I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source with the Nobel Prize novelist from Turkey,

Ohan Pamuk. It is not your standard book chat. It's closer, in fact, to headbutting

than conversation, as you'll hear, but it's polite enough, and nobody gets hurt in the next half

hour or so. Orhan Pamuk wanted to talk about his hardcover collection of notebook drawings

and diary entries in recent years. I wanted to hear the global writers take on the distemper,

East and West, in the 2020s. He said he doesn't talk contemporary affairs, but then he insisted on doing just that.

He said President Erdogan's authoritarian politics is ruining Turkey,

and that Donald Trump could be just as dangerous in America.

The news about Orhan Pamuk himself coming out of his notebooks is that he has been a passionately

visual artist all along, keeping an alternative record of his own life in high-colored

drawings and aphoristic jottings, words and pictures like nothing that I or our listeners

have ever seen unless they draw their own.

Until you were 22, I take it the plan was to be a painter.

Yes, I was raised in a family of civil engineers.

My grandfather being a civil engineer, my uncle, my father going to the same Istanbul

Technical University, and I was pressured to go to the same civil engineering school and be an architect.

But since I was drawing, drawing, and everyone thought that I would be a painter, they said,

why don't you be like the Corbusier, who was making money by architecture, and who was privately doing cubist paintings and I decided to do that.

But a screw was loose in my head at the age of 22 and suddenly I quit studying architecture,

the desire to be a painter and sat at a table and began writing novels.

I can't even explain the mystery of it myself.

It took a whole book to explain it. And the combination, words and pictures, are still wonderfully

...