Orhan Pamuk, “The New Life” (1998)

“. . .’My book,’ [Pamuk] says, ‘is my attempt at being visionary through the experience of love. It has a tongue-in-cheek quality about the effect of love on one’s spirit. The intensity of desire is so overwhelming that the narrator is in a new world, in a new life. It’s about maturing through love, reaching a higher level of consciousness.’
The title is appropriated from Dante’s ‘La Vita Nuova,’ Pamuk allows. ‘Dante’s is an account of how he fell in love, along with autobiographical digressions about the effect of love.’ Although it’s impossible to neatly summarize a Pamuk book, ‘The New Life’ is also a meditation on the way literature can affect — or afflict — a nation.” [. . .]    –Judy Stone, Orhan Pamuk