Istanbul: Memories and the City
Selected Book Details
- Paperback
- Author: Orhan Pamuk
- Publisher: Vintage
- Release Date: July 2006
- ISBN-10: 1400033888
- ISBN-13: 9781400033881
- List Price: $15.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryA shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy–or hüzün– that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Kudos to the translator, too!
Rating: 
A lovely book -- which I'd not have been able to enjoy, learn from OR comment on, without benefit of Maureen Freely's incredibly fine translation.
From the Nobel Prize winner.
Rating:
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.
After visiting Istambul
Rating:
I have started to enyoy this masterpiece, since I visited Istambul. Suddenly Pamuk's memories has merged with mine.
Excellent introduction to Turkish history and culture
Rating:
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.
neo-nostalgia
Rating:
I remember the Boston of my childhood, though I remember Marblehead (a small town to the north) much better because I actually lived there. The two places had certain sights, sounds, smells, and "feelings" that, for the most part, have vanished like a morning fog off the Atlantic. But anchoring all those sensory aspects of the places was history, a giant kaleidescope of shifting people, institutions and events that created the then present, that created the new present, and will create the next present. I can't imagine Boston or Marblehead without that history.
Orhan Pamuk chose to write his great love for his city in a strange form. He weaves himself and his personal history into the picture, but completely avoids any historical details. I wonder whom he wrote for ? If for that "western audience" he refers to so often, there is not enough history to make sense of why Istanbul became such a melancholic, declined, fallen, poor, neglected place (at least he says it was). Fires and accidents, rain and snow, the hiss of tires slipping on old cobblestone alleys in a city that once ruled a big part of the world. If he wrote for a Turkish audience, his style of describing his family and his personal behavior would probably turn them off, along with his emphasis on Turkish cultural poverty. Maybe he wanted to "send a message" to those who insist too much on "Turkishness", by mentioning the now-mostly-disappeared non-Muslim minorities quite often. Maybe, but I conclude that he wrote it for himself---full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes to come. Pamuk writes of western painters and travellers and their views of the city in the 19th century and how they influenced him. He also writes of Turkish authors and how they viewed the city, though I have never seen any of their work in translation (meaning I have no idea how they would resonate with me). I liked this gambit, though I knew nothing about those Turkish writers. What I liked best is how he describes the city itself, how he walked around it as a child and a youth, how he steeped himself in the decay of the old Ottoman heritage before all the old mansions burned, before concrete apartment blocks sprang up like toadstools to sweep away the sad wooden houses that had seen better days. I loved the chapter on smoke from the funnels of steamships in the Bosphorus, and above all I liked the dozens of black and white photos of bygone days that fill the pages. It's a world class essay of nostalgia, but done in a very new way.
It's an interesting way to describe a city and write the first part of an autobiography. It's not a travelogue. There's not a single map---as if all the readers would know the geography of Istanbul. This is not Istanbul for visitors, this is Istanbul for those who loved it (who could AFFORD to love it) back in the Fifties and Sixties, when it had not been inundated in a huge tide of immigrants or refugees from the countryside and abroad, when Turkey was a poor, slow country. I saw it, once, briefly then, when Pamuk was an eleven year old kid. The dynamic, vital, amazing city of 2008 bears little resemblance to that other Istanbul. I understand why he wrote the book; I know a little of what is lost. To know that, you couldn't find a better book than this.
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