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| Istanbul: Memories and the City | 
 enlarge | Author: Orhan Pamuk
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $7.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (46 reviews)
Sales Rank: 12150
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 1400033888
Dewey Decimal Number: 949.61803092
EAN: 9781400033881
ASIN: 1400033888
Publication Date: July 11, 2006
Release Date: July 11, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world?s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy?or huezuen? that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire.
With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters?both Turkish and foreign?who would shape his consciousness of his city. Like Joyce?s Dublin and Borges? Buenos Aires, Pamuk?s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 41 more reviews...
 Post-Trip Recollections December 29, 2008
Unlike most reviewers here, I read this after spending my time in the city in question. I had the good fortune of visiting it for about a month last October and have my own version of what the city is like and my own self in relation to it. I'm glad I did wait now.
I don't think this book is so much about Istanbul as much as it is about Pamuk's personality quirks and interests, and Istanbul has an incidental place in those sometimes. Mostly, you will find chapters about what he values about the city and about his own life -- the ferry boats, cinema, famous Istanbul journalists, French travelers to the city, population dynamics, his obsessions with sex and painting and so on. Most of this is boring, poorly coheres in the book itself, and he never really won me over. He didn't convince me he had anything worthwhile to relate, just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau never really made good on his promise to reveal himself warts and all.
In general, I think Pamuk's books are well-executed, mostly lifeless copies of authors that write better fiction. He mercilessly copies Eco, a great deal of Proust, Calvino, detective novels, and many others whom I am most likely not familiar with. He can only weave superficial Turkish stories around innovations already carried out by those writers, the great James Joyce included. This book, in its own way, strikes me as being just as lifeless a memoir, whereas, for instance, Henry Adams or Mark Twain gave their narratives a real lifeline to latch on to -- in their case, a real sense of cohesion came across about the narrative they wanted to create for themselves and how their narratives reflected that. There was solid commitment to those memoirs, whereas, here, I sense a "hey, I'll just write whatever the hell I please to pass the time" kind of approach.
Joyce used Dublin to smash literary conventions and give us a new magical way of seeing the world. Pamuk uses Istanbul much like his paintings as a child -- very slipshod and having more to do with the way Europeans saw the city. But to be fair to him, that is how he writes in general. He has not developed a world of his own; he has always borrowed from other writers instead.
I would pass on this book, even if you have traveled there, unless Pamuk has made a favorable impression upon you and you think his remarks on the city will help you come to a better understanding of it. You would get more out of a Turkish history volume, I reckon, if you want to learn more about Istanbul.
 For those who glory in rainy days November 9, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Yes, it got the Nobel Prize, and who am I to argue with that. But the book just didn't work for me. I had rather hoped for a slightly more objective glimpse of Istanbul from the eyes of someone who grew up there and knew it well. Unfortunately, this was Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, which may or may not have much correlation to the Istanbul others know. Orhan grew up in a very privileged home. He was spared from the poverty he saw all around him. His recollections are of an Istanbul that is melancholy, crumbling, and in decay. The mood was gray, the voice was gray, and the pictures were gray. Reading the book felt like being outside on an overcast day that threatens rain. Fine if you like that kind of weather, but I always find myself hoping the sun will peek through just once in a while. This didn't happen in Pamuk's Istanbul. Recommended to those who like rainy days.
 After visiting Istambul September 20, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have started to enyoy this masterpiece, since I visited Istambul. Suddenly Pamuk's memories has merged with mine.
Excellent introduction to Turkish history and culture August 2, 2008
Istanbul: Memories and the City
Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, like Samuel Peyps' London, Proust's Paris, and Borges' Buenos Aires, is a collection of childhood memories informed by adult intellect. Born into a once prominent but lately downwardly- mobile family, Pamuk is preoccupied by the sense of lost glory that infuses Istanbul:
"The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy." It is this melancholy, or
`huzun' that infuses the city and his memories.
How to refer to the change in political control of the city from Greek to Ottoman is the subject of a fascinating chapter: "Conquest or Decline? The turkification of Istanbul." During the 500th anniversary ceremony in l953, the government downplayed the "Turkish' factor, partially because of Turkey's new membership in Nato. Out of fear of alienating the Greek population, the government chose to ignore the anniversary of the "Conquest of Constantinople."
But there were anti-Greek demonstrations and violence, leading Pamuk to conclude that "the government allowed mobs to rampage through the city, plundering the property of Greeks and other minorities. A number of churches were destroyed during the riots and a number of priests were murdered, so there are many echoes of the cruelties Western histories describe as the "fall" of Constantinople. In fact, both the Turkish and Greek states have been guilty of treating their respective minorities as hostages to geopolitics."
One of the attractive features of Pamuk's memoir is the generous use of archival, black and white photographs dating from the 1920's, thirties, and forties.
The original Turkish is ably translated Maureen Freely. I am now encouraged to read more of Pamuk's works available in English, "The Black Book," "My Name is Red," and "Snow," which he describes as his only political novel.
neo-nostalgia July 24, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I remember the Boston of my childhood, though I remember Marblehead (a small town to the north) much better because I actually lived there. The two places had certain sights, sounds, smells, and "feelings" that, for the most part, have vanished like a morning fog off the Atlantic. But anchoring all those sensory aspects of the places was history, a giant kaleidescope of shifting people, institutions and events that created the then present, that created the new present, and will create the next present. I can't imagine Boston or Marblehead without that history.
Orhan Pamuk chose to write his great love for his city in a strange form. He weaves himself and his personal history into the picture, but completely avoids any historical details. I wonder whom he wrote for ? If for that "western audience" he refers to so often, there is not enough history to make sense of why Istanbul became such a melancholic, declined, fallen, poor, neglected place (at least he says it was). Fires and accidents, rain and snow, the hiss of tires slipping on old cobblestone alleys in a city that once ruled a big part of the world. If he wrote for a Turkish audience, his style of describing his family and his personal behavior would probably turn them off, along with his emphasis on Turkish cultural poverty. Maybe he wanted to "send a message" to those who insist too much on "Turkishness", by mentioning the now-mostly-disappeared non-Muslim minorities quite often. Maybe, but I conclude that he wrote it for himself---full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes to come. Pamuk writes of western painters and travellers and their views of the city in the 19th century and how they influenced him. He also writes of Turkish authors and how they viewed the city, though I have never seen any of their work in translation (meaning I have no idea how they would resonate with me). I liked this gambit, though I knew nothing about those Turkish writers. What I liked best is how he describes the city itself, how he walked around it as a child and a youth, how he steeped himself in the decay of the old Ottoman heritage before all the old mansions burned, before concrete apartment blocks sprang up like toadstools to sweep away the sad wooden houses that had seen better days. I loved the chapter on smoke from the funnels of steamships in the Bosphorus, and above all I liked the dozens of black and white photos of bygone days that fill the pages. It's a world class essay of nostalgia, but done in a very new way.
It's an interesting way to describe a city and write the first part of an autobiography. It's not a travelogue. There's not a single map---as if all the readers would know the geography of Istanbul. This is not Istanbul for visitors, this is Istanbul for those who loved it (who could AFFORD to love it) back in the Fifties and Sixties, when it had not been inundated in a huge tide of immigrants or refugees from the countryside and abroad, when Turkey was a poor, slow country. I saw it, once, briefly then, when Pamuk was an eleven year old kid. The dynamic, vital, amazing city of 2008 bears little resemblance to that other Istanbul. I understand why he wrote the book; I know a little of what is lost. To know that, you couldn't find a better book than this.
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