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Memories and the City
Knopf
June 2005
400 pages
ISBN: 1400040957
Hardcover
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Fiction
A 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.
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