his suitcase and saw that I had moved it. We looked each other in the eye. There followed a pressing silence. I did not tell him that I had opened the suitcase and tried to read its contents; instead I looked away. But he understood. Just as I understood that he had understood. Just as he understood that I had understood that he had understood. But all this understanding only went so far as it can go in a few seconds. Because my father was a happy, easygoing man who had faith in himself: he smiled at me the way he always did. And as he left the house, he repeated all the lovely and encouraging things that he always said to me, like a father.

As always, I watched him leave, envying his happiness, his carefree and unflappable temperament. But I remember that on that day there was also a flash of joy inside me that made me ashamed. It was prompted by the thought that maybe I wasn't as comfortable in life as he was, maybe I had not led as happy or footloose a life as he had, but that I had devoted it to writing – you've understood ... I was ashamed to be thinking such things at my father's expense. Of all people, my father, who had never been the source of my pain – who had left me free. All this should remind us that writing and literature are intimately linked to a lack at the centre of our lives, and to our feelings of happiness and guilt.

But my story has a symmetry that immediately reminded me of something else that day, and that brought me an even deeper sense of guilt. Twenty-three years before my father left me his suitcase, and four years after I had decided, aged 22, to become a novelist, and, abandoning all else, shut myself up in a room, I finished my first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons; with trembling hands I had given my father a typescript of the still unpublished novel, so that he could read it and tell me what he thought. This was not simply because I had confidence in his taste and his intellect: his opinion was very important to me because he, unlike my mother, had not opposed my wish to become a writer. At that point, my father was not with us, but far away. I waited impatiently for his return. When he arrived two weeks later, I ran to open the door. My father said nothing, but he at once threw his arms around me in a way that told me he had liked it very much. For a while, we were plunged into the sort of awkward silence that so often accompanies moments of great emotion. Then, when we had calmed down and begun to talk, my father resorted to highly charged and exaggerated language to express his confidence in me or my first novel: he told me that one day I would win the prize that I am here to receive with such great happiness.

He said this not because he was trying to convince me of his good opinion, or to set this prize as a goal; he said it like a Turkish father, giving support to his son, encouraging him by saying, 'One day you'll become a pasha!' For years, whenever he saw me, he would encourage me with the same words.

My father died in December 2002.

Today, as I stand before the Swedish Academy and the distinguished members who have awarded me this great prize – this great honour – and their distinguished guests, I dearly wish he could be amongst us.