Istanbul: Memories of a City [Paperback]

I didn't quite know what to expect of Istanbul, having read all of the author's fiction. I suspected it might be a little strange, and rather melancholic. Pamuk's study of his home town turned out to be a non-linear, dip-into read. It is engrossing and lyrical and a great testament to Pamuk's writing that it doesn't come across as self-obsessed or egomaniacal as Pamuk is clearly fascinated by his family/family legacy. In a more self-indulgent writer this could be rather irksome, but in Pamuk's (and translator Maureen Freely's) hands it becomes seductive and soothing. I spent time in Istanbul in the late 80s and I never really got the hang of the city, didn't understand how/why it worked. I wish this book had been around then as I would approach the place completely differently.

Ekren Koçu devoked most of his life, between the 50's and the 70's, to compiling an encyclopedia of Istanbul. For Orphan Pamuk, Koçcu failed in this life-long task because it was impossible "to explain Istanbul using western 'Scientific' methods of classification. He failed in part because Istanbul is so unmanageably varied, so anarchic, so very much stranger than western Cities: its disorder resists clasification". Intrigued? Then this is a book for you.

This book is very a personal reflection on the author's notion of Istanbul - as much an idea or concept as much as a place - developed during his childhood and adolescence from the 50's through to the 70's.

We start with the author's first memories: the tall house entirely occupied by one (fascinating) extended family; his father and brother, inheritors of his grandfather's fortune, determined to fritter it away in one business disaster of the next; his long suffering mother; his father possessed of an almost fatal attraction for other women; and his grand mother, the true matriarchal anchor of the family. We end, in the 70's, with a row between Orphan and his mother and the book concludes with Orphan's declaration that he is going to be a writer. And in between we are treated to a wonderful exercise in writing and remembrance.

We begin to understand Istanbul as Orphan did himself. An important feature of his childhood were the black and white films that he was taken to as a young child. As an adult Orphan sees Istanbul, exclusively, in black and white. And the text is accompanied by a whole series of atmospherics black and white photographs. As the text unfolds we begin to understand that this is a great time of change for the turks, when political leaders looked to the west for progress, but where - for most people - notions of east and west was pretty meaningless. Istanbul was Istanbul, a world within itself, indeed, we learn that the author has never lived anywhere else and has never felt the desire to do so.

As the story progresses the story of his life is interspersed with chapters that talk about history and tradition. We learn about great Turkish thinkers, writers, poets and philosophers. We see Istanbul through the eyes of successive generations of western visitors, Flaubert and Ruskin amongst them. And we learn of a new nation beginning to build a new identity in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman empire.

This is a fascinating story rendered even more impressive by the wonderful style of the writer. We live with him through family disasters, through his teenage love of painting (only Istanbul of course) and through the trauma of his first love, a story which superbly illustrates the real limits of life that faced talented - or wealthy - Istanbulus in the post war years.

Pamuk's Istanbul is a fascinating place and this book is a fascinating book, not least becasue he avoids so many of the western clichés which seem to have defined how even Turks think and write about their home. What we do appreciate here is the uniqueness of Istanbul.

For Parmuk the most defining notion of Istanbul is, Hüzün, a kind of turkish melancholia, but a melancholia that is distinctive to this place, a collective condition rather than the individualstic notion of, say, French tristesse.

Hüzün dominates this book but not in a sad or overpowering way. It just makes Istanbul seem very different and a very individual place.

This is great reading and - as I said above - very stylish writing. In many ways it reminded me of W.G.Sebald although I can't quite understand why, although it is clearly as honest and individual as his best work.

This book is one hell of a treat; indulge yourself!

Near the opening of Istanbul: Memories Of A City, Orhan Pamuk suggests that "at least once in a lifetime, self-reflection leads us to an examine the circumstances of our birth", to examine family, identity and origins, perhaps to find if we might have deserved better. Thus this master prose applies his art, his skill to weave an intricate and detailed tapestry of a city with its history, customs, architecture and feel embroidered around the story of the writer's early years, spent in a domesticity somehow short of bliss. The book, no doubt, is an instalment, since it ends with the young Orhan Pamuk out of college declaring he wants to be a writer. There remains, therefore, a lot of story yet to be told.

There is a crucial concept, Pamuk tells us, needed to inform our experience of this place. It provides a clarifying lens that not only magnifies and intensifies, but also interprets. In Turkish it's called hüzün, which roughly translates as melancholy. But it is not the melancholy of melancholia. It is not unhappiness, and is far removed from depression or anything else clinical. Orhan Pamuk returns to this word and its meaning throughout the text, but usually to skirt around its core, to illustrate rather than define. As I read Istanbul, the more I was convinced I was dealing with an idea that spanned both humanity and humility along one axis, married with reflection and mortality along another.

The concept explains why this city, when seen through foreigner's eyes, has been either a comment on history, a judgment on squalor, or a romance on the exotic. Whether it's the engravings of Melling or the words of Flaubert, Western visitors have tended to exaggerate, to concentrate on things the locals take for granted, whilst ignoring those that fire them. Compared to local writers whose views are no less partial, it seems, the visitors tend to concentrate more on the picturesque, what can be observed and recorded rather than what can be felt or interpreted. Those born or living in the city are in contrast part of its fabric, conscious of its design, more able to follow a thread of meaning.

Pamuk follows such a political thread through his book. The country's modernisation under Ataturk is a constant theme. It was an ideology, Pamuk declares, that convinced his family that, as Westernised, positivist property-owners, they had the right to govern over semi-literates, and a mission to prevent them becoming too attached to their superstitions. Such acute and astute observation, laden with irony, is also revealed as having penetrated his own psyche. Elsewhere, he tells us that while he might remain uneasy about religious devotion, he, like the secular bourgeoisie in general, feared not God, but the potential fury of those who believed in Her too much.

He also, quite early on, introduces the reader to his suspicion, nay fear, that he himself has a duplicate existence in another place elsewhere in the city, perhaps in the same form, but with a separate, independent identity. Readers of Pamuk will notice here a theme that seems to pervade his work.

The city itself has had at least three separate identities, all played out by different occupants, their origins in a multiplicity of cultures and places. And so it may be with the individual. He did not choose to be born into this identity, this skin, this psyche. By chance he might have a religious fanatic, a merchant, a Sultan, a boatman or a moderniser as a father, and any of the same - less Sultan - plus more as a mother. He might have changed direction in his own life, have become the architect he aimed for, have been a painter, or might have even married the first love who modelled for his portraits. Throughout, he might have been someone else, or indeed have merely represented a type, a class, a privilege, a poverty. Are we discussing the individual, an individual, the writer, a writer or, as a generality, anyone who might or might have once lived in this place and thus adopted its identity?

Thus lives, like places, are to be interpreted, reinvented by the eyes that view them. A writer, perhaps, invents nothing in his fiction, the production of which becomes merely a search for the self who, by accident of history, becomes fixed in an individual that remains, inevitably, in a state of change. This beautiful, moving book, one hopes, is just the start of an autobiographical project. Like life itself, I anticipate a future whose attainment I possibly might live to regret. Hüzün.