Orhan Pamuk working on new novel ‘Card Players’

ISTANBUL

Nobel prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk has announced that he is working on his new novel, “The Card Players,” which tells a story of how a group of card players playing with foreign cards comes up with an idea to produce a local version of those cards.

“While the characters are playing cards with cards of foreign origin, they ask themselves: ‘Why don’t we make a local version of these cards? They decide to change ‘the king’ as the Sultan and ‘the queen’ as the Lady [hanım in Turkish],” Pamuk explained while speaking at a press conference held on the 10th anniversary of the foundation of the Museum of Innocence, which he built after his novel, with the same name, became a best seller.

The main theme of “The Card Players” is about a journey of how the characters recreate cards. “I also produce the playing cards in the novel. This time we are creating playing cards instead of founding a museum,” he said while making a reference to the book “Museum of Innocence.”

He also stated that he has plans to shoot a film about an episode from his novel “The Museum of Innocence” and present it on the screens of the Museum of Innocence, located near Istanbul’s landmark Taksim Square.

“There are two screens upstairs. When Kemal and Füsun meet in the last part of the novel, Kemal says there is a distinct and surrealist movie in his mind. I want to film that movie,” he said, adding that the Museum of Innocence project never ends.

The Museum of Innocence, the first of its kind museum inspired by a novel, has been visited by 285,000 people in the past 10 years, and 36,000 people used the free ticket in the book, Orhan Pamuk noted.

On the 10th anniversary of the museum’s opening, new works referring to some parts of the novel have been added to the museum’s collection.

Orhan Pamuk, born in 1952, is a recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the author of the novels “My Name is Red,” “The Black Book,” “The Museum of Innocence,” and “Silent House.” His latest novel, “Nights of Plague,” was published last year in March.