Louisville Courier-Journal, KY
March 11 2006

Pamuk’s rambles through Istanbul

By Alan G. Brake
Special to The Courier-Journal

Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s year is looking up. His memoir
Istanbul: Memories and the City was nominated for a National Book
Critics Circle Award [it lost to Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them,]
and the Turkish government dropped the sedition charges against him.

Accused of denigrating Turkish identity by speaking openly about the
genocidal killings of Armenians and Kurds, Pamuk had become a symbol
of Turkey’s aspirations: Would the country choose a transparent,
European Union-friendly path, or a closed, fundamentalist one? By
dropping the charges against him without embracing free speech, the
Turkish government sidestepped the question and took a middle course.

Further complicating the situation, Pamuk is a writer who is
interested in identity, place and perception. Istanbul is equal parts
love letter and critique of a country, a city, a people and himself.
Those looking to Istanbul for a precise portrait of the metropolis
will be disappointed, for our guide confesses he is “drunk with
memories” (but then as a recent domestic literary controversy tells
us, it is unwise to turn to memoirs for facts).

Pamuk studied painting and architecture, so he is a keen observer,
but he refuses to limit the frame of his portrait. The kaleidoscopic
book includes memories of Pamuk’s family, sketches of neighborhoods,
analysis of 19th Century landscape paintings and excerpts of visiting
and native writers’ depictions of the city, among other elements.
Scattered throughout are dozens of photographs and a handful of
paintings, illustrations and engravings.

Pamuk has borrowed this archival technique from the late novelist
W.G. Sebald, and though Pamuk places the images with less skill and
surprise than Sebald, they still have a hypnotic quality that helps
to ground the reader in the place as his narrative shifts through
time, space and literary forms. He depicts a city consumed by a
collective melancholy, something he describes as uniquely Turkish, in
contrast with Western melancholy, which is a more individualistic
experience.

The purpose of the book is, at first, unclear, but midway through
Pamuk casually makes this observation: “According to [Walter]
Benjamin, the enthusiasm for seeing a city from the outside is the
exotic or the picturesque. For natives of a city, the connection is
always mediated by memories.” As an unabashed admirer of the West,
Pamuk has always counted himself among an elite minority and thus
something of an outsider in his native city. In Istanbul, Pamuk is
attempting to construct a portrait of the city — and thus of himself
— that balances the outsider’s view of the picturesque aspects of a
place with native memory. Istanbullus see the rotting wooden houses,
the poverty, the ancient ruins and the jumbled streetscapes as
evidence of a civilization in decline, while outsiders see the same
elements as charming and atmospheric.

Later in the book he writes, “Perhaps it was that I wished to
convince myself that … by looking at Istanbul, so much more defeated,
ruined and sorrowful, I would forget my own pain.” In his
characteristically oblique fashion, Pamuk backs away, continuing,
“But to say such a thing would be to talk in the language of Turkish
melodrama…” Notice, he does not deny he is trying to comprehend the
city’s condition in place of understanding his own. He merely states
it is unwise to admit it.

Like a rambling walk through tangled streets and alleys of an
unfamiliar city, Istanbul provides us with an understanding of the
place that is richer than a tour of major monuments — the book is
introspective, challenging, beautiful, and fleeting.

Alan G. Brake is a writer and critic on architecture, design, and
urbanism.