Fair’s Fair “For Book Lovers”

Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul: Memories and the City. Trans. Maureen Freely. New York: Random House, 2004. ISBN 10 1-4000-3388-8

Pamuk is a nobel prize winner who has lived in Istanbul, Turkey, his entire life. Pamuk purports to a quiet existence–a life focused on writing–even though he has been questioned extensively and at one point prosecuted for his political views, particularly for a 2005 interview where he was quoted as saying, “30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” It was a trial that has been observed by his fellow writers as a violation of human rights

Orhan Pamuk’s memoir, Istanbul, indeed presents the quiet but highly detailed and observant life of this artist in his milieu: Istanbul. Pamuk gives a comfortable, gentle look at the past and present city of Istanbul and its contributions to Art and Culture placed along side the Renaissance offerings to the world of imagination. In many ways the depiction of this city is comparable to that of James Joyce’s description of Dublin in his various short stories and novels, minus some of the auditory quality and intensity of language that is ultimately Joyce‘s forte. Pamuk, himself, has not disguised the fact that he had Joyce‘s work among others in mind when he wrote Istanbul. Pamuk has obviously sharpened his writing skills on their whetstone. His style is so eloquent that the experience of reading Istanbul is like licking layers of whipping cream off the top of ice cream on a summer’s day; I am warmed by the work, even though I am reading it in a chilly draft-filled suite on 25th Ave in the middle of -27 below weather in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Stylistically, in the hands of a less experienced writer, Istanbul would be a failed work: a mere scrapbook of bits and pieces; but, Pamuk uses lists of witticisms and sayings from newspapers, black and white pictures of himself as a child, along with photos of people, and buildings in the city. He moves eloquently between the past and present to create this memoir. Artist extraordinaire, he knows exactly how to balance the amount of information and how to weave it into the overall text.

Also, in part, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a work that doesn’t confine reading to that particular text. There are numerous references to writers such as Nerval, Mallarme, Proust, Baudelaire, Borges, and others. There are further mentions of recognized visual artists such as Matisse and Delacroix; their names in the text add texture to the overall work. Ultimately, one senses that the reading of Istanbul is as much about art and imagination as it is a glimpse of the reality of life in Istanbul: poverty, a history of war and sometimes censorship.

Throughout, Pamuk shapes himself as an imaginative mind. The first chapter reads like a study in depth of a creative child’s imagination. Pamuk explains that he felt he had a double in the city and expresses other daydreams in vivid detail. In youth, he became obsessed with painting, but finally chooses writing over the visual arts. In the last sentence of the text he makes the pronouncement “I don‘t want to be an artist . . . I’m going to be a writer”(384).

The tone throughout Istanbul is what one might describe as “contentment in melancholy.” The photos of Pamuk as a child generally show a look of deep grief and despair. Concurrently, Pamuk describes Istanbul as a place of deep melancholy and he recounts his habit during his twenties of walking the streets for hours at times in a state of despair and yet feeling happy in this despair.

Ultimately, Istanbul once known as Constantinople is a city of the imagination. The fantastic and sometimes ghostly stories, the glorification and the destruction of this grand city in writings by both Turkish poets and others, its depiction by visual artists, along with its dispiritedness, poverty, historical and architectural wonders, and the various flavours of the exotic leave one longing to journey to the East. In short, Pamuk’s memoir, Istanbul, stands not only as an eloquent, breath-taking significant written work but in many ways a magnificent monument to the actual city of Istanbul.