Nights of Plague

Pamuk began writing a historical novel about a bubonic plague epidemic on a fictitious island in 2016. Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, Manzoni's The Betrothed, Camus' The Plague, he was particularly interested in the way plagues have been Orientalized.[5]

Pamuk claims in a 2020 article that Western observers such as Defoe saw a tendency of fatalism in the Muslim world view—the religious concept of "Every Man's End Being Determined," as Defoe expressed it. [6][7]

In the year 1901, a ship from Istanbul arrives on Mingheria, an island plagued by the Bubonic plague.[8] This island serves as a microcosm of the declining Ottoman Empire, where diverse groups coexist but are on the brink of disintegration.[9] The plague, in a literal sense, mirrors the empire's metaphorical characterization as "the sick man of Europe." To combat the outbreak, the Sultan dispatches Bonkowski Pasha, the empire's chief inspector of public health, followed by a Muslim epidemiologist, Prince Consort Doctor Nuri Bey, and his wife, Princess Pakize.[10]

When the chief inspector is murdered, it falls upon Princess Pakize and Prince Consort Doctor Nuri Bey to employ methods reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes to identify the culprit. Simultaneously, Western medicine works to control the plague.[11] However, the islanders resist quarantine measures, resulting in an increasing number of infectious bodies.[12] Amidst this chaos, gruesome discoveries like the corpses of two individuals fused together are made, leaving questions about their relationship unanswered.[13]

Matt A. Hanson of World Literature Today noted that the motifs of Nights of Plague are prevalent in the latter years of Ottoman collapse, notably during Abdul Hamid's disastrous reign, which Pamuk fictionalises the formation of the fragmented political identities that sparked World War I and eventually strengthened the foundations of the Turkish republic rising from the ashes of its sick, old-man empire.[14] According to Judith Shulevitz of The Atlantic Nights of Plague is plainly satire and metaphor, and narrated the mordant riffs on Ottoman, revolutionary, and nationalist leadership styles amount to a critique of Atatürk, Kemalism, and even President Erdoğan's government—but not in a single sentence.[15]

James Wood in his review for The New Yorker noted that a peculiar way in which Pamuk, attentive to how, in history, the disease has been unfairly Orientalized, relishes, in fiction, shamelessly Orientalizing his own island, imbuing it with swirls of Ottoman magic and mythology, This reader was not surprised to discover Pamuk taking a jab at Edward Said at the end of the work, for the "negatively inflected sense" of Said's academic term "Orientalist."[6]

In his review for The Times Peter Kemp called it masterfully weaving a tale of intrigue and disease on the fictional island of Mingheria.[16]