SOURCE: Adams, Phoebe-Lou. Review of The Black Book, by Orhan Pamuk. Atlantic Monthly 275, no. 2 (February 1995): 113-14.

In the following review, Adams lauds Pamuk's accomplishment with The Black Book, calling the novel exciting, imaginative, and intelligent.

On a winter day in Istanbul, Galip comes home from his languid law practice to find that Rüya, his wife and also his cousin, has run away. He assumes that she has taken refuge with her half-brother Jelâl, a widely read newspaper columnist, but Jelâl is also missing, from both the paper and his formal address. Galip goes sloshing through slush and grime in search of the errant pair. The novel [The Black Book] is constructed in alternating chapters—one describing Galip's wanderings and the strange and garrulous people he meets, who all tell him strange stories; the next reproducing one of Jelâl's old columns, which also contain stories...