BY ORHAN PAMUK
Turkish
novelist Pamuk (Snow) presents a breathtaking portrait of a city, an elegy for
a dead civilization and a meditation on life's complicated intimacies.
The
author, born in 1952 into a rapidly fading bourgeois family in Istanbul, spins
a masterful tale, moving from his fractured extended family, all living in a communal
apartment building, out into the city and encompassing the entire Ottoman
Empire.
Pamuk sees the slow collapse of the once powerful empire hanging like a
pall over the city and its citizens.
Central to many Istanbul residents'
character is the concept of hüzün (melancholy).
-- Publishers Weekly
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