SOURCE: Wright, Ronald. “From a Breeze-Block Istanbul.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4932 (10 October 1997): 23.

In the following review, Wright commends The New Life as an engaging novel of ideas that serves as an allegory for modern Turkey.

In A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel observes that reading links the reader's contemporary experience with many “an early page in a distant foreign century”. He then quotes from Orhan Pamuk's novel The White Castle: “You cannot embark on life, that one-off coach ride, once again when it is over, but if you have a book in your hand … you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life.” Such rereading of the past through the lens of the present—and vice versa—is the task Pamuk sets himself in The New Life, a sparkling allegorical novel of...