Srinagar, May 4 -- By Naveed Qazi

There is a particular pleasure in watching a novelist turn inward and examine his own craft. The Naive and Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk takes up that task with unusual clarity and restraint.

Drawn from a series of lectures delivered at Harvard, the book reads like an extended conversation. Pamuk writes as a practitioner thinking aloud, someone who understands that fiction resists neat formulas even as it invites careful thought.

Pamuk builds his argument around a distinction borrowed from Friedrich Schiller: the "naive" and the "sentimental." He adapts these terms to describe two states of mind that govern both writing and reading.

The naive novelist moves through the story as if it unfolds on ...