Istanbul: Memories and the City (Vintage International)

Ah, to understand a Turk. To comprehend a vast, neglected city like Istanbul, a once-splendid hub of empire and now the veritable locus of "East Meets West." Even better, to glimpse intimately, what makes a great author, great. If you haven't read any of Orhan Pamuk's work, reading this fine memoir is the perfect place to start, it can only whet your appetite for future readings. If like me, you lament that nothing remains unread in Pamuk's translated canon, then this book will feel like pure luxury, like a series of grace notes floating over a collection of excellent fiction. "Istanbul: Memories and the City" has many tender accounts of the author's childhood and family life along with insightful musings on the character of Istanbul and its denizens, the Istanbullis. Certainly, the book's central theme is an exploration of how relationship and birthplace make us what we are. As Mr. Pamuk makes plain, (and lucky for us) he was born in no ordinary city. In addition, the book harkens directly to the zany, dream-afflicted characters found abundantly in Mr. Pamuk's work, which the memoir makes amply clear, are so much in their parts . . . like unto himself. Once again, Pamuk has us pondering the structure and nuance of Identity, this time as a grand idea explored through the medium of childhood and birthplace. The sensitive candor with which Mr. Pamuk describes his background and relationship to the City is quite touching. The chief literary pleasure of the book has to be the chapter describing "Huzun" (which may be an aging sister to notions of "Kismet"). "Huzun," according to Pamuk, is a collective melancholy consisting of, in differing degree; longing, nostalgia and unrequited love. Mr. Pamuk explains how the experience of "Huzun" both limits and expands the life of Istanbul, its citizens and himself, as a quality central to shared identity. Despite Istanbul's storied allure, the book highlights the deeper mystery of Istanbul's past, belying old notions of "orientalism," while revealing the cultural affect of early 20th century "Westernization" and its resulting distortions. The Ottoman past becomes the modern Turkish state within the lifetime of his grandmother and parents. This transformation is most opaque when Mr. Pamuk recalls the interminable, empty "western-style "sitting rooms" used by the apartment dwellers to bear witness to their incipient "Westernization." Photographs of neglected Ottoman-era houses leaning sadly into each other over the Bosphorus, along with pictures of the author's family are an exceedingly pleasant accompaniment to the text. Also not to be missed, is the chapter on the never-quite-completed and wholly subjective "Encyclopedia Turkey." This chapter captures a certain frenetic intensity that lies with The Turks, a people who did the unthinkable by adopting new habits of dress, writing and socio-political organization within an unimaginably short period of time. The energy behind this intensity appears (to this reader) to counterbalance the undertow of "Huzun," in both Mr. Pamuk's memoir and his collected fiction. By the author's account, the chaos wrought by the redirection of Turkish society and its requisite "Westernization" resulted in difficult years for Pamuk's family and the legacy of Istanbul. Fortunately, today Turkey is the seventh fastest-growing economy in the world. Similarly, Mr. Pamuk is an internationally recognized writer (12OCT2006, A Nobel winner! Congrats, Mr. Pamuk!) Paramount to "Memories and the City" is the true art of sweet memoir. As Mr. Pamuk engages us in his city and childhood, (even a first romance) the shades of Hoja, young bus riders from "The New Life," shadows of the poet Ka from "Snow" and especially Jelal, that crazed columnist from "The Black Book," rise above the blue haze of Istanbul's "Huzun" with devastating grace, to the reader's extreme delight.

In this beautifully crafted memoir, Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk guides us through his home city of Istanbul. But rather than merely encounter the place of his birth, we find a city and people thriving beneath the struggle of their own sense of melancholy. We find life in its most organic and most fragile. Memories and the City is a string of memoirs, a historiography and art history chronicle that covers subjects ranging in topic from the emotional, linguistic, and even topographical. Pamuk spares no detail in this rich, lush portrait of a city that is nostalgic for the former grandeur of pashas, harems, and sultans--while coping with the despondency that accompanies poverty in all its incomprehensible brutality. But the poverty of Istanbul is different from that of other cities and locales. Pamuk illustrates that In Istanbul, the citizens revel in their state of hardship. They wear melancholia with honor and pride--that they too suffer, but will overcome. Istanbul's poverty or sense of Hüzün--a Turkish term for a sort of despondency that settles over a location like a blanket of snow. Hüzün is not so much depression or outright dejection as it is a state of being--a collective gloom Istanbul's inhabitants have come to associate with themselves and their city. It is their heart. It is their collective consciousness. Replete with gorgeous photographs culled from personal family collections and the works of renowned Turkish photojournalist, Ara Güler, Pamuk takes his reader on a locals-only tour of the city of his birth. And rather than boast the former glory of an empire that is no longer, rather than show us the monuments and cultural touchstones that don the touristic Istanbullu skyline, he takes us down back-alleys to the crumbling remnants of days long past. He shows us at once, the embodiment of the bold face of transition and the impending consequences of westernization. However, Pamuk establishes a position on his city that is far from despair. Like his city, he too revels in the sense of Hüzün. He celebrates the collective melancholy and dolefulness of Istanbullus by reminding us that the true beauty of a location lies not in the glory of its architectural feats, but rather in the exquisite minds and souls of its inhabitants. Part memoir, part history lesson, Istanbul - Memories and the City is the perfect read for the would-be travelers, the culturally curious, and the arm-chair escapists, hungry to set their sights on landscapes that are simultaneously foreign and yet deeply personal.

The book's subtitle, Memories and the City, guided me through the chapters, many of which can stand alone, with themes that weave in and out. Pamuk questions his own memories from the beginning, with a kind of “double” in another house where he lived briefly as a child, and with his older brother sometimes questioning his accounts of the past. His portrayal of growing up in a family with three generations in one apartment, even as he escaped into make-believe and games, seems both straightforward and complicated at the same time. Pamuk presents the City of Istanbul as seen through Western European photographs, paintings, and travel writings from the nineteenth century, and from Istanbul artists and writers, including journalists, a century later, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, as well as from his own experience of walking all over its different neighborhoods. He sees the neighborhoods falling into ruin, the mansions along the Bosphorus burning to the ground one after another, and his own family’s fortunes gradually crumbling. Against this decline and loss of pride, he sets his early love for painting, begun with a wish for praise and developing into joy of self-expression, and then reveals how he eventually chose to write instead. This book is hard to read straight through because of all the interweaving ideas, stories, and themes. But various chapters, images and passages echo and invite rereading, and as I reread, I love the book more and more. I only wish I could enlarge some of the photographs to see them in more detail.

The author with translator conveys a rich literary style. I prefer newspaper, business style. I liked the way the author roams through the back streets rather than the tourist sights of Istanbul, which I have visited. A map or two would have been useful. So many suburbs were mentioned I wish I'd had the book on my Kindle so I could have looked up the regions on Wikipedia. After we'd discussed the book in a book group, where members described it as art, I went to Google Street View to see some of the neighborhoods. So I'd advise reading the book on a tablet where you can look up the places on maps. I know it is interesting to watch waterways - but given how many beautiful beaches there are in Turkey - staring at the Bosphorus in Istanbul, seems to me like looking at the Thames in London, not my idea of an idyllic view, but maybe better than looking at streets. The author finds great beauty in the Bosphorus - all I can say is beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. I felt sorry for the author, he seemed to have a very limited view of the world and a longing for the past. Ataturk provided a written language with western script, easier to learn than its forerunner. So yearning for the Ottoman Empire gave a highly biased view. Britain lost its empire, but I don't think many Brits long for a return to the past. So I found a rather pathetic character portrayed in the book who couldn't get with modernity and globalism. I did like the black and white pictures - although I'd have liked the figures to be titled. Instead, tedious paragraphs of fluffy language described some of the pictures. I was looking for more of a biography than a work of literature. I wanted historical facts, geographical maps, and maybe a few statistics. I found the book lacking as either a biography or a history of Istanbul. I'm glad I read the book, but I can't say I enjoyed it - until I reached chapter 35 where the author added a more biographical tone, I found it very hard going and tedious. Don't let this put you off though - I decided as a child to equate novels with fairy stories so decided the limited time in my life should be devoted to non-fiction rather than literature.

I visited Istanbul briefly recently without knowing what to expect. I was stunned by its beauty, history and allure. I came home wanting to know more. I could not have picked a better book than this one. Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk's beautiful book, "Istanbul, Memories and the City", combines a bracing and poignant memoir of family and childhood with a fascinating, selective but quirky history of Istanbul. Known for his novels that speak to the tensions and opportunities of East meets West stories, that theme pervades this book also. I especially liked the chapters about Nerval, Gautier, and Flaubert's experiences in Istanbul in the 19th century. As a teenager Pamuk decided to paint and by the end of the book he has dropped out of college to "become an artist". In the last chapter his mother lectures him about the need to finish school and become an architect and the misery he will endure as an artist. He leaves the apartment angrily to walk the city's streets at night as he often does. In the last line of the book he decides not to become an artist but to become a writer! Can anyone relate? Beautifully illustrated with black and white photographs and drawings and with a wonderfully produced Audiobook narrated by John Lee (which I listened to as I read the Kindlebook). Read/listen to this book and go to Istanbul to see for yourself. I know I plan to return.

Interesting, lyrical

Haunting memoir of growing up on Istanbul. It seems that the Istanbul described has passed into history. It gives insight into the city’s history, people, customs and traditional architecture. Worth reading.

There is a type of depression unique to Istanbul called 'hüzün'. According to the author, Istanbul residents suffer from it through "neglecting the past and severing their connection to it." It is not 'tristesse' which "implies a guilt-ridden Westerner who seeks to assuage his pain by refusing to let cliché and prejudice color his impressions." "Hüzün" cannot be felt by a non-resident. It can only be glimpsed as 'through a glass darkly' while reading this Nobel-prize-winning poet-author's memoir of his ancient city by the Bosphorus. The word 'noir' kept coming to mind as a feeling, not just a color while reading "Istanbul." Orhan Pamuk prefers his city with its ancient fortresses, its Great Wall, its decayed palaces, and its massive mosques shrouded in fog or snow or the soot from an endless chain of ships threading passage between Europe and the ancient civilizations of Asia. This book is by no means a member of that peculiar colony of literature called 'travel books' that clings precariously to the steep shelves of history and autobiography. It is a work of great sensitivity and imagination, whose author finds gloomy pleasure (or so it seems) in watching the city's last wooden yalis (mansions of the Ottoman Empire) burn: "Ours was the guilt, loss, and jealously felt at the sudden destruction of the last traces of a great culture and a great civilization that we were unfit or unprepared to inherit, in our frenzy to turn Istanbul into a pale, poor, second-class imitation of a western city." In simple terms, this is the story of a young poet and artist who grew up in a family falling to slow ruin, in a 2,000-year-old city decaying (most recently) from the brilliant heights of the Ottoman empire. If it reminds me of anything, it is Lawrence Durrell's memoirs of Cyprus, "Bitter Lemons"---only as seen from the inside out, rather than the outside in. If you're a Westerner like me and Constantinople has always floated like a tantalizing mirage at the edge of your memory and vision, you owe it to yourself to read Orhan Pamuk's memoir of Istanbul.

This book has quickly become one of my favorites. Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul is not just a memoir — it’s a deeply emotional, poetic love letter to a city he’s known all his life. What fascinates me most is how, despite growing up in Istanbul and spending his entire life there, Pamuk never loses his ability to love the place. He continues to see it with fresh eyes, discovering beauty in its melancholy and joy in its worn streets. His writing is charming, rich with feeling, and full of a quiet wonder that’s contagious. Pamuk doesn’t romanticize the city — he captures it with honesty and depth — but there’s still such warmth in the way he describes even its sadness. It made me feel like I was walking alongside him, seeing Istanbul through his eyes. I didn’t want it to end.

Fascinating history of the city and brilliant read of the author's complex childhood

Meu primeiro livro de Orhan Pamuk, que me fez admirar este autor e suas românticas histórias vividas ou contadas sobre Istambul.

A beautiful edition by Vintage International. One would not have any regrets about the price after receiving this book. The cover is of sturdy matte card, and the paper seems to be durable and of very good quality. There are a wealth of photographs. A good book to add to your library or collection. :)

Excellent read