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| Istanbul: Memories and the City | 
 enlarge | Author: Orhan Pamuk
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $6.18
You Save: $9.77 (61%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (43 reviews)
Sales Rank: 11573
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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| Customer Reviews:
Nostalgic and Melancholic January 10, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Times gone by. Greater times, present days. A very personal take on the Great City by one of the world's great writers. Not always popular in his home country, his prose transcends borders, showing Istanbul as it truly is: universal. Packed with great black and white pictures.
 Istanbul - a melancholic, authentic and universal view January 6, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I think book reviews, rather like any similar activity composed of observation, reception and reflection, can be skewed by our personal experiences and knowledge, as well as corrupted by the opinion and speculation that we sometimes try and keep under control. The empathy and sense of understanding that I felt when reading Istanbul, Memories and the City, were very much shaped by my prior experiences, my personal interpretations of what I had seen, and my own frame of mind.
I was going through Istanbul's Ataturk airport last December (2007) and with the prospect of a long and dull journey in front of me, I was looking in the bookstore for something that I could "lose myself in" during the incredibly dull and boring journey back to Alicante. I was doing some idle browsing in the airport bookshop and I came across Orhan Pamuk's book entitled Istanbul, Memories and the City.
After hurrying to the gate to embark on my flight, there was yet another set of security check, another set of the same procedures to go through - belts off, boots off, everything metal through the scanner, mobile phones, MP3 player, pens, coins, I had so much junk; I even put the Pamuk's book into the plastic tray they provide as part of the terror free scanning service.
Actually this book seemed to be of more interest to the security person than all the rest of the modern technology and metal crap I was having scanned. She looked at the book placed in the tray, as if it might contain some thing rather subversive material, she smirked, picked the book up, then she chucked it back into the tray. I pretended not to notice. Again she picked the book up, made some comment to one of her colleagues, and then chucked the book back into the tray, laughing the way people do when actually there is nothing funny to laugh about; a forced laugh. I still pretended not to notice and of this "behaviour", and just walked through the detector and picked my things up at the other end.
Little things like that can really turn me off a place, it can lead to momentarily dislike and antipathy towards places, especially one that I have found to be, on occasions, desperately depressing, grey and miserable, somewhat filthy, frequently anachronistic, and neither comfortably traditional nor fundamentally contemporary; a pessimistically gloomy halfway house, stuck between a densely populated provincial backwater and a peculiar and unauthentic pastiche of modernity.
I boarded the Iberia flight back to Madrid, with the feeling of someone arriving home, to the familiar and friendly. I took my seat, and prepared for the 4 hour flight to Madrid, within 5 minutes I was asleep.
I awoke to the sound of the in-flight service, I was handed a tray, and I also took a bottle of nice red Spanish wine to accompany dinner.
Sufficiently relaxed and replenished, I took out my recent literary acquisition and started to read.
The book, as I read it, focuses on Orhan Pamuk's recollections of the experience and sensations of growing up in Istanbul, from a very young child in the fifties to a young adult in the seventies. Pamuk expresses a wealth of empathy for the memories of his childhood, and for the city that has been his home for most of his life.
In many ways, Pamuk's account of his Istanbul reminds me very much of many aspects of my life in Cardiff and South Wales when I was very young. This idea was reinforced by a review in the English daily newspaper The Telegraph, in which David Flusfeder wrote:
"Europe has its share of melancholy cities: the citizens of Lisbon take each destructive fire as fate's latest grim joke; Warsaw has been regularly ripped apart by foreign invaders; and it's hard to be cheerful in Trieste or, indeed, Cardiff."
I find it curious that quite a few "western" travellers, writers and artists have sough to represent Istanbul, to recall memories of Istanbul, even modern Istanbul, as a somewhat some what exotic eastern place, full of mystery, harems, intrigue and promise; interesting for its cute differences and it's perceived quaint traditions, for it's ancient history, for its old buildings and even older dirt, for the perceived charm, permissible decadence and cultural diversity. As an aside, I find some of the reviews of Pamuk's work to be bizarre and only vaguely byzantine in their intricate expressions of misplaced and arrant nonsense, and far more so than authors are typically exposed to.
However, I do not find it so strange that many of Pamuk's compatriots are as quick to dismiss and deride him as others in Europe are as quick to laud him, and both doing so on the basis of scant knowledge of the author or their work, and are frequently seasoned with oppressively recondite forms of anachronistic nationalism, by people both in Pamuk's home lands and elsewhere in Europe.
But in his book of memories, Pamuk talks to us about his family, his father, his mother, his friends, desires, the Black Rose, as well as the city; the quarters, districts and neighbourhoods; The Pamuk apartments; Cihangir, Beyolu and Niantai; flavoured gin, stuffed mussels, sweets and puddings; the peoples, the Turks, the Italians, the Armenians, the Germans, the French, the Greeks, the Jews, the Persians, and others; art and literature; the necessity of the cosmopolis and the importance of authenticity; the ever present Bosphorus; books, bookshops and booksellers; the cities pizza eating dogs; the trams, buses, shared taxis and metro; the calming and relaxing nature of act of painting; simit sellers and unmentioned fish sandwiches; the changes in life; shared experiences; schools and colleges; books; fishermen, fantasies and murder; art, artists and the artist as seen by the bourgeoisie; the collisions between ships on the Bosphorus, crumbling buildings, the effect of neglect on wooden buildings and the burning of palaces of Ottoman Pashas; the end of empire, the decay that follows and also the new opportunities; family apartments, change and movement; the other self; walking the streets at night; black and white; the taste of a little goats cheese held in the mouth and a sip of tea; ships and ferries; big American limousines; quarrels and complications; the westernised, ornate and hardly used lounges in many apartments; Istanbul Modern; life and death; the writers, poems and novels; the humorous anecdotes culled from articles written during more than 100 years of Istanbul journalism; of architecture, and, of course, writing.
Throughout the book Pamuk comes back to the theme of melancholy (huezuen, in Turkish) which I think he strongly identifies with a depressing spectre that haunts certain abstractions of what can be seen and felt as being Istanbul. I am not so sure exactly where this melancholy stems from, but I would bet that much of it comes down to a deep sense of deception and loss, that goes way beyond the passing of innocence and has been allowed to grow into a monster of nightmares that threatens to cast asunder any modern senses of education, culture and civility; the sad and avoidable debasement of hope and the defeatist crushing of the promises of a better future.
Pamuk seems to have used the writing of this book as one might use a mirror, to reflect his states of mind - his moods, and to project his desires and dislikes, his hopes and fears, into the world. It is a truth that I find compellingly attractive, authentic and very contemporary. Of course, it might not be to everyone's liking, but if you want to truly understand Istanbul then it really is a "must read".
Thinking again about the insignificant incident at the airport, I suspect that the behaviour of the security guard was just another example of the petty, provincial and anachronistic spirit that has created such a depressingly and melancholic place for people who have made Istanbul their home, and yet who desperately want to live in the global "here and now", in their own interpretation of a cosmopolitan, comfortable, modern, cultured and civil society, and unsurprisingly, they do not want to be dragged back into the distant past, into the dark ages; those times that most of us have fortunately never experienced; a return to times, backwardness and conduct, that none of us in our right minds, would ever desire.
Orhan Pamuk, very much like Immanuel Kant who never ventured outside of Koenigsberg,, has lived virtually all of his life the city of his birth. The following words written about Kant by the critical philosopher Ursula Reitemeyer, in "The History of Mankind between Nature and Reason" strike a chord of relevance and similarity:
"So criticism is the core of Kant's metaphysics of history and the reason, why his metaphysics outlasted his epoch and made him to the very first global philosopher. Kant, that is to say, identified "world" not with a coincidental and necessarily limited perspective of the world but with the whole history of mankind as a morally evolving process. On this theoretical basis every human being is a citizen of the world by birth. This message contains Kant's lasting merit for the modernity - and is probably its only chance."
decay and (introverted) passion December 7, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Perhaps it is true that you either love Pamuk or don't. I find that once I adapt myself to his style, what he is offering is simply wonderful. You carry your expectations to a book, and with Pamuk I never know what to expect. This memoir is a description of his native city and his family, as a gateway into the mind of an unusual autodidact, extremely introverted and melancholy, yet passionately committed to his art.
These three levels are the core themes of the book, which plays lots of games with its structure and images that readers can unravel if that is their bag. First, there is Istanbul - a character in the book, just like his mother and brother - a city that is in decline from its glory as the Ottoman Empire's capital city. From the heights of sophistication and colonial richness, it has entered the modern age as a decapitated giant of ruins with a crumbling (and extremely present) past. One of Pamuk's favorite pastimes is to watch old Pasha mansions burn down, another is to watch disasters on the Bosphorus. But the feeling of decay and loss pervades everything, seeps into the heart of everyone, esp. the author. He breathes this decay with a never-ending fascination and love, finding in poverty and even mediocrity a key to his own identity.
The second level is his family, which is squandering its wealth and squabbling over a painfully unbalanced marriage. It is a mirror of the decline of the city, of course, and Pamuk must decide what to do. That is the third theme, which brings it all together: how he can carve out a role for himself as an artist, in a society that has little place for them. In addition to European writers, Pamuk focuses on a few artistic Turks, but again, they are not what you'd expect: writers who published virtually nothing in their lifetimes, even an encyclopaedist, who stops at K. Again, the descriptions are as astonishing as they are understated, a window into a developing talent.
Finally, the book is packed with wonderful photos, engravings, and paintings. I wish they were of higher quality than in my edition.
There is a political subtext to it, of course: Ataturk's secular revolution is woefully incomplete: while the empire is gone, nothing has risen that can quite take its place. What you get is a half-formed society, extremely sad at its decline, but somehow proud and contented in its particular melancholy, or Huzun. The expression of this is absolutely wonderful and vivid, yet understated and infinitely subtle.
This is what this book said to me. I got a feeling for Turkey that was completely unexpected, and it will fuel my own passion history for years. That being said, this book is not for everyone. It is about the life of the mind in a place that many will find obscure and depressing. Also, Pamuk is so introverted that many readers will not identify with him. And his style is extremely quirky.
Warmly recommended. I got a wonderful sense of the passage of history and human struggle and identity unlike anything I have ever read.
This explains The Black Book June 13, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Pamuk has lived in the city all his life: Istanbul, one of the most fascinating cities in the world, with a heavy and rich history as a city, capital of an empire, the spiritual heart of the new country Turkey. Having been to Istanbul I love the city and was fascinated by Pamuk's stories and photos (there are many black and white photos in the book). His main topic is, those who are of Istanbul have an inherent right to a special Turkish-Istanbul melancholy. He is very open about his family and feelings and growing up, his fears and loves.
This book explains a lot of Pamuk's The Black Book. If you read one, you should read the other.
 lost in melancholy June 11, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
A very melancholic memoir that at times seems to get lost in a not there not here, not east not west time and space ! somewhat interesting but not very compelling
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