AN EVOCATIVE TOUR OF ALL THAT IS ISTANBUL
By Keith Monroe
The Virginian-Pilot(Norfolk, VA.)
March 19, 2006 Sunday
The Virginian-Pilot Edition
ISTANBUL Memories and the City
ORHAN PAMUK
Knopf. 373 pp. $26.95.
SOME WRITERS flee home – Hemingway, Shakespeare, Zola. Others stay
home and cultivate their own little patch – Faulkner and Austen.
Orhan Pamuk is one of the latter. He grew up in the family’s Pamuk
Apartments where a grandmother or uncle was only a flight of stairs
away. Nearing 60, he still lives in the Pamuk Apartments.
Such rootedness can smack of the ingrown – Dickinson in Amherst,
Flaubert in provincial Rouen. But Pamuk inhabits a city so fascinating
and multifarious, it hardly seems eccentric to burrow deep.
This book begins at the beginning, and few writers have ever captured
the hothouse of childhood so well. Pamuk’s recollections are vivid
and deeply felt, and only gradually does he iris out from his family
– where a beloved mother feuds with a ne’er-do-well father who is
squandering the family fortune through ill-conceived business ventures.
As Pamuk learns about a wider world, we learn with him about his
adored city, often through the works of those who depicted it: The 18th
century German artist Memling, the French writers Nerval and Flaubert
and four melancholy Turks whom he counts as spiritual guides – Kemal,
Kocu, Hisar, and Tanipar.
This mixture of Western and Turkish influences is appropriate
in a Turkish writer who was raised as an unbelieving Muslim in a
westernized, bourgeois family. He observes of his Turkish artistic
forebears: “After long deliberation they found an important and
authentic subject, the decline and fall of the great empire into
which they were born.”
Pamuk himself was born a half century or more after these men,
in 1952. He has seen the crumbling city of his youth (population 1
million) metastasize into a sprawling 10-million-person megalopolis.
He mourns the replacement of much dilapidated ancient beauty with
even more dilapidated modern ugliness.
He could undoubtedly say a good deal about the decline of comity
as well in a city that has replaced habitual melancholy with rising
militancy. Pamuk was threatened with jail in 2005 for discussing the
brutal treatment of Armenians by Turks a century ago. But this book
stops long before the present.
In fact, it ends around 1970, with Pamuk as a lackadaisical student
of architecture who also paints. His distraught mother fears he’ll
try to make a living as an artist. “In a country as poor as ours,
around so many weak, defeated, semiliterate people, to have the sort
of life you deserve … you have to be rich.”
To which, with the comical, cocksure obliviousness of youth, he offers
Mom this reassurance: “I don’t want to be an artist. I’m going to be
a writer.”
It’s not exactly Joyce’s megalomaniac boast that he will forge the
uncreated conscience of his race in the smithy of his soul, but it
does show that “Istanbul’s” submerged theme is “A Portrait of the
Young Artist Discovering his Vocation.”
Since Pamuk is Turkey’s leading novelist and on the Nobel short list,
it seems to have worked out. Since the tale of his entire adulthood and
working life remains to be told, it also suggests that this luminous
book is only the first volume of memoirs we might expect >From him.
Almost half of the book’s page count is devoted to dozens of
astonishing photos by Ara Guler. He deserves to be regarded as the
Eugene Atget of Istanbul, and his cityscapes alone are worth the
price of admission.
They help make this book wonderfully evocative of a unique place –
part “Arabian Nights,” part Third World trash heap, part first world
capital.
* Keith Monroe lives in Greensboro, N.C.