Islam, Melancholy, and Sad, Concrete Minarets: The Futility of Narratives in Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book

This article examines, in the work of a contemporary Turkish novelist, the repeated association of Islam with a variety of different sadnesses-melancholy arising from the demise of the secret, from a certain awareness of the death of metaphysics, the end of our ability to believe in such stories and yet our simultaneous inability to carry on living without them. The implications such 'Western' ideas have in the text of an 'Eastern' novel-resurrecting the familiar question of non-Western novelists 'writing for the Centre' - are also considered.