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| Istanbul: Memories and the City | 
 enlarge | Author: Orhan Pamuk
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (45 reviews)
Sales Rank: 11072
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:
Unfortunate, that it cannot be recommended to young readers January 2, 2007
3 out of 10 found this review helpful
Orhan Pamuk has been in the news lately, owing to the Nobel Prize he was awarded in Literature. To me, it is always uplifting to see non-Western names in the Nobel lineup. I decided to check him out, and not having much time, preferred the light reading offered by Istanbul. It is an amazingly marvelous way of describing the conflicts faced by well-settled people, in developing countries, as changes sweep by, mostly for the worse. These changes are the modern realities of overcrowded cities, dumping of history and monuments, and migration of peoples from the rural areas. They can also be seen as muddled attempts at Westernization in most of the Third World; attempts running up against the limitations of wealth, land, innovation, and job creation. This can apply to any city in the Third World, caught in the realities of the modern era. I could easily change the names of the places in Istanbul, and could very well be in a city in India; such is the power of Pamuc's expression.
All the changes have brought on a certain melancholy in the author, and he describes the various ways he coped with it. In the process, he has bared a lot of details about his personal ways and I find one description particularly disturbing---there is repeated description of masturbation in chapter after chapter. If it was true in his case, then was there a repeated need to bare this? I earnestly hope that this form of self-flagellation is not a gold standard for catching the attention of the Nobel Committee. Such a good book, and what would have been a good introduction to a famous writer, unfortunately, cannot be recommnded for young readers.
 Brooding on Lost Empires December 21, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
There is a type of depression unique to Istanbul called 'huezuen'. 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 cliche and prejudice color his impressions." "Huezuen" 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.
Absolutely gorgeous reading December 3, 2006
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A sumptuous reading. Pamuk sculpted his Istanbul in the most poetic and cinematic way. Everywhere the "huzun" or melancholy of Istanbul is dominant, in the text and descriptions, in the black-and-white pictures and in the actual lives of the 'istanbullus'. The best memoir I have ever read. The most beautiful thing in this book is the artful juxtaposition of appropriate pictures that show the decline in everywhere. In life and buildings, in nature and in people's lives. He also mentioned the lives and writings of some of the writers who tried to portray Istanbul or wrote memoirs on this city. One thing that bothered me is that since Pamuk belonged to the rich, he portrayed them skillfully, but the poor is absent in his memoir.
"Istanbul c'est moi" November 7, 2006
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Certain cities have become the intellectual and spiritual property of a single writer. Dublin is Joyce, Oran is Camus, Winesburg Ohio is Sherwood Anderson, Alexandria, Lawrence Durrell. Now Istanbul is Orhan Pamuk who in this autobiographical account of his own childhood and youth, makes Istanbul itself his major subject. The city, and the way it has been described by its writers, painted by its painters is a central concern of his throughout the book. Surprisingly it is the 'look' and ' feel' of the city which have greater importance for him than its people. And aside from his own immediate family, his parents and brother there are very few detailed descriptions of the citizens of Istanbul. Instead the focus is on the writers and painters depictions of the city. And then too Pamuk is very much aware of how the city is seen in the eyes of others outside it. And his description of his own formation as a writer includes this element of his seeing in the way Nerval and Gautier and Flaubert saw the city. His own small family drama and growing up are also given prominent part of the book. His close even clinging relation to his mother, his competitive and difficult relation with his older brother, his at times distant but at other times accepting relationship with his philandering father are described in detail. So too his own youthful adventure in painting. One of the best - told stories in the work of his first love with a girl called 'the dark rose' who eventually is forced by her family to go away from him.
The descriptions of Istanbul are again detailed and comprehensive. They are accompanied by monochrome illustrative photos most of which are credited to Ara Guler. These photos are truly helpful in filling out the pictures of the city Pamuk makes in the work.
The Istanbul of Pamuk's childhood is the faded and decrepit former capitol of the Ottoman Empire. It is a city in which the people of Pamuk's class and social set are devoted to the Westernization of. And the theme of the partial and limited Westernization is one central to the work. At the very end of the work when Pamuk's mother is cautioning him against making a career as painter, cautioning him that there is no way to make a respectable career in it in Turkey, she has in her mind the clear sense of what a Frenchman or Englishman can do, and what a Turk cannot expect to.
In describing the mood and feeling of the city Pamuk discourses at length on the concept of 'hazzun' the city's special kind of melancholy. This is how Alberto Manguel in a Washington Post review describes Pamuk's account of it. It is " a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, "a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating." It is the failure to experience huzun," Pamuk says, "that leads him to feel it." According to Pamuk, moreover, huzun is not a singular preoccupation but a communal emotion, not the melancholy of an individual but the black mood shared by millions. "
What becomes clear in the way is that melancholy or not Pamuk is too deeply connected with his city to leave it in mind and in spirit.
Yet the city which Pamuk focuses on and describes is one in which religion plays a neglible part, certainly among the social circles of Pamuk's family, and apparently also within his own life. This Istanbul dated from perhaps the turn of the century to the early nineteen- sixties when Pamuk's narrative ends is clearly much different from the far more Islamic city of today.
One of the great surprises of this book was seeing how small a part Islam per se plays in Pamuk's vision of the city.
Pamuk writes with brilliance and intricacy, and he is masterful in his descriptions of the city. But in his description of human relationships he seems to me somewhat cold and detached. One does not even feel real love in his writing about his close family members.
In this work though the real emotional devotion is to the city of Pamuk's childhood and youth. Nobel- Prize winner Pamuk is now part of its legend.
 This is Pamuk's Istanbul October 22, 2006
29 out of 49 found this review helpful
The other day I have picked up the latest book by our first Turkish Nobel Laureate in literature, Orhan Pamuk. As far as one could tell, the decision to honor him with the Nobel Prize was largely based on this particular literary accomplishment. At least, when asked by reporters why Pamuk deserved the Prize, Professor Horace Engdahl, the very multilingual Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, kept referring to this book.
The book in question, Istanbul: Memoirs and the City, is a concoction of encyclopedic information, nostalgia-invoking monochrome photographs and the author's unsettling childhood memories. It could very well be crowned his worst work to date by readers familiar with the author's previous books. As I forced myself through page after page of what seems to be Pamuk's much distorted perception of his hometown, I can honestly say that his childhood memories sprinkled here and there were what kept me awake.
Just like in his previous works, a constant undertone of pessimism and hopelessness is palpable throughout the book, but his negativism is more disconcerting this time around as he unsuccessfully tries to ascribe his internal conflicts and his personal darkness to a magnificent town whose wonders never cease to amaze.
Owing to his affluent background and is uber-privileged vantage point, Pamuk's views are so dreadfully skewed that you might start believing him while he wholeheartedly describes the citizens of his version of Istanbul, hovering in a dream-like state of communal melancholy.
His imaginary Istanbul - with its decrepit buildings, filthy streets and rabid dogs roaming its dark, narrow, and decaying alleys - is not the vibrant city throbbing with liveliness that the ordinary folks, like his readers or the lower class Istanbullus for that matter, are able to perceive. His repeated use of the adjective dilapidated to describe certain aspects of Istanbul feels deliberate and malevolent.
As he paints this almost repulsive picture of Istanbul, he does not fail to rebut disagreeing views of European Istanbul lovers by telling them, "You need to live here at least ten years to be able to see it through my eyes."
Who are you to know what you are seeing?
Pamuk sees Istanbul as a fallen fantasy town where he is entitled to scorn poverty and the impoverished which uglifies what is rightfully his. He is visibly and unashamedly tormented as this city, for which he fosters a pathological affection, ignores his irrational expectations of conformity altogether. She continues to pulsate, breathe and change, remains jovial and full of energy, determined to enjoy whatever life throws at her as Pamuk watches from the sidelines in anguish.
Most disturbing of it all is his suggestion, maybe not directly but most certainly inferentially, that Istanbullus have no fight left in them. They have already lost the game and have made peace with the fact - hence comes the huezuen a term he is trying a little too hard to coin - and are desperately waiting for the shoe to drop. (Hey, why not generalize this to the entire country while we are at it and reinforce the whole Sick-Man-of-Europe deal?) Pamuk's yearning for all things European and his dislike for whatever may represent the east is even more pronounced in parts of the book where he professes his love to Istanbul.
It is fair to say that Pamuk's work brought him very little acclaim in Turkish literature, and few if no awards. His writing skills have always been an issue of debate among his colleagues. Nowadays, there is a lot of discussion in Turkey about how his literary inelegance is magically lost in translation, how his sentences are invigorated and become more passable with some creative interpretation from his talented translator Melling Freely, as well as many proven accusations of plagiarism.
Until recently, Pamuk has been known to steer clear of politics. He has spent most of his career carefully avoiding political subjects, or approaching them only tangentially, with the calculated caution and slickness expected from bourgeoisie intelligentsia.
His abrupt and seemingly unnatural politicization began with Snow, his most politically-charged novel to date. His loving embrace of "all things political", unforeseeable as it was, tightened up faster than expected, reaching its peak with his astounding public statements regarding the killing of one-and-a-half million Armenians and thirty-thousand Kurds. This incarnation of Pamuk even claimed that he was the only person in Turkey who had enough cojones to broach these sensitive issues. Why the sudden change, you might ask yourself. I did ask myself, for one thing, why did the vanilla boy become interested in politics in his fifties?
All the publicity and buzz surrounding this "new and improved" Pamuk must have sounded like music to Pamuk's mostly English speaking allies and co-workers, who have done more than their share of P.R. for Pamuk's continued existence in European and American literary circles. These selfless allies have gone so far out of their way to promote this one specific author in such unprecedented fashion that it makes one wonder why.
Measly commissions they were to get from the marketing of Pamuk's books were so out of proportion with the amount of effort they put into hyping Pamuk to literary stratosphere that you have to ask why?
Did the promoters of Pamuk have an ulterior motive? Was the French Parliament's passing of the bill that criminalizes "questioning of armenian genocide" just when Pamuk's received his award a coincidence? Is European Union, which harbors this primordial mentality that does not stop at telling you what you can or cannot say but goes a step further and dictates what you can and cannot question, worth joining? Did people around Pamuk lure him into doing things that he might not have done otherwise by using the brilliant Nobel Prize as bait?
Was it worth it?
Reportedly, Pamuk's editor at Random House, George Andreou said in an interview in 2001, that if Pamuk were to write more politically he would have won a Nobel Prize by then.
This statement answered at least some of my questions.
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