There’s a review in the November 8, 2007 New York Review of Books of a book by the Turkish Nobel laureate Oran Pamuk, Other Colors: Essays and a Story. The reviewer quotes from an essay by Pamuk:

It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are.

In another section, the reviewer again quotes Pamuk, “an imaginative novelist … can look directly into the center of things the way that only children can.” The child’s view is unconditioned by adults who may not see the obvious, or if they see it may have good reasons for keeping quiet about it. You’ll recall in the story of the Emperor’s Clothes that it was a child that revealed the veiled truth about the not so veiled Emperor, that he was buck naked. (more…)