Istanbul: Memories and the City

From Barnes & Noble

In this engaging travel narrative, the Dublin Literary Award–winning novelist returns to his teeming home city, reflecting on its unique role as a gateway to both the East and the West. Pamuk mixes urban and personal history, sociology and legend to render an Istanbul that meaning, conflict, and cultural contradictions. A portrait of one of the world's great cities by its foremost literary resident.

From the Publisher

Delightful, profound, marvelously original. . . . Pamuk tells the story of the city through the eyes of memory." –The Washington Post Book World"Far from a conventional appreciation of the city's natural and architectural splendors, Istanbul tells of an invisible melancholy and the way it acts on an imaginative young man, aggrieving him but pricking his creativity." –The New York Times"Brilliant. . . . Pamuk insistently discribes a]dizzingly gorgeous, historically vibrant metropolis." –Newsday “A fascinating read for anyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with this fabled bridge between east and west.” –The Economist

Christopher de Bellaigue

Pamuk is not a sunny memoirist, but neither is he a sunny novelist. In this memoir of his youth, as in the six novels he has set in the city, Istanbul bears only a fleeting resemblance to the smiling and vibrant place many Westerners know from vacationing there. Pamuk's hometown is rarely consoling; it is more often troubled and malicious, its voice muffled and its colors muted by snowfalls that happen more often in the author's imagination than in real life. ''From a very young age I suspected there was more to my world than I could see,'' Pamuk writes, and so it goes. Far from a conventional appreciation of the city's natural and architectural splendors, Istanbul tells of an invisible melancholy and the way it acts on an imaginative young man, aggrieving him but pricking his creativity.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Turkish novelist Pamuk (Snow) presents a breathtaking portrait of a city, an elegy for a dead civilization and a meditation on life's complicated intimacies. The author, born in 1952 into a rapidly fading bourgeois family in Istanbul, spins a masterful tale, moving from his fractured extended family, all living in a communal apartment building, out into the city and encompassing the entire Ottoman Empire. Pamuk sees the slow collapse of the once powerful empire hanging like a pall over the city and its citizens. Central to many Istanbul residents' character is the concept of hazan (melancholy). Istanbul's hazan, Pamuk writes, "is a way of looking at life that... is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating." His world apparently in permanent decline, Pamuk revels in the darkness and decay manifest around him. He minutely describes horrific accidents on the Bosphorus Strait and his own recurring fantasies of murder and mayhem. Throughout, Pamuk details the breakdown of his family: elders die, his parents fight and grow apart, and he must find his way in the world. This is a powerful, sometimes disturbing literary journey through the soul of a great city told by one of its great writers. 206 photos. (June 10) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Pamuk, whose My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, fondly remembers and capably details life growing up in the paradoxical city of Istanbul. The city, which Flaubert once predicted would be the capital of the world, is an odd mix of history and modernity, Eastern tradition and Western progress, stateliness and vulgarity. Along with the disparate cultural elements, we get Pamuk's own unique family experiences, which provide the thread of focus through a mosaic of culture, history, art, religion, and politics-elements that continue to shape the city daily in Istanbul's "greatest treasures," its grocery stores and coffeehouses. Whether describing the elegant decay of the Bosporus mansions (so named for their location on the Bosporus Strait) or explaining the wealth and danger of oil tankers and shipping routes, Pamuk paints a picture of a city where the "remains of glorious past civilizations" are everywhere "inflicting heartache" on all who live among them. Fans of Pamuk and his work will enjoy the well-written accounts of his eccentric upbringing, but others might find the multitude of reminiscences distracting. It is the city that is most intriguing. Recommend for larger public libraries, extensive travel collections, and where there is an interest in Muslim history. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/05.]-Mari Flynn, Keystone Coll., La Plume, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An eerie, subtle evocation of childhood and a melancholic, loving ode to home. Award-winning novelist Pamuk (Snow, 2004, etc.) grew up in an elite household; his childhood was both charmed and fraught. The cast of characters included his beautiful mother, his two-timing father and his grandmother, who looked like a "relaxed matron from a Renoir painting." They inhabited a culture in transition. The ancient Turkish regime had collapsed, but westernization had not quite rushed in to fill the void; people were mournful and confused, betwixt and between. Even Pamuk's family was finally claimed by "the cloud of gloom and loss that the fall of the Ottoman Empire had spread over Istanbul." His father continually flirted with bankruptcy and would sometimes vanish for days at a time. Young Orhan wanted the city to westernize, yet he wanted everything to remain the same. His memoir also delves into literature and art, discussing how outsiders like Flaubert have seen Istanbul and considering the ways in which Western configurations of the city have shaped its self-understanding. Pamuk discusses the many Western artists, like Antoine-Ignace Melling, who painted the Bosphorus. The author himself took to drawing as a child, painting the landscape and eventually graduating to portraits, among them one of a beautiful girl he would fall in love with. Later, Pamuk studied architecture, but his heart wasn't in it. "Pah," says his mother, "do you think you can earn a living just making pictures? Maybe in Europe, but not here." There it is again, the long shadow of the West. In the last pages, Pamuk turns from art and architecture to writing, making this ultimately a book about vocation. The text is augmentedby a remarkable collection of photographs, many by Ara Guler. Translator Freely also deserves kudos for rendering Pamuk's perfect Turkish adjectives in spare, startling English, from the "ghost-ridden" house to the "cold-blooded candor" of Westerners. An engrossing tale of a city-and of an author as a young man.