that's what the introduction to my dissertation looked like at one stage, too!

Not petty at all! He did live in the building, you're saying, just not in the actual space where the bar is?

I don't think I've misinterpreted anything-- what you say is quite clearly a paraphrase of Pamuk's statements. I skipped over the paraphrase part and pointed out the shadow side of what you're saying: he's complaining about a "large-scale bias" that he helps to support by carefully tending to his international reputation in English-speaking countries. Rushdie, according to your example, could be said to support it even more by writing in English rather than his "native language" (I'm not sure when Rushdie learned English but in post-colonial India English could probably be said to be one of his native languages). I think Pamuk could use whatever influence he has to persuade English publishers to translate Turkish writers whose work he admires or tone down his own presence in the Anglophone world in order to make room for these other "marginalized" voices who may be translated but are getting less press than he is. I give him credit for attending the Jaipur festival and bringing attention via his own spotlight to the other "marginalized" writers who were there. But who are they? Which other Turkish writers should we read? Tell us, Orhan Pamuk!

I'm so glad you brought up Middlemarch! I'm sure someone has written on the two novels together but I just kept thinking of Middlemarch as I was reading. The difference, I think, is that Middlemarch was written without a model for what it was doing (maybe I'm wrong? the tripledecker novel perhaps?) whereas South Riding was written in full knowledge not only of Middlemarch, but of the transition from the realist tradition to modernism, and the achievements of Woolf, Eliot, Joyce, etc. that had become assimilated to the 1930s writer's sense of what writing could/should do. So South Riding could perhaps be said to be a late modernist novel in the sense that Holtby makes a conscious choice not to adopt a more modernist form to her essentially realist novel (as Rosamond Lehmann does in The Weather in the Streets, published the same year). I can't wait to hear what you make of all these novels! Thanks again for your comment.