Excerpts: "Dichotomies aspire to put everything in the red corner or the blue one, and though this may enable discussion, it rarely accords with reality...It was the German poet Schiller who spoke of "naive" and "sentimental" poetry, and Pamuk, who prefers "reflective" to "sentimental", wants the division to vibrate through his six lectures on the writing and reading of novels... At the beginning of one paragraph, Pamuk writes: "Allow me to generalise." ...it could have been the name of the book...About halfway through the book, Pamuk says that his belief that novels are "visual" fictions is "one of my strongest opinions". This helps to clarify the book's formula of confidently delivered nonsense - Pamuk is emulating Vladimir Nabokov, especially the Nabokov of Strong Opinions. Pamuk is fond of the word "life", which Nabokov said "does not exist without a possessive epithet", and admires Thomas Mann, for whom Nabokov had contempt. Otherwise, this is Nabokov redux: "ideas" are bunk, politics are to be avoided, the point of reading and writing novels is to commune with the lush and lovely visible world. Pamuk's habit of generalising his own situation is present in Nabokov's leap from "I think in images" to the claim that other people must also do the same because they "don't move their lips when they think". And his passion for exotic simplicities and purported yokings is contracted from the Nabokov who claimed that a good reader should possess "the passion of science and the patience of poetry." Nabokov's ideas constitute one (extreme) model of reading, but many writers treat them as holy writ. At a talk to high-school students in Oklahoma recently, Ian McEwan commanded: "When you sit down with a great work of literature, don't be intimidated by it...."...he advised concentrating on images, details and word-choice. ..McEwan was addressing a young audience who wouldn't have known better; but Pamuk, delivering the Norton Lectures at Harvard, was addressing what Frank Kermode once called "one of the best audiences in the world" - "the gifted young" and "their learned elders". They would have known better...[In]this book Pamuk is addressing a non-academic readership...It would be a shame if they believed what he says."

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