From the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and the acclaimed author of My Name is Red— an inspired, thoughtful, and deeply personal book of essays about reading and writing novels. In this fascinating set of essays, based on the talks he delivered at Harvard University as part of the distinguished Norton Lecture series, Pamuk presents a comprehensive and provocative theory of the novel and the experience of reading. Drawing on Friedrich Schiller’s famous distinction between “naïve” writers—those who write spontaneously—and “sentimental” writers—those who are reflective and aware—Pamuk reveals two unique ways of processing and composing the written word. He takes us through his own literary journey and the beloved novels of his youth to describe the singular experience of reading. Unique, nuanced, and passionate, this book will be beloved by readers and writers alike. “Pamuk’s nonfiction voice matches the narrating voice of his novels—grave, thoughtful, wry.” — San Francisco Chronicle “A full-fledged theory of the novel. . . . His explorations of time and plot, words and objects, and the convolutions of the reader’s mind as he seeks the center of the novel are incomparable.” — Huffington Post , One of the Ten Best Books of 2010 “Anyone who has read Pamuk’s exquisite fiction will be interested in these essays on reading and the art of the novel.” — Plain Dealer “Fascinating. . . . Every novelist will want to read this, and will learn from a master.” — The Telegraph (UK)   “A pleasure to read. . . . Quite an interesting theoretical map, illuminating, for instance, the difference between literary and genre fiction, or the relationship between art and reality.” — The National   “Engaging. . . . Charming.” — The Guardian (UK)   “Full of literary examples and written with a real love for the power of books, The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist will take its place with other classics like E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel , John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and James Wood’s How Fiction Works .” — Business-Standard “A striking interpretation of what goes on in the novelist’s mind. . . . Pamuk’s great insight is that novels don’t necessarily have a single center—the center depends on the point of view of the character, and more importantly, the shifting point of view of the reader.” — The American Statesman “Pamuk’s book is a reminder that, without this almost metaphysical faith, great fiction can’t be truly appreciated or written.” — Bookforum Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. His novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. He lives in Istanbul. Novels are second lives. Like the dreams that the French poet Gérard de Nerval speaks of, novels reveal the colors and complexities of our lives and are full of people, faces, and objects we feel we recognize. Just as in dreams, when we read novels we are sometimes so powerfully struck by the extraordinary nature of the things we encounter that we forget where we are and envision ourselves in the midst of the imaginary events and people we are witnessing. At such times, we feel that the fictional world we encounter and enjoy is more real than the real world itself. That these second lives can appear more real to us than reality often means that we substitute novels for reality, or at least that we confuse them with real life. But we never complain of this illusion, this naïveté. On the contrary, just as in some dreams, we want the novel we are reading to continue and hope that this second life will keep evoking in us a consistent sense of reality and authenticity. In spite of what we know about fiction, we are annoyed and bothered if a novel fails to sustain the illusion that it is actually real life. We dream assuming dreams to be real; such is the definition of dreams. And so we read novels assuming them to be real—but somewhere in our mind we also know very well that our assumption is false. This paradox stems from the nature of the novel. Let us begin by emphasizing that the art of the novel relies on our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory states. I have been reading novels for forty years. I know there are many stances we can adopt toward the novel, many ways in which we commit our soul and mind to it, treating it lightly or seriously. And in just the same manner, I have learned by experience that there are many ways to read a novel. We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fiber of our being. There was a time in my youth when I completely dedicated myself to novels, reading them intently— even ecstatically. During those years, from the age of eighteen to the age of thirty (1970 to 1982), I wanted to describe what went on in my head and in my sou