Orhan Pamuk Q & A

       At The New Republic Pankaj Mishra has a Q & A with Orhan Pamuk on Taksim Square, the Effects of Breaking Bad, and why the Future of the Novel is in the East
       Good to see that Pamuk doesn't believe the-art-of-the-novel-is-dying talk:

It's strong, everyone is writing them, everyone wants to read them. Maybe we're not so interested in what is happening in London, but we're interested in what's happening in Zadie Smith's new novel. I think the form has immense possibilities.

       But he does believe US TV serials are a real threat:

They're sophisticated. That really kills the novel -- it takes away the regular pleasures of reading novels. The power of those sophisticated serials is that you watch it with your wife, your friends, and you can immediately chat about it. It's a great pleasure to enjoy a work of art and to be able to share it with someone you care about.

       (I beg to differ: immediate (or even eventual) chatability isn't the test of a novel (or movie or TV show, or any work of art) to me -- and surely the much more widely-watched TV series of previous eras did much better in terms of getting water-cooler (and the like) discussion going among a much larger pool of viewers.)
       Interesting also that Pamuk believes:

The novel is a middle-class art. And we see the proliferation of middle classes in India, China, definitely in Turkey, so everyone is writing novels. If you want to predict the future, I can predict that in Europe, in the West, the importance of literary novels will decrease, while in China, India, popular literature will continue. Innovation will come from there, because the populations are large, there will be a lot of production.

       Quite a few dubious leaps in logic here, from the belief that, because 'there will be a lot of production' consequently: 'Innovation will come from there', to the mix up between the (dubious categories of) 'literary novels' and 'popular literature'.