Türkiye’s Nobel-winning author Orhan Pamuk sets to launch his new book as he unveiled the title "The Card Players."
It revolves around a group of characters who start off playing with cards from around the world and decide to make their own sets, Pamuk said at a press meet at his Museum of Innocence in Istanbul on Friday.
"While the protagonists are talking among themselves, at some point in the story they say ‘Why don’t we make a local of this? Let’s make the Sultan instead of the king. Let’s make a lady instead of a queen,” he explained.
"How they produce the playing cards is the story of my novel, but I also make those playing cards. This time we’re not creating a museum, but playing cards,” he added.
Pamuk’s latest offering shares its name with a famous series of paintings by French post-Impressionist artist Paul Cezanne depicting workmen playing cards.
His last book "Veba Geceleri" ("Nights of Plague") was published in Turkish last year in March and is expected to be released in English this October.
His books, "My Name Is Red" and "Snow," rank as the most translated and read Turkish works in history, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.
Pamuk, 70, is also known for his drawings corresponding to his books, some of which can be seen at the Museum of Innocence.
The museum, which opened its doors in 2012, is modeled around his heart-wrenching 2008 novel of the same name.
Pamuk personally designed each of the museum’s 83 cabinets as "paintings” referencing different parts of the book.
Each is like a smaller museum in its own right, individually describing "memories and meanings associated with objects from daily life" as described in the novel, according to the museum catalog. The museum won the European Museum of the Year Award in 2014.
On Friday, six new cabinets for six of the book’s chapters – 33, 61, 62, 75, 76 and 77 – were added to the museum.
Pamuk said around 285,000 people have visited the museum in the past decade, with about half of them being international visitors.
Among the esteemed visitors, the museum has hosted over the years were Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist and philosopher who died in 2016, and Chinese Nobel-winning writer Guan Moye, better known by the pen name Mo Yan, according to Pamuk.
American artist Jeff Koons, one of the most famous in the field today, is expected to visit the museum in the coming days, Pamuk added.
