Orhan Pamuk merges the story of his childhood with the story of a city in his dazzling memoir, Istanbul, says Nouritza Matossian
Sunday April 17, 2005
The Observer
Istanbul: Memories of a City
by Orhan Pamuk
Faber £16.99, pp288
The idea of merging a writer’s life with the city of his childhood seems both natural and exciting, particularly from an author who has come to symbolise the liberal face of Turkey, struggling to pull itself into shape for the EU.
Orhan Pamuk, an International IMPAC Award winner, inspires love and hostility in equal measure at home. Recently, the governor of Sütçüler ordered that Pamuk’s books be collected from libraries and bookshops in his province and destroyed. Instant condemnation in the national press of this ‘barbarity’ demonstrated an enlightened majority asserting itself. The governor must have been furious when no books by Pamuk were found, for sale or burning. Subsequently, the author’s sales have soared.
It is fascinating, therefore, to uncover the boyhood and obsessions of this quiet, self-absorbed 52-year-old. The book centres around a solemn toddler trapped in the pressure cooker of his family’s squabbles. Each wing of the secular clan occupies a floor of the Fifties Pamuk Apt block overlooking the glittering Bosporus. The household is ruled from the bed of his overweight grandmother, who mourns her sons’ squandering of the family fortune, his aunts’ and uncles’ quarrels, his parents’ teetering marriage and the devotions of their Muslim servants.
Like many writers split between inner and outer reality, Pamuk creates an alter ego to take him into his ‘second world’. The book is brilliantly constructed, delving into the phenomenological world of the young boy. The reader is drawn into the dark house, his ‘family museum’, crammed with uncomfortable formal furniture, unplayed pianos, cabinets displaying unused trinkets and ceremonial photographs. Such is its gloom that when he goes out into the street, the sunshine blinds him at first.
At intervals, single chapters introduce Turkish writers, the Divan poets with their homoerotic fantasies, or early Western travellers. The German 18th century artist, Melling, became the architect of the Sultan’s sister and left a book of engravings of the wondrous city. He is fascinated by Gérard de Nerval, Gautier but especially Flaubert, whom he credits with inspiring the germ of his book, The White Castle.
The reader is led into into decaying, unloved Istanbul between the Sixties and Eighties. Nineteenth-century wooden mansions are burned down to be replaced by concrete blocks; tankers collide in the night lighting fires on the Bosporus; murderers terrorise the city; contrived race riots escalate into massacres; Greek and Armenian shops in his own street are looted and wasted; packs of dogs roam freely; porters stagger under loads far taller than their height.
A master of elegant miniatures, Pamuk writes concisely, piling scene upon scene, and, at one stage, composing a dazzling single sentence a hypnotic two-and-half pages long. He is eloquent, too, in his empathy for his country’s dilemma: Westernisation and Europe or tradition and Islam.
‘I have described Istanbul when describing myself and described myself when describing Istanbul,’ Pamuk teases. Add to this the delight of photographs by Ara Güler and a seamless translation by Maureen Freely.
Orhan Pamuk has remained faithful to his opulent muse. This quietly instructive and enchanting elegy to a redeemed childhood and to Istanbul itself will bring the world to his feet. It should be read, and reread, simply for joy.
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