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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: 11349
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:
| Showing reviews 41-45 of 45 | | « PREV 1 ... | | |
Gloom, melancholy and sadness July 17, 2005
10 out of 18 found this review helpful
An author's account of his or her life is always of consuming interest. A prize-winning author is even more compelling. When an author cops the IMPAC Prize, the reader is almost driven to learn the background and motivations of the novelist. Pamuk's account of his early life is one of the more bizarre examples of the memoir genre. His entire life has been intimately tied to the city. The link is so strong he contends his views are typical of the entire population. The detailed events may differ, of course, but he claims to speak for them all.
Pamuk's life, he says, has been dominated by "another Orhan". First perceived as a child, this "doppelganger" possesses some elusive qualities the author seeks for himself. Definition of these qualities eludes us, but the reader is left the impression that they are more positive than the author's own. Almost anything would fit that qualification. If there is a more morose and defeated character than Orhan Pamuk in today's Istanbul, he would be difficult to find. In Pamuk's account of his young life in this city, the word "melancholy" occurs times beyond counting. He even devotes an entire chapter to the Turkish word for it - "huzun".
His despondency is due to numerous conflicts. He devotes a chapter to fights with his brother. The estrangement of his parents are a continuous theme of his account. His father, having wasted the family's inheritance, is often away. Pamuk only reveals where almost at the end of the book. An expedition with his mother culminates in a remote apartment in the city. There, he discovers his father's clothes and a stack of books duplicating the one at home. Beyond these local tribulations are ship collisions in the harbour or in the Straits which the family ventures forth at any time to witness. More enduring are the losses by fire of many buildings, most significantly the palatial villas lining the Dardanelles. These were an attempt to restore some of the grandeur of the Ottoman Empire. Their loss is keenly felt by Pamuk - although he'd never moved in that level of society.
Adding to Pamuk's gloomy text is his photographic collection used to enhance the feeling. Everything is monochrome - faces, streets, buildings even the Straits. Smoking ship funnels add to the despondency of the city - and of the author. Even snow, with its capacity to enliven an urban or rural scene anywhere else, here displays as merely another shade of grey. One mourns that Pamuk wrote so much, since the photos, in larger scale, would be a significant collection of urban images. Placing them in such reduced displays diminishes both the city and its people. Pamuk, even as a child if the photographs of him are indicative, may be in an abyss of despair. Others in the city may actually smile. In a couple of the shots, his mother makes at least a weak attempt.
The final conflict is that of Turkish nationalism rending the Ottoman Empire. It permeates Pamuk's text, with nearly every ill suffered by the city or himself somehow tracked back to that amorphous amalgamation of peoples. Why the loss of empire a century ago should dominate the thinking of an entire city, perhaps an entire nation after so long, remains unclear. While Pamuk's lament is continuous and unflagging, it's difficult to see where he thinks solace lies. What is the value of harking back to such a questionable past? Would he restore tyrannical sultans or quell rebellious provinces with mass slaughters? Would he abandon a nominally democratic society for one in which the mass of the population was constrained by medieval rigidity? Why would a restoration make him content? There's little hint of just what would lift him and his city from these doldrums.
The memoir is restricted almost entirely to Pamuk's childhood. Years of school, including architecture and painting are skimmed over superficially, other than as means of further voicing his discontent with life. While this book may provide background for Pamuk's style, his motivation to write is contained in but one sentence. Is this reviewer impelled to grasp a Pamuk novel, eager to see how this morose personality is expressed in the characters he creates? Only if suitably fortified. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
 deeply personal narrative of city July 8, 2005
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
I loved this book because Pamuk gives an almost hilariously personal view of the city. Imagine meeting up in the city with a Turkish friend met at some other time and place, someone a bit overzealous and known to get off track. That is what it is to read this book. It is amusing and sad as it tells a story of Istanbul, and, additionally, you get better acquainted with the famous author, a treat if you are a fan. Plus, the pictures are deeply beautiful, not like postcards but like forgotten snapshots of long ago.
Highly Individualistic View of Istanbul by a Native Son June 27, 2005
21 out of 21 found this review helpful
Istanbul has been the designated intersection between East and West for centuries, and as a past tourist there, I have felt the resulting richness in culture and history as I visited the city's landmarks. However, author Orhan Pamuk takes a different view as a native of the city - a pervasive confusion over identity in reconciling the often conflicting sympathies of different cultures. In fact, he feels that there is an overwhelming sense of melancholy. As a Turk, Pamuk knows of which he speaks in this intriguing memoir as he is a product of the Atatuerk revolution. He is not caught up in the inherent exoticism of the city but rather what he sees as a critical juncture between past and present. The past is represented by the Ottoman Empire, a multilingual dynasty whose heart once beat in Istanbul, its once dazzling capital. But the empire no longer exists, except in the surviving imperial mansions and memorials, the marble fountains and clapboard waterside villas. Yet, all the remnants are deteriorating as developers take hold of the real estate.
In Pamuk's view, the Ottoman past is a foreign country for the Turks. The present is the Turkish Republic, Atatuerk's secular, Western-oriented, homogenizing nation state now centered in Ankara, an outgrown Anatolian village. Pamuk spends much of the book understandably mourning the replacement of the Empire with the nondescript country that is Turkey now. Sometimes his disappointed tone can be wearing, but Pamuk's honesty is bracing. Politically and economically, Istanbul is no longer a city of consequence, let alone a world capital. It is an insular little place sinking in its own ruins, "so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former heights of wealth, power and culture". In brief, Turkey has become a country simply obsessed by its hopeful acceptance into the European Union.
Where Pamuk's book takes flight is the chronicle of his own personal journey. He is a secular Turk who exhibits integrity by not seeking authenticity in so contrived a national mission -- which he finds exemplified in his parents' house, where the piano is untouched and the porcelain is simply for show. In fact, his recollection of his childhood and his parents' failed marriage within the context of the public desolation of a dying empire is what most informs his exploration of Istanbul in the mid 20th-century. In fascinating detail, he recounts the city's European visions through writers as diverse as Flaubert, Nerval and Gautier through Gide to Brodsky; and the work of native Istanbul residents like the novelist Tanpinar and poet Yahya Kemal. In particular, for Tanpinar, the poor neighborhoods of Istanbul were symbolic of Turkey's own impoverishment in the modern world. The text is accompanied by an abundance of illustrations, including the photographs of Ara Gueler from 1950 and the present, and photographs from the Pamuk family album.
Pamuk's chief achievement in this book is to show the human damage done by Atatuerk's revolution without succumbing to the benighted nostalgia of many Turkish Islamists. Like many secular Turks, the author grapples with the most basic questions of existence -- love, compassion, religion, the meaning of life, jealousy, hatred -- in trembling confusion and painful solitude, but he cannot offer a solution. Mapping his own complexities, he turns to the streets of his hometown and to the last vestiges of a great culture. One of Pamuk's qualities is his constant striving to be worthy of that inheritance. This is a fascinating read by a native son.
Huzun in the City June 21, 2005
84 out of 96 found this review helpful
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.
Exotic Literary Memoir and Travel Guide June 17, 2005
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
This memoir stikes me as both erudite & conversational thanks to a fairly reader-friendly translation, but it can be boring at times. Pamuk deals on three levels simultaneously: it is first and foremost a personal memoir,containing voluble childhood memories of mother,father, brother,grandmother and numerous aunts and uncles,his schools(at which he was a precocious student who found time to make fun of those who were more prone to disciplinary problems),his love of painting,his rich sometimes malicious fantasy life, as well as a great deal of teenage angst in the latter chapters regarding his guilt and self-hatred regarding a career choice;a wonderful if sad chapter on his first love,"Black Rose", a model; and his decision to drop out of college and abandon his original love of painting in favor of a career as a writer, a decision he makes after the "Black Rose" rejects him.In the last chapter we learn that his mother, who exerts a high degree of influence over him, believed that painting, though a highly esteemed vocation in the West, was not a practical alternative especially in the more backward East, and she strongly recommends that he finish college and find a profession,so that he won't become neurotic or constantly dependent on the beneficence of art patrons. She did, however, encourage his interest in art by allowing him to use one of her apartments as an art studio; his father supported all his interests. As a youth he moved a lot, due to his parents' frequent arguments and his father's extramarital affair.
The memoir is also notable for his family's secularized view of religion; for the most part,with a few exceptions, he considers most of the rituals of Islam, including Ramadan, to be almost in the realm of superstition and the province of the poor rather than his own more intellectual family. Symbolic of this is the family maid who tells Orhan his hands will turn to stone if he touches her while she is praying.
The family which I would describe as upper middle class slowly squanders its fortune over time--he mentions this repeatedly-- but Orhan has the benefit of a private school education in his early years. Many of his best friends were rich at the American Robert Academy. The memoir is also in large part a literary history of 4 modern Istanbul writers he greatly admires and other French writers who visited Istanbul as tourists especially in the 19th Century; the book also contains a large amount of art commentary as well as quite a bit of emphasis on the Bosphorus, its accidents, its fires, the architecture of its now time-worn palaces, and its steam ferries. The memoir is less a political history but we learn the importance of the Ataturk Revolution, and the Westernization and Turkification that it inspired, as well as its negative impact on the wealthy industrialists of Istanbul, including some interesting details about vendettas among the rich shipping magnates. The Turkification was also a form of ethnic cleansing of minorities. One of the first efforts at Westernization, and certainly not the last, was to eliminate traditional Turkish dress. There is a great deal of emphasis on the melancholy aspects of this now dilapidated city which fell from world power in the 19th Century as it slowly lost all or most of its conquered provinces; melancholy, or "huzun",a word used to denote apathy, is the word Pamuk most frequently uses to describe Istanbul, a quality shared by citizens of every class. At the turn of the 19th Century, from the engravings provided by Melling, Istanbul seems to rival Paris as a world class city. Besides the personal memoir, the book focuses on the travel writings of French authors like Gautier, Nerval, Flaubert and Gide and the indigeneous Istanbul writers,most educated in France and some of them newspaper columnists,who like Victor Hugo in Paris, frequented the poor back alleys and ruins of this complex city, a habit Pamuk emulates in some detail after making his decision to become a writer. These foreign writers as a rule were quite condescending in their negative views of the primitive East and held their own Western values as far superior. Flaubert, for example, blames the East for his contracting syphilis, a false charge; some of them, including the Turkish writers, enjoyed watching fires. Unfortunately Pamuk often, perhaps necessarily, slips into didacticism in discussing the literary history of Istanbul; it often seems rather dry and in some ways Pamuk fails to bring it to life. As the writer, it is his responsibility to do so.
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