National Post (Canada)
August 13, 2005 Saturday
Toronto Edition

Poverty, confusion and melancholy in 1950s Istanbul

Dan Rowe, Weekend Post

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY

By Orhan Pamuk

Knopf

400 pp., $35.95

– – –

It’s a commonplace that a memoir by an established fiction author
will reveal a surprising or celebratory element of the writer’s past.
In the case of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City, there
are no such revelations or celebrations about his Turkish upbringing,
but the book does serve as a reminder of Pamuk’s considerable skill
and intelligence.

Turkey’s best-known novelist, Pamuk is the author of several books,
including The White Castle, My Name is Red (which in 2003 won the
IMPAC, the world’s richest literary prize) and Snow, released in an
English translation last year to wide acclaim. This fall, at the
Frankfurt Book Fair, Pamuk will collect the German book trade’s Peace
Prize.

Pamuk is also very outspoken. In February, he told a Swiss newspaper:
“Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in Turkey.
Almost no one dares speak but me, and the nationalists hate me for
that.” The comment earned him criminal charges in his homeland, not
to mention the scorn of Turkish officialdom.

In Istanbul, published in Turkey in 2003, Pamuk is considerably more
artful in his approach, making no direct reference to the Armenian
genocide. The book weaves the story of young Orhan — who wanted to
be a painter until his late teens — and his secular upper-class
family with evocative descriptions of the city’s dismal alleys and
vast waterways. It’s also the story of various writers and artists,
Turkish and Western, who travelled to Istanbul at the end of the
Ottoman Empire.

Pamuk is clearly a thorn in the side of the Turkish establishment.
Having lived for a time in New York City, he has many qualities that
might be described as Western, so his allegiances are not easy to pin
down. Throughout Istanbul, he longs for the city’s glory days at the
height of Ottoman rule. This yearning is especially evident in the
passages where he recalls watching as large homes burn along the
Bosphorus Strait. He also dabbles in Islam, even though his family
and their upper-class counterparts don’t approve.

Born in 1952, Pamuk lived at a time in Istanbul’s history when the
collective memory was fading and the current economic rebound, stoked
by the possibility of joining the European Union, was a long way off.
The prevailing mood in the city, he says, is one of melancholy —
huzun in Turkish — a mood that’s compounded by the architectural and
artistic glories of Istanbul.

“The people of Istanbul simply carry on with their lives amid the
ruins,” Pamuk writes. “Many Western writers and travellers find this
charming … These ruins are reminders that the present city is so
poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its
former heights of wealth, power and culture. It is no more possible
to take pride in these neglected dwellings … than it is to rejoice
in the beautiful old houses that as a child I watched burn down one
by one.”

Pamuk returns to these themes throughout Istanbul and, with the help
of more than 200 well-chosen black-and-white photographs and a fine
translation by Maureen Freely, evokes this feeling with great skill.

Like Snow, this book builds slowly and steadily to an ending that is
not particularly shocking or revealing but wholly satisfying. And it
leaves you pleased that Pamuk chose writing instead of painting.

GRAPHIC: Black & White
Photo: BOOK COVER: ISTANBUL: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk;
Colour Photo: Simon Hayter, The Ottawa Citizen / “The people of
Istanbul simply carry on with their lives amid the ruins,” says the
author, who longs for the city’s glory days.