CULTURE
Around the world with Truman Capote, Bunny Mellon, Orhan Pamuk, and Cormac McCarthy—twice
NIGHTS OF PLAGUE By Orhan Pamuk (Knopf)
Unless Orhan Pamuk is clairvoyant—which, given his expressive gifts and imaginative powers, seems somehow plausible—the timing of his new, 704-page opus, chronicling a 1901 plague outbreak on the fictional island of Mingheria (“the pearl of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea”), must be chalked up to coincidence. (He began working on this freakishly relevant historical novel in 2016.) In any case, Nights of Plague feels strangely oracular. As the population of Mingheria—split almost perfectly down the middle between Orthodox Greeks and Muslims—is assailed by a sweeping illness that causes agonizing 60
“buboes” to sprout across the bodies of the afflicted, the small nation descends into factionalism and paranoia. The horror not only begins to feel familiar, but like a valuable case study. “Nobody ever wants a quarantine,” says the island’s pharmacist, Nikiforos, in conversation with two recent arrivals. Nobody wants “any evidence that disrupts their usual ways, they will deny any deaths, and even resent the dead.” He is addressing this foreboding, darkly prescient observation to Doctor Nuri, a renowned Ottoman quarantine specialist, and Princess Pakize, the doctor’s new bride and daughter of the deposed sultan, Murad V. The couple have traveled to the island at the directive of Murad V’s brother and successor, the iron-fisted Abdul Hamid II, with a dual mandate: to prevent the pathogen from spreading beyond Mingheria’s borders, and to investigate the grisly assassination of yet another Ottoman doctor. Both objectives are quickly derailed. The plague proves too slippery to contain: every day, the island’s corpse wagon rumbles through the streets, its pile of bodies mounting, while firefighters are dispatched across the island with tanks of Lysol to hose down infected neighborhoods. Revolutionaries find footing in the chaos, and Mingheria’s health crisis is compounded by a political one. Over the course of Pamuk’s decades-long career—the beloved Turkish novelist was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature— certain threads have united his work. His plots are devilishly intricate, airtight, and thorough. His prose is graceful, yet sturdy. Nights of Plague is no different. It is narrated by a modern-day historian, Mîna Mingher, tasked with annotating 113 letters between Princess Pakize and her sister, an arrangement that gives the tale a quasi-academic, yet oddly rich, flavor. She faithfully weaves the princess’s correspondence into a story, all the while lingering luxuriously over images—including various paintings inspired by critical moments in the island’s plague-battle—or digressing into asides about Mingheria’s topography (mountainous) or signature exports (stone and roses). This narrative contrivance also allows a dash of literary criticism
to sneak in. In the best of such moments, Nights of Plague falls into dialogue with itself, its pet subject being the limitation of recorded history. “Only a poet— not a novelist, and certainly not a historian—would be able to describe the despair that began to seep through the city toward the middle of June,” the narrator writes. In other words, facts and timelines may be vital in grasping the scope of a calamity, but they obscure the true engines of history: the personalities of shot-callers, the shifting moods that permeate a population. Luckily, Pamuk, the clairvoyant, is attuned to all. —Daniel Karel
THE PASSENGER, STELLA MARIS By Cormac McCarthy (Knopf)
Guilt and grief walk hand in hand in Cormac McCarthy’s longawaited new novel, The Passenger, and in its companion, Stella Maris, the first published in October, the second in December. The entwined emotions are almost as tightly bound as the two siblings at the frantically, forebodingly beating heart of the story that the two books tell. The brother and sister are Bobby and Alicia Western, and they usher McCarthy back to the top of his game. Like many McCarthy characters, these two do get around geographically. Death and its sorrows hang over them like Spanish moss in the gothic, Faulknerian South that McCarthy occasionally hefts onstage to underscore corrupted innocence and its aftermath. They both embark on road trips in search of truths that elude them. They expose themselves to cold in wilderness states. History is McCarthy’s reason here. The Westerns’ childhoods were spread all over the map by their physicist father’s scorched-earth affiliation with the Manhattan Project. Its
massive, bomb-building compound in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, produced his marriage to a local pageant queen, her extraordinary beauty settling on their genius-IQ daughter like a curse. Alicia’s physical allure is irresistible to many, her brother included. Though, to be fair, he’s obsessed with the entire package, namely an intelligence on the level of the notorious nuclear physicists and world-famous mathematicians whose accomplishments roll off her tongue in Stella Maris, which is her book and the far shorter of the two, while The Passenger is more Bobby’s. McCarthy has made Stella Maris nothing but Alicia conversing: with a psychiatrist fascinated by her brilliance and concerned about her obvious death wish. Needless to say, she talks circles around the very good doctor with scientific conundrums, higher math, moral brainteasers, and music theory (she is also a violin prodigy). McCarthy, who has strong ties to the Santa Fe Institute near his home base in New Mexico and regularly expresses a preference for scientists over fiction writers, suffuses the lovers’ saga with the theoretical and scientific. Then boils it down to love as allconsuming. Alicia is equally, and more destructively, hung up on her brother. Stella Maris is a place—a mental institution in backwoods Wisconsin where she is a repeat patient. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, she is visited throughout by hallucinated buddies she calls her “hort”—as in short for cohort—prominent among them the demanding and lethally critical “The Kid,” as in short for “Thalidomide Kid.” His “flapper” arms are McCarthy at his most grotesque and poignant, shooing Alice away from her brother and precipitously toward a final suicide attempt. As their world turns, these novels have deep, cloudy, clandestinely raging waters to navigate, and not just because Bobby is by his latest profession a salvage diver. The Tennessee Valley Authority’s government-sanctioned deluge in the 1930s buried the area of Tennessee once farmed by their ancestors. Their grandmother, still puttering around in small-town exile, won’t let them forget what she remembers as a bucolic Arcadia that, in McCarthy’s sparingly lyrical
AVENUE MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER—DECEMBER 2022
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