Yet neither is it another fiasco like the march into the Carpathians. It generates somehow a quiet ecstasy. For the exchange of identities, the mutual introduction to a new life, a ne way of thinking, a new language-this is, at least it can be, a kind of love. Their love is not really sexual, however. But it is passionate.
Cultures can certainly fall into hatred.
Undying animosities have kept Europe and the Islamic Middle East at each other's throats for no less than 1,300 years. It is so powerful that people sometimes do want to abandon their own identity in a fit of self-loathing or desire for the other. One of the appeals of Pamuk as a novelist is that he invites this sort of daffy speculation, not explicitly, but by the substance of what he writes. Possible interpretations bubble up spontaneously from his pages. There are novelists who entertain us with their inventiveness and novelists who entertain us with our own inventiveness.