When a writer of formidable international repute unveils his newest book, riotous scenes happen. And if that author happens to be a Nobel Laureate, the frenzy only doubles.

So, when Turkish writer and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature Orhan Pamuk came calling in Delhi to launch his latest work, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, the venue was crammed to bursting point. Much to the chagrin of the crowds milling outside, the gates closed much before time and the jostling post-launch, book signing didn’t take place either. Pamuk had pre-signed the copies.

Pamuk (centre) with author Kiran Desai at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival

In the wake of the hugely successful launch, the distinguished author’s Delhi dairy was choc-a-bloc with appointments. But looking at ease in the no-fuss environment of a hotel’s business centre, Pamuk shrugged off the aura that surrounds a writer of his stature: “Writers are made out to be geniuses. But we are just hard workers.’’

“I’m a guy who works like a clerk. Who sits at his table and writes and writes. There are days when I’m desperate, angry and frustrated — which is really the life of a novelist. But I have an essential optimism that hard work yields a good book,” says the man, who has eight much-feted novels and equally celebrated works of non-fiction under his belt.

He writes only in Turkish, is translated in 59 languages (including Catalan and Czech), and has been highly decorated with coveted, international literary prizes including, of course, the Nobel. “The prize made me happy and I recommend it to everyone,” he chuckles, his eyes crinkling in delight.

On a more serious note, he says: “The Nobel has an intimidating strength over you, your private life and any statement you make. Suddenly you are under acute scrutiny. Today, I know that my next novel will address 2 million readers. So, I have to be very careful.”

Pamuk, 58, is also famous for shooting from the hip and despite his popularity and huge sales he’s a controversial writer in Turkey. He has faced a highly public trial for comments made in an interview about the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I — a very sensitive issue in Turkey.

Pamuk says candidly that the fallout of the comments made in that interview was tough to deal with. But he insists that he doesn’t have a deep political agenda. “I’m not a political person but when I find myself confronted by such situations I lose my temper and tell the truth,” he says vehemently.

Pamuk’s books establish him as an author who can write about the past and present with the same intensity. There is, for instance, The Black Book (1990) which describes the past and present texture of Turkey through the story of a lawyer who is searching for his missing wife. Or there’s The New Life that’s about young university students influenced by a mysterious book and My Name is Red (1998) about Ottoman and Persian artists.

His first political novel, Snow (2002) portrays with artistry the cruelty and intolerance of both the Islamic fundamentalists and the representatives of the secular Turkish state. And there’s Istanbul, the author’s memoirs.

In his newest work, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Penguin), he decided to deconstruct the novel and detail what happens to us — the readers — as we read novels.

The book is a compilation of the Norton Lectures that Pamuk delivered in 2009. A tradition established at Harvard in 1925, the Norton Lectures are a series of six lectures that have in the past been delivered by luminaries in art, poetry and music including T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost. Pamuk is delighted that The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist is generating interest in India.

Though Pamuk is a best-selling author in Turkey, the enthusiasm of his Indian fans came as a surprise. “In Turkey there are resentments and a lot of nasty and negative questions asked of me. In India, there’s a sweetness that I have not experienced even in Europe or America,” he says.

Pamuk isn’t a first-timer in India. He came in 2003 on an invitation by the Indian government to travel intensely for two weeks beginning in Chennai and also visited Madurai, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Calcutta. He returned in early 2010 to promote his last book, The Museum of Innocence.

What Pamuk enjoys most about India is its cacophony of sights and sounds which remind him of his youth in Turkey: it’s wayside barber shops, little nondescript stores that sell clothes, shoes or even watch straps and street vendors. And he also loves the way drivers honk away furiously in India. “It’s almost like they are chatting. Very Turkish,” he laughs.

Pamuk, who spends four months a year in New York teaching a semester on Comparative Literature at Columbia University, lives for six months in Istanbul with periods of travelling within Europe or Asia. But his stories are all rooted in Istanbul, his hometown where he’s spent 55 years of his life. He says that it’s inevitable that he revisits the city in his novels. “Till the age of 33 I hadn’t even ventured out of the country,” he says.

It should be no surprise then that his next book too will be set in Istanbul. This one will deal with Istanbul’s immigrants, the mafia, the man on the street and the anger of the poor who live in shanty towns. “It’s about the other Istanbul, the underbelly of Istanbul,” he says.

And no, he has no intention of writing a novel set outside of Turkey. “I speak Turkish and write my books in Turkish. I cannot imagine writing about English characters who speak Turkish,” he says. Though, of course, he speaks in English with author Kiran Desai, his love interest.

Back in Istanbul he’s also investing a lot of time in a private museum which he hopes to throw open in less than a year. The Museum of Innocence is not just a novel, but it is also a physical building.

The idea came to him 12 years ago when he bought a small house in a poor neighbourhood close to his office in Istanbul. He decided to set an imaginary family in that empty house and tell a story — which became The Museum of Innocence.

When Pamuk’s museum opens — and he has spent a lot of his royalties on it — it will house all the little objects that are minutely described in the book. As he wrote the novel, Pamuk bought lots of objects — outfits that some of the central characters wore, the bingo tickets that they used and even a quince grinder which figures in the book. “The novel will come alive in the museum,” he promises.

No wonder then that he calls himself an experimental novelist who loves to tell things a bit differently. He wanted to be a painter, but stopped painting by the time he was 22. Then two years ago he started painting again. “There’s a failed artist in me, but he’s not dead. In the future, I’m planning to combine paintings with text and write complete novels like that,” he says.

Writing a novel, he says, is all about craftsmanship, patience and false starts. And the first two years of writing a new novel are chaotic. “I see a huge sea of material before me and I plunge into it,’’ he says.

Pamuk’s life’s story is well documented. Born in Istanbul in 1952, he’s from a family of successful engineers beginning with his grandfather who made his fortune building railroads and factories. His father followed in his footsteps.

Till the age of 22 he wanted to be a painter but after graduating from the American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years, before dropping out as he had decided to become a novelist. He gave up everything else and retreated to write his first novel, Cevdet Bey and Sons, which was published in 1982. It had taken him four years to find a Turkish publisher for this novel.

He’s come a long way since and he looks back with considerable wonderment to the day in 2006 when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His literary agent woke him up at 7am in New York to give him the news. Coincidentally, Pamuk had planned to start work on The Museum of Innocence that day and all he could think of was the amount of work that lay ahead of him.

But he promised himself that the Nobel would not change him, though he admits that it has changed his life. It has given him many new readers, a lot of new attention and inevitably new responsibilities, he says.

So what does a Nobel prize-winner read himself? A new book by Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other contemporary writers and a host of Indian and India-born authors including Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and V. S. Naipaul. And of course he reads the new generation of writers from British novelist Zadie Smith to Kiran Desai. He says of Desai: “We are happy that we are both writers. We talk about what we do and understand the problems that writers face. We encourage each other a lot — that is inevitable.”

Novelists, he insists, address human situations and to him the beauty of a thing or situation is far more relevant than moral issues. He says: “Above all, I’d love to tell more stories and to do tricks and new things every time I write a book.’’

Photographs by Rupinder Sharma