Istanbul: Memories and the CityA portrait, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's great cities, by its foremost man of letters, author of the acclaimed novels "Snow" and "My Name Is Red." Blending reminiscence with history; family photographs with portraits of poets and pashas; art criticism, metaphysical musing, and, now and again, a fanciful tale, Orhan Pamuk invents an ingenious form to evoke his lifelong home, the city that forged his imagination. He begins with his childhood among the eccentric extended Pamuk family in the dusty, carpeted, and hermetically sealed apartment building they shared. In this place came his first intimations of the melancholy awareness that binds all residents of his city together: that of living in the seat of ruined imperial glories, in a country trying to become "modern" at the dizzying crossroads of East and West. This elegiac communal spirit overhangs Pamuk's reflections as he introduces the writers and painters (among the latter, most particularly the German Antoine-Ignace Melling) through whose eyes he came to see Istanbul. Against a background of shattered monuments, neglected villas, ghostly backstreets, and, above all, the fabled waters of the Bosphorus, he presents the interplay of his budding sense of place with that of his predecessors. And he charts the evolution of a rich, sometimes macabre, imaginative life, which furnished a daydreaming boy refuge from family discord and inner turmoil, and which would continue to serve the famous writer he was to become. It was, and remains, a life fed by the changing microcosm of the apartment building and, even more, the beckoning kaleidoscope beyond its walls. As much a portrait of the artist as a young man as it is an oneiric Joycean map of the city, "Istanbul" is a masterful evocation of its subject through the idiosyncrasies of direct experience as much as the power of myth--the dazzling book Pamuk was born to write. |
Contents
Another Orhan | 3 |
The Photographs in the Dark Museum | 9 |
Me | 18 |
Copyright | |
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Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar Ahmet Ahmet Rasim Anadoluhisarı apartment buildings artist asked back streets beautiful Beşiktaş Beyoğlu black-and-white Bosphorus brother cemeteries child childhood Cihangir city's crowds dark dolmuş dream empty encyclopedia eyes Eyüp father feel felt ferry film Flaubert French friends Galata Bridge Gautier girl Golden Horn grandmother Greek happy harem hüzün Istan Istanbul İstanbullus Kızkulesi knew Koçu Koçu's later lived look lycée Maçka mansions melancholy Melling Melling's meyhane mosques mother Nerval never newspaper night Nişantaşı once Orhan Orhan Pamuk Ottoman Empire painting Pamuk pashas perhaps photographs play pleasure poet poor neighborhoods rich Robert Academy ruins Rumelihisarı ship Şişli sitting room smile smoke soccer someone sometimes strange Taksim Tanpınar things thought told took Tünel Turkish uncle Üsküdar walk walls watch western travelers wooden houses writers Yahya Kemal