2008 Book n+1 Istanbul Memories and the City
Orhan Pamuk has written a strangely haunting book. Part memoir, part history, yet entirely evocation of a mood. The mood Pamuk claims permeates Istanbul is, "hüzün" - a word for which there is no easy English translation. Apparently, it's close to "melancholy" and close to "despair", yet it is more positive than either English equivalent, more communal, more achingly beautiful and more spiritual in some mystical sufic way. It's the mood of the black-and-white photographs which complement the text throughout the book, the mood of poverty, of dark winter evenings, of decaying grandeur, of watching the last great Ottoman buildings burn down in frequent fires, of the smoke from the Bosphorous steamers, of knowing that your city is declining in its fortunes - and may never again reach the giddy cosmopolitan heights of Constantinople or the Ottoman Empire.
Pamuk touches on various themes illustrated by his youth in the Istanbul of the 1950s, 60s and 70s: the necessity and limitations of the twentieth-century Westernized modernisation movement with its face turned towards a Europe which barely noticed that Istanbul existed, the Bosphorus - soul and saviour of the city, the drawings and writings left by nineteenth-century European visitors to Istanbul (all that are left, as the Ottomans never produced their own), the influential writers, poets and encyclopaedists of the early twentieth century, and the practical monetary-minded orientation of the middle and upper classes who were sure that Istanbul could never produce a world-class artist. (That it now owns a Nobel laureate is modestly left unstated.)
This is a puzzling book, intriguing, confusing, full of unexpectedly quotable sentences. It manages to make Istanbul seem at once both more exotic and more familiar than any city in which the reader has ever lived.
Pamuk touches on various themes illustrated by his youth in the Istanbul of the 1950s, 60s and 70s: the necessity and limitations of the twentieth-century Westernized modernisation movement with its face turned towards a Europe which barely noticed that Istanbul existed, the Bosphorus - soul and saviour of the city, the drawings and writings left by nineteenth-century European visitors to Istanbul (all that are left, as the Ottomans never produced their own), the influential writers, poets and encyclopaedists of the early twentieth century, and the practical monetary-minded orientation of the middle and upper classes who were sure that Istanbul could never produce a world-class artist. (That it now owns a Nobel laureate is modestly left unstated.)
This is a puzzling book, intriguing, confusing, full of unexpectedly quotable sentences. It manages to make Istanbul seem at once both more exotic and more familiar than any city in which the reader has ever lived.