Istanbul: Memories and the City
Product Description
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… More >>
Istanbul has been the designated intersection between East and West for centuries, and as a past tourist there, I have felt the resulting richness in culture and history as I visited the city’s landmarks. However, author Orhan Pamuk takes a different view as a native of the city – a pervasive confusion over identity in reconciling the often conflicting sympathies of different cultures. In fact, he feels that there is an overwhelming sense of melancholy. As a Turk, Pamuk knows of which he speaks in this intriguing memoir as he is a product of the Atatürk revolution. He is not caught up in the inherent exoticism of the city but rather what he sees as a critical juncture between past and present. The past is represented by the Ottoman Empire, a multilingual dynasty whose heart once beat in Istanbul, its once dazzling capital. But the empire no longer exists, except in the surviving imperial mansions and memorials, the marble fountains and clapboard waterside villas. Yet, all the remnants are deteriorating as developers take hold of the real estate.
In Pamuk’s view, the Ottoman past is a foreign country for the Turks. The present is the Turkish Republic, Atatürk’s secular, Western-oriented, homogenizing nation state now centered in Ankara, an outgrown Anatolian village. Pamuk spends much of the book understandably mourning the replacement of the Empire with the nondescript country that is Turkey now. Sometimes his disappointed tone can be wearing, but Pamuk’s honesty is bracing. Politically and economically, Istanbul is no longer a city of consequence, let alone a world capital. It is an insular little place sinking in its own ruins, “so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former heights of wealth, power and culture”. In brief, Turkey has become a country simply obsessed by its hopeful acceptance into the European Union.
Where Pamuk’s book takes flight is the chronicle of his own personal journey. He is a secular Turk who exhibits integrity by not seeking authenticity in so contrived a national mission — which he finds exemplified in his parents’ house, where the piano is untouched and the porcelain is simply for show. In fact, his recollection of his childhood and his parents’ failed marriage within the context of the public desolation of a dying empire is what most informs his exploration of Istanbul in the mid 20th-century. In fascinating detail, he recounts the city’s European visions through writers as diverse as Flaubert, Nerval and Gautier through Gide to Brodsky; and the work of native Istanbul residents like the novelist Tanpinar and poet Yahya Kemal. In particular, for Tanpinar, the poor neighborhoods of Istanbul were symbolic of Turkey’s own impoverishment in the modern world. The text is accompanied by an abundance of illustrations, including the photographs of Ara Güler from 1950 and the present, and photographs from the Pamuk family album.
Pamuk’s chief achievement in this book is to show the human damage done by Atatürk’s revolution without succumbing to the benighted nostalgia of many Turkish Islamists. Like many secular Turks, the author grapples with the most basic questions of existence — love, compassion, religion, the meaning of life, jealousy, hatred — in trembling confusion and painful solitude, but he cannot offer a solution. Mapping his own complexities, he turns to the streets of his hometown and to the last vestiges of a great culture. One of Pamuk’s qualities is his constant striving to be worthy of that inheritance. This is a fascinating read by a native son.
In 1923 when Turkey became a republic, Muslim Turks made up half of Istanbul’s population of 500.000. The other half consisted of Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Italians and other non-Muslim ethnic groups. The city was truly cosmopolitan and highly fashionable in the 1960s when Pamuk was growing up in upscale Nisantasi district: Non-Muslim religious temples outnumbered mosques even then, although the population has unevenly grown to 1.5 million in favor of Muslim Turks. One could order ham or pork sausages for breakfast in most restaurants or drink lemon flavored vodka at Rejans, a Russian restaurant run by two emigrant White Russian ladies, in Beyoglu. In those days, Istanbul was a visibly secular, highly sophisticated, cultured and refined city.
Today, Istanbul has a bustling population of about 12 million people where the non-Muslim population can hardly reach 100 thousand in total. Some churches and synagogues are closed most of the time because of lack of attendance and funds. Pera (or Beyoglu) is no longer a cosmopolitan community despite its long surviving name. The city has a much different, lackluster character now. It looks tired, burdened by heavy traffic, crowded streets and dense housing.
When Orhan Pamuk reflects on his life in Istanbul, he cannot help feeling melancholic about it because the city has now been inundated by an influx of conservative migrants from rural Turkey. While walking around in working-class districts similar to Fatih or Carsamba, a secular Istanbullu (like Pamuk himself) would indeed feel depressed. Clad in clothes compliant with Islamic values, overpowering number of bearded men and headscarved women would contrast very poorly to the secular images of the past.
For me, this book is not as simple as it appears at first glance. Here, in disguise there are strong political and social messages about the current tendentious issues in Turkey. Again, author Orhan Pamuk delivered us a gem in “Byzantine” style. Bravo!
Ah, to understand a Turk. To comprehend a vast, neglected city like Istanbul, a once-splendid hub of empire and now the veritable locus of “East Meets West.” Even better, to glimpse intimately, what makes a great author, great. If you haven’t read any of Orhan Pamuk’s work, reading this fine memoir is the perfect place to start, it can only whet your appetite for future readings. If like me, you lament that nothing remains unread in Pamuk’s translated canon, then this book will feel like pure luxury, like a series of grace notes floating over a collection of excellent fiction.
“Istanbul: Memories and the City” has many tender accounts of the author’s childhood and family life along with insightful musings on the character of Istanbul and its denizens, the Istanbullis. Certainly, the book’s central theme is an exploration of how relationship and birthplace make us what we are. As Mr. Pamuk makes plain, (and lucky for us) he was born in no ordinary city. In addition, the book harkens directly to the zany, dream-afflicted characters found abundantly in Mr. Pamuk’s work, which the memoir makes amply clear, are so much in their parts . . . like unto himself.
Once again, Pamuk has us pondering the structure and nuance of Identity, this time as a grand idea explored through the medium of childhood and birthplace. The sensitive candor with which Mr. Pamuk describes his background and relationship to the City is quite touching. The chief literary pleasure of the book has to be the chapter describing “Huzun” (which may be an aging sister to notions of “Kismet”). “Huzun,” according to Pamuk, is a collective melancholy consisting of, in differing degree; longing, nostalgia and unrequited love. Mr. Pamuk explains how the experience of “Huzun” both limits and expands the life of Istanbul, its citizens and himself, as a quality central to shared identity.
Despite Istanbul’s storied allure, the book highlights the deeper mystery of Istanbul’s past, belying old notions of “orientalism,” while revealing the cultural affect of early 20th century “Westernization” and its resulting distortions. The Ottoman past becomes the modern Turkish state within the lifetime of his grandmother and parents. This transformation is most opaque when Mr. Pamuk recalls the interminable, empty “western-style “sitting rooms” used by the apartment dwellers to bear witness to their incipient “Westernization.” Photographs of neglected Ottoman-era houses leaning sadly into each other over the Bosphorus, along with pictures of the author’s family are an exceedingly pleasant accompaniment to the text.
Also not to be missed, is the chapter on the never-quite-completed and wholly subjective “Encyclopedia Turkey.” This chapter captures a certain frenetic intensity that lies with The Turks, a people who did the unthinkable by adopting new habits of dress, writing and socio-political organization within an unimaginably short period of time. The energy behind this intensity appears (to this reader) to counterbalance the undertow of “Huzun,” in both Mr. Pamuk’s memoir and his collected fiction. By the author’s account, the chaos wrought by the redirection of Turkish society and its requisite “Westernization” resulted in difficult years for Pamuk’s family and the legacy of Istanbul. Fortunately, today Turkey is the seventh fastest-growing economy in the world. Similarly, Mr. Pamuk is an internationally recognized writer (12OCT2006, A Nobel winner! Congrats, Mr. Pamuk!)
Paramount to “Memories and the City” is the true art of sweet memoir. As Mr. Pamuk engages us in his city and childhood, (even a first romance) the shades of Hoja, young bus riders from “The New Life,” shadows of the poet Ka from “Snow” and especially Jelal, that crazed columnist from “The Black Book,” rise above the blue haze of Istanbul’s “Huzun” with devastating grace, to the reader’s extreme delight.
Pamuk spans the distances of time and memory in this novel as he searches for the meaning of the melancholy, or huzun as he calls it, of the city of Instanbul. Born into a wealthy Turkish family, Pamuk slowly watches his family’s fortune dissolve in the hands of his father. He recounts his memories as his family moves from one quarter to another, interspersing personal accounts with various literary observations. Through it all we experience the uneasy balance between Islamic and Western forces that have shaped the city over the centuries. He explores through the writings of Europeans, how foreigners perceive the city, and how Turkish writers have attempted to respond to these views. Pamuk has such an elegant way of writing, with many undercurrents, like the Bosphorus which he so much loves. I particularly liked his literary chapters, like that of the four melancholy writers of Istanbul, and their attempts to forge an identity for the city. These attempts may have fallen short of their grand expectations, but the books became treasures, and helped to define modern Turkish writing. There are also his amusing observations on Flaubert, Nerval and other French writers and painters, who became absorbed in the city and to whom he felt modern Turkish writing owes a substantial debt. While Pamuk tries to escape this melancholy in his painting, ultimately finding a muse on which to hang all his hopes, he can never fully escape it, as he too becomes absorbed in this great city, which proves to be his literary release.
Is any city as mysterious or compelling as Istanbul? To be the seat of the Ottoman Empire for centuries only to see itself poor, downtrodden and defeated in the modern age must produce a melancholy unknown in the West. Turkey’s greatest living national treasure, Orhan Pamuk, gives us an insider’s view of Istanbul. And he does so in the best possible way – by using his own life as a guide for Istanbul’s intrigues in a highly personalized story of the city.
ISTANBUL therefore is not a detailed or comprehensive history of the town. Rather, its thirty-seven chapters provide bitesized snapshots of Istanbul through the lens of a young man growing up knowing that his city was once great and also knowing, alas, that its best days are behind it. Istanbul residents even have their own word for the melancholy this produces and this sense of huzun infuses the entire book.
Pamuk covers many things in ISTANBUL, including growing up in the shadow of a once great empire, the intimate relationship city residents have with the Bosphorus river, tales of various writers and artists who have visited Istanbul and the legacy they left behind, and the picturesque nature of outlying neighborhoods. The reader finds himself strangely drawn to Istanbul at the same time as he feels the pain and isolation of its residents.
Given the personal nature of the writing, Pamuk also focuses quite a bit on the odd pull the streets, buildings and citizens of Istanbul have had on him. I once heard an interesting question about rock-and-roll. Would U2 have been a spectacular supergroup had they been from Oklahoma City rather than Ireland even if all else, the music and talent, had been the same? An interesting thought to chew on and one that is relevant here. Pamuk is one of the more important writers today. But where would he be if he had been born somewhere besides Istanbul? The city so infuses his soul that it is difficult to imagine him being from anywhere else and writing the books that he does. A non-native could not have written ISTANBUL and we should be thankful that it has a native son like Pamuk to do the job for us.