Orhan Pamuk

Memories and the City

Istanbul

Omar Fernandez

Istanbul is a shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2006, was born in Istanbul, 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 hzn- that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost Ottoman Empire. As he companionably guides us across the Bosphorus, through Istanbul's historical monuments and lost paradises, its dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways, he also introduces us to the city's writers, artists and murderers. Like the Dublin of Joyce and Jan Morris' Venice, Pamuk's Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.

Paula Alarcón

Maureen Freely

Memories of a City

Ayesha ahmed

I honestly thought this book was a memoir. It's nothing like the usual memoirs I have read (not in a positive way). It's more of a detailed description of Istanbul, which would have been acceptable if it was not so boringly detailed. I kept pushing myself to keep reading waiting for the moment that it would completely change my mind, but when he started talking about a painter's way of portraying Istanbul, I could not take it anymore and put the book down. I might read it some other time when I'll have completely nothing to read as it was not something I want to read anytime soon.

Safiya 

It's amazing how the writer brilliantly recounted the story of the city in his autobiography:


  "I have described Istanbul when describing myself, and described myself when describing Istanbul.."


 One can seldom walk in Istanbul now without thinking of the details he put in this book. 


  "Notions of beauty or of the landscape of a city are inevitably intertwined with our memories: This book is the product of that exchange."


And it was not just how this was the least boring literary autobiography that I've ever read, but also the effortless prose that streams from his hands recalling everything literary related to the city, and that has at some point influence Orhan to write one day.


  "Gustave Flaubert, who visited Istanbul 102 years before my birth, was struck by the variety of life in its teeming streets; in one of his letters he predicted that in a century’s time it would be the capital of the world."



  "Théophile Gautier, paid a visit to Istanbul."
... as did Gérard de Nerval, Maxime du Camp and maybe if my memory serves me right, Victor Hugo as well, and that made it easier for me to relate to, since I was on good terms with French Classics... 

As I was holding the deluxe edition with its marvellous pictures collection I have stopped many times to admire those timeless perspectives. Him being an artist, and an architecture uni dropout, in my opinion shaped his aesthetics in picking the right pictures:I was subjugated by their 'poiesis', bringing forth a feeling of familiarity and beauty that didn't exist before his words.


  "The Bosphorus was the key, the heart of the geopolitical world, and this was why all the nations of the world and all their armies and most especially the Russians wanted to take possession of our beautiful Bosphorus."



  "There is an art to viewing a photograph and describing it with imagination and erudition."


And let's just dwell on the beauty of keeping what he always waned to become to the last sentence/word in his autobiography :


  "I don't want to be an artist," I said."I'm going to be a writer."


I'd love to end my review on a Hüzün note, since it struck a chord with my adolescent self who was keen on losing herself in Greek tragedies, and that later on impacted on my reading passion. Although moderate now, I can go on re-reading everything Pamuk said about Hüzün tirelessly :


  "According to El Kindi, hüzün was associated not just with the loss or death of a loved one but also with other spiritual afflictions, like anger, love, rancor, and groundless fear."



  "Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Istanbul; it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed."



  "Hüzün teaches endurance in times of poverty and deprivation; it also encourages us to read life and the history of the city in reverse. It allows the people of Istanbul to think of defeat and poverty not as a historical end point but as an honorable beginning, fixed long before they were born."



  "Likewise, the hüzün in Turkish poetry after the foundation of the Republic, as it too expresses the same grief that no one can or would wish to escape, an ache that finally saves our souls and also gives them depth."



  Special Architectural Mention:


Glad that I found on these pages a reference of one of my favourite books in architecture, The Seven Lamps of Architecture : 


  "In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, John Ruskin devotes much of the chapter entitled “Memory” to the beauties of the picturesque, attributing the particular beauty of this sort of architecture (as opposed to that of carefully planned classical forms) to its “accidental” nature."



  "For Ruskin, picturesque beauty rises out of details that emerge only after a building has been standing for hundreds of years, from the ivy, herbs, and grassy meadows that surround it, from the rocks in the distance, the clouds in the sky, and the choppy sea."



I think that this might be my favourite book by Orhan Pamuk, I laughed, felt sad and was hopeful along the book, and on top of all I was eager to learn that it was all real...

anjali

Peter Read

Alex Webb

In 1998 Alex Webb visited Istanbul and was immediately enthralled by the people, the layers of culture and history, the richness of street life. But what particularly drew him in was a sense of Istanbul as a border city, lying between Europe and Asia. As he writes, For thirty-some years as a photographer I have been intrigued by borders, places where cultures come together, sometimes easily, sometimes roughly. He has returned to Istanbul whenever possible, and the resulting body of worksome of Webbs strongest to dateconveys the frisson of a culture in transition, yet firmly rooted in a complex history.

Istanbul Memories and the City

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