Istanbul: Memories and the City
Orhan Pamuk
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 1400033888
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A 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.With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters–both Turkish and foreign–who would shape his consciousness of his city. Like Joyce’s Dublin and Borges’ Buenos Aires, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.
clear-eyed Westerner, Melling’s Istanbul is not only a place graced by hills, mosques, and landmarks we can recognize, it is a place of sublime beauty. CHAPTER EIGHT My Mother, My Father, and Various Disappearances My father often went to faraway places. We would not see him for months on end. Strangely, we hardly noticed his absence until he’d already been gone for some time. By then, we were already accustomed to it—rather in the way you might realize belatedly that a seldom-used
goods identified the corpse as a gangster who the year before had entered his shop in broad daylight and robbed him at gunpoint. When she was reading the latest on this drama, my mother was alone in her room, or so she told me with a mixture of regret and annoyance many years later. After taking her to the hospital, my father had grown restless and, when my mother’s labor failed to progress, he’d gone out to meet with friends. The only person with her in the delivery room was my aunt, who’d
neighborhood life, and the meyhanes he saw in his youth. He mentions a Bosphorus yali in which he lived as a child and which later burned down. When Reşat Ekrem was twenty years old, his father rented an old Ottoman villa in Göztepe. Here Koçu the younger lived the traditional life of the Istanbul wooden köşk, remaining long enough to see his extended family dispersed. As with so many families of this sort, gradual impoverishment and family feuds forced Koçu’s family to sell the wooden köşk,
Tanpınar would echo almost a century later and that western travelers would then turn into a cliché: “Istanbul, which has some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, is like a theater and best seen from the hall, avoiding the poverty-stricken and sometimes filthy neighborhoods in the wings.” Eighty years later, when Yahya Kemal and Tanpınar created an image of the city that resonated for İstanbullus—something they could do only by merging those beautiful views with the poverty “in the
and his fantasies of the sultan’s harem—Tanpınar found these (like the accounts of so many subsequent western travelers) to be of “dubious morality,” although he does allow that Gautier could not be blamed insofar as the harem “did indeed exist.” This uneasy aside conveys the ambivalence that besets literary İstanbullus on reading western observations. Because the country is trying to westernize, what western writers say is desperately important, but whenever a western observer goes too far, the