Yet Pamuk is no stranger to Western culture either, of course. Actually his dual heritage and ability to explore and interpret is what makes him so unique. He stands right at the point where West literally meets East, i.e., Turkey. "Turkey is made in such a way that the country's culture is also made of two spirits, not essentially fighting with each other but trying to find ways of combining," Pamuk said in a 2004 Boston Globe interview. "In that sense, I'm slightly schizophrenic — slightly."

Pamuk takes no clear side between East and West or on their reflections in Turkey, i.e., the secularists and the Islamists. No wonder he has been criticized for that. "Some of my secularly minded readers were furious at the fact that I had made such efforts to understand the situation of girls who voluntarily wear the headscarf," says Pamuk. "I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the West."

What he is trying to show, instead, is the commonality of human nature, which he thinks is overshadowed by the ideological battles we mortals fight over. This is most obvious in Pamuk's highly renowned international thriller, Snow." It is the story of Ka, who goes back to Turkey after 12 years of political exile in Germany to the very eastern and rustic city of Kars. While hoping to reconnect with Ipek, his childhood love, Ka finds himself in the middle of a culture war between secularists and Islamists. Whilst portraying the rigidity of the latter camp, he also shows that the former is not as "liberal" as it claims to be. "If we don't let the army and the state deal with these dangerous fanatics," a staunch secularist character of the novel proclaims, referring to the city's observant Muslims, "we'll end up back in the Middle Ages, sliding into anarchy, traveling the doomed path already traveled by so many tribal nations in the Middle East."

Yet Pamuk himself is less alarmed by traditional Muslim religion. "Political Islam doesn't have much to do with Islam," he argues. "It's about politics and nationalism and anti-Westernism."

And what he implicitly proposes to his people is a liberal solution, a live-and-let-live Turkey. In his Boston Globe interview he says: "I'm not saying, look, here are bad guys, here are good guys. I'm not taking sides. In fact, it's more a crying out for happiness: Life is short, enjoy it, take your girl and run away."

Yet can one really be happy by simply "taking your girl and [running] away?" Does man live by the "girl" — and bread, of course — alone?

Here perhaps Pamuk's own life implies a contradiction with his message. "I write," he frankly acknowledged last week, "to be happy." Of course others have stories to write — and, in some cases, stand and fight — about, too. Actually the problem lies not in the existence of these stories, the grand narratives that give meaning and passion to our lives, but in the way we express them. Pamuk has always told his stories with profound sophistication and intellect — and smiled at those who swear at him. That might be the greatest legacy that he will leave behind in his own "suitcase" one day.