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Istanbul: Memories and the City

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Manufacturer: Knopf
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A portrait, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost man of letters, author of the acclaimed novels Snow and My Name Is Red.

Blending reminiscence with history; family photographs with portraits of poets and pashas; art criticism, metaphysical musing, and, now and again, a fanciful tale, Orhan Pamuk invents an ingenious form to evoke his lifelong home, the city that forged his imagination. He begins with his childhood among the eccentric extended Pamuk family in the dusty, carpeted, and hermetically sealed apartment building they shared. In this place came his first intimations of the melancholy awareness that binds all residents of his city together: that of living in the seat of ruined imperial glories, in a country trying to become “modern” at the dizzying crossroads of East and West. This elegiac communal spirit overhangs Pamuk’s reflections as he introduces the writers and painters (among the latter, most particularly the German Antoine-Ignace Melling) through whose eyes he came to see Istanbul. Against a background of shattered monuments, neglected villas, ghostly backstreets, and, above all, the fabled waters of the Bosphorus, he presents the interplay of his budding sense of place with that of his predecessors. And he charts the evolution of a rich, sometimes macabre, imaginative life, which furnished a daydreaming boy refuge from family discord and inner turmoil, and which would continue to serve the famous writer he was to become. It was, and remains, a life fed by the changing microcosm of the apartment building and, even more, the beckoning kaleidoscope beyond its walls.

As much a portrait of the artist as a young man as it is an oneiric Joycean map of the city, Istanbul is a masterful evocation of its subject through the idiosyncrasies of direct experience as much as the power of myth--the dazzling book Pamuk was born to write.


DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 949.61803092
EAN: 9781400040957
ISBN: 1400040957
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: 2005-06-07
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: 2005-06-07
Studio: Knopf


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Snow
• My Name Is Red
• The Black Book
• Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds
• Other Colors: Essays and a Story (Vintage International)


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: From the Nobel Prize winner.
Comment: Available now in paperback this is a perfect beach book; the gravitas, of course, is its Nobel Prize-winning author.

I suppose in a sense this is a travelogue, but so much more. I think the critics are a bit over the top. Take, "The Observer (London): 'This ... elegy ... will bring the world to his feet.'" Well, I don't know about that.

It is actually quite depressing and "The Sun" says it best: "A deeply inward memoir of a city."

The memoir has elements of Proust and Joyce. Proustian in personal and family remembrances, and Joycean in description of a city. Like Joyce, Pamuk is ambivalent (at best) about his birth city.

Unlike Joyce, however, who had no trouble laying the blame for Dublin's backwardness on the Church and London politicians, Pamuk is unable to do the same. Pamuk simply observes; he does not ask why Istanbul was unable to move into the 21st century (or even the 20th century, for that matter). But his observations are superb.

Chapter Ten ("Melancholy") and Chapter Eleven ("Four Lonely Melancholic Writers") provide insight for Istanbul's plight but Pamuk does not explore the reasons for the melancholy. My gut feeling is that he knows the reason for the melancholy -- and if he were Joyce he would address it head-on. But Pamuk is afraid to go there. One keeps wanting to ask Pamuk if he has read "What Went Wrong" by Bernard Lewis, and if he has, his thoughts.

Having said that (it sounds a bit harsh), I was softened by his essay "First Love." That essay was worth the price of the book. This is one of the best essays I have ever read of one's first love. Like Istanbul, this tale explains much of Pamuk's melancholy mood. And, it explains why he is a Nobel Prize winner. Absolutely outstanding.

This is definitely a keeper, a nice little paperback that will fit nicely into your carry-on and into your beach basket.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Post-Trip Recollections
Comment: Unlike most reviewers here, I read this after spending my time in the city in question. I had the good fortune of visiting it for about a month last October and have my own version of what the city is like and my own self in relation to it. I'm glad I did wait now.

I don't think this book is so much about Istanbul as much as it is about Pamuk's personality quirks and interests, and Istanbul has an incidental place in those sometimes. Mostly, you will find chapters about what he values about the city and about his own life -- the ferry boats, cinema, famous Istanbul journalists, French travelers to the city, population dynamics, his obsessions with sex and painting and so on. Most of this is boring, poorly coheres in the book itself, and he never really won me over. He didn't convince me he had anything worthwhile to relate, just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau never really made good on his promise to reveal himself warts and all.

In general, I think Pamuk's books are well-executed, mostly lifeless copies of authors that write better fiction. He mercilessly copies Eco, a great deal of Proust, Calvino, detective novels, and many others whom I am most likely not familiar with. He can only weave superficial Turkish stories around innovations already carried out by those writers, the great James Joyce included. This book, in its own way, strikes me as being just as lifeless a memoir, whereas, for instance, Henry Adams or Mark Twain gave their narratives a real lifeline to latch on to -- in their case, a real sense of cohesion came across about the narrative they wanted to create for themselves and how their narratives reflected that. There was solid commitment to those memoirs, whereas, here, I sense a "hey, I'll just write whatever the hell I please to pass the time" kind of approach.

Joyce used Dublin to smash literary conventions and give us a new magical way of seeing the world. Pamuk uses Istanbul much like his paintings as a child -- very slipshod and having more to do with the way Europeans saw the city. But to be fair to him, that is how he writes in general. He has not developed a world of his own; he has always borrowed from other writers instead.

I would pass on this book, even if you have traveled there, unless Pamuk has made a favorable impression upon you and you think his remarks on the city will help you come to a better understanding of it. You would get more out of a Turkish history volume, I reckon, if you want to learn more about Istanbul.



Customer Rating:
Summary: For those who glory in rainy days
Comment: Yes, it got the Nobel Prize, and who am I to argue with that. But the book just didn't work for me. I had rather hoped for a slightly more objective glimpse of Istanbul from the eyes of someone who grew up there and knew it well. Unfortunately, this was Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, which may or may not have much correlation to the Istanbul others know. Orhan grew up in a very privileged home. He was spared from the poverty he saw all around him. His recollections are of an Istanbul that is melancholy, crumbling, and in decay. The mood was gray, the voice was gray, and the pictures were gray. Reading the book felt like being outside on an overcast day that threatens rain. Fine if you like that kind of weather, but I always find myself hoping the sun will peek through just once in a while. This didn't happen in Pamuk's Istanbul. Recommended to those who like rainy days.

Customer Rating:
Summary: After visiting Istambul
Comment: I have started to enyoy this masterpiece, since I visited Istambul. Suddenly Pamuk's memories has merged with mine.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction to Turkish history and culture
Comment: Istanbul: Memories and the City


Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, like Samuel Peyps' London, Proust's Paris, and Borges' Buenos Aires, is a collection of childhood memories informed by adult intellect. Born into a once prominent but lately downwardly- mobile family, Pamuk is preoccupied by the sense of lost glory that infuses Istanbul:
"The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy." It is this melancholy, or
`huzun' that infuses the city and his memories.
How to refer to the change in political control of the city from Greek to Ottoman is the subject of a fascinating chapter: "Conquest or Decline? The turkification of Istanbul." During the 500th anniversary ceremony in l953, the government downplayed the "Turkish' factor, partially because of Turkey's new membership in Nato. Out of fear of alienating the Greek population, the government chose to ignore the anniversary of the "Conquest of Constantinople."
But there were anti-Greek demonstrations and violence, leading Pamuk to conclude that "the government allowed mobs to rampage through the city, plundering the property of Greeks and other minorities. A number of churches were destroyed during the riots and a number of priests were murdered, so there are many echoes of the cruelties Western histories describe as the "fall" of Constantinople. In fact, both the Turkish and Greek states have been guilty of treating their respective minorities as hostages to geopolitics."
One of the attractive features of Pamuk's memoir is the generous use of archival, black and white photographs dating from the 1920's, thirties, and forties.
The original Turkish is ably translated Maureen Freely. I am now encouraged to read more of Pamuk's works available in English, "The Black Book," "My Name is Red," and "Snow," which he describes as his only political novel.

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