Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk spent five years working on Nights of Plague, well before the onset of the current pandemic. Perhaps he foresaw history repeating itself; the political fallout from the outbreak of the bubonic plague on his make-believe island of Mingheria in 1901 resonates eerily with our world today.
Whether Pamuk was intentionally writing an allegory, the audacity of the narrative action has opened him up to attack. Last year Pamuk was “under investigation” for “insulting the founder of modern Turkey and for ridiculing the Turkish flag” in the book – not the first time he has been censored. (He recently told The Times of India, “anyway, they’re not pursuing it, my case is lost in the labyrinths of Ankara”.)
