ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 33

BY ORHAN PAMUK

A city one has lived in long enough shapes itself into one's own image, acquires the traits of one's personality, the features of one's soul. 

It becomes what Jorge Luis Borges once called "a map of my humiliations and failures" or, as in the case of Pamuk's Istanbul, a map of a man's huzun,\ both of his intimate miseries and betrayals and of his secret victories.

--The Washington Post

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 32

BY ORHAN PAMUK

"Here we come to the heart of the matter," he says early in the book.

"I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood." 

Such a city becomes the inhabitant's in more senses than one. 

"To Be Unhappy Is to Hate Oneself and One's City" is the title Pamuk gives the 34th chapter. 

The reader must therefore deduce that he is not an unhappy man, because Istanbul is a book by a man in love.

--The Washington Post

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 31

BY ORHAN PAMUK

Istanbul as shared melancholy, Istanbul as double, Istanbul as black-and-white images of crumbling buildings and phantom minarets, Istanbul as a city of maze-like streets seen from high windows and balconies,

Istanbul as an invention of foreigners, Istanbul as a place of first loves and last rites: In the end, all these attempts at definition become Istanbul as self-portrait, Istanbul as Pamuk himself.

--The Washington Post

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 30

BY ORHAN PAMUK

There is a past tense in Turkish -- it does not exist in English -- that allows the writer to distinguish between hearsay and what he has seen with his own eyes. 

"When we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense," Pamuk explains.

This is the tense in which his book seems to be written, in a voice on the edge of reality, halfway between what he knows has happened and what he believes imaginatively to be true. 

This voice, this tone, this tense, is perfectly suited to describing melancholy.

--The Washington Post

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 28

BY ORHAN PAMUK

Through the descriptions of other writers -- several Turkish masters, various traveling foreigners -- Pamuk parades yet more double-images of the Istanbul he knows.

As seen by the poet Yahya Kemal or the historian and encyclopedist Resat Ekrem Kocu, by Gerard de Nerval or Gustave Flaubert, Pamuk's Istanbul keeps unfolding like a series of Rorschach tests, multiplying its ink-stained ghosts and tempting the reader with potentially infinite interpretations.

--The Washington Post

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 27

BY ORHAN PAMUK

As with himself and the picture of his "other," Pamuk suggests, Istanbul is haunted by another Istanbul, a shadowy presence in the shadows. 

He sees the city in black and white, mirrored in the ancient engravings and old photographs that illustrate the book -- 

a city in which ruined buildings conjure up the ghosts of their former selves and stately monuments insinuate their future collapse.

--The Washington Post

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 26

BY ORHAN PAMUK

Pamuk begins his inquiry with an image, a kitschy portrait of a child brought back from Europe that was hung in the house of his aunt. 

"Look! That's you!" the aunt would say to the 5-year-old boy, pointing at the picture. 

For Pamuk, the painted child (who resembled him slightly and wore the same cap he sometimes wore) became his double, another Orhan leading a parallel life in another house in the same city, another self whom he would meet in his dreams with shrieks of horror or with whom he'd bravely lock eyes, each boy trying to stare the other down "in eerie merciless silence."

--The Washington Post

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 25

BY ORHAN PAMUK

Huzun is therefore a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of huzun that causes the sufferer distress.

"It is the failure to experience huzun," Pamuk says, "that leads him to feel it." 

According to Pamuk, moreover, huzun is not a singular preoccupation but a communal emotion, not the melancholy of an individual but the black mood shared by millions. 

"What I am trying to explain," he writes in this delightful, profound, marvelously original book, "is the huzun of an entire city: of Istanbul."

--The Washington Post

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 24

BY ORHAN PAMUK

According to Orhan Pamuk, the melancholy of Istanbul is huzun, a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, "a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating." 

For the Sufis, huzun is the spiritual anguish one feels at not being close enough to God; for Saint John of the Cross, this anguish causes the sufferer to plummet so far down that his soul will, as a result, soar to its divine desire.

--The Washington Post

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 23

BY ORHAN PAMUK

All happy cities resemble one another, to paraphrase what Tolstoy famously observed of families, but each melancholy city is melancholy in its own way. 

The saudade of Lisbon, the tristeza of Burgos, the mufa of Buenos Aires, the mestizia of Turin, the Traurigkeit of Vienna, the ennui of Alexandria, the ghostliness of Prague, the glumness of Glasgow, the dispiritedness of Boston share only on the surface a common sense of melancholy.

--The Washington Post

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 22

BY ORHAN PAMUK

If readers are inclined to be suspicious of a fiction writer's memories--as well they should be--more than 200 photos and prints provide arresting physical evidence for Pamuk's metaphysical reality.

Short, lyrical chapters span his early childhood through young adulthood, focusing always on his relationship with the city and its history.

In a shrinking world full of rootless wanderers, it's surprisingly rare to read of someone who feels compelled to stay "in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view"--and instructive to see how much can be learned thereby.

--Booklist

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 21

BY ORHAN PAMUK

In chapter 10, Pamuk explains the ambiguities of huzun, the Turkish term for melancholy. 

This single word provides a fascinating window into the culture and history of Istanbul, and even more so, into the author's memories of growing up amid the ruined glory of the Ottoman Empire. 

Pamuk (Snow, 2004) is blessed with the ability to recall not only the events of his childhood with clarity but also images and feelings; and the interplay of then-Orhan's naivete with now-Orhan's nuancing is truly remarkable.

--Booklist

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 20

BY ORHAN PAMUK

Reminiscent of works by Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, Pamuk’s novels, mostly set in his native Turkey, have racked up an International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and profiles on NPR. 

Marcel Proust comes to many critics’ minds when describing Istanbul, an introspective account that transcends the memoir, as it also describes a city losing its identity.

More than a city or guide book, Istanbul is "the most haunting, heartbreaking, gorgeous book ever about a city," says The San Diego Union-Tribune. 

Although Pamuk’s memoir concludes with his adolescence, it rings true to the universal coming-of-age experience.

--Bookmarks Magazine

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 19

BY ORHAN PAMUK

Istanbul's hüzün, Pamuk writes, "is a way of looking at life that... is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating." 

His world apparently in permanent decline, Pamuk revels in the darkness and decay manifest around him. 

He minutely describes horrific accidents on the Bosphorus Strait and his own recurring fantasies of murder and mayhem. 

Throughout, Pamuk details the breakdown of his family: elders die, his parents fight and grow apart, and he must find his way in the world. 

This is a powerful, sometimes disturbing literary journey through the soul of a great city told by one of its great writers.

-- Publishers Weekly

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 18

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

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 17

BY ORHAN PAMUK

At times when I accept as my own the stories I’ve heard about my city and myself, I’m tempted to say, “Once upon a time I used to paint.

I hear I was born in Istanbul, and I understand that I was a somewhat curious child. 

Then, when I was twenty-two, I seem to have begun writing novels without knowing why.” 

I’d have liked to write my entire story this way–as if my life were something that happened to someone else, as if it were a dream in which I felt my voice fading and my will succumbing to enchantment.

Beautiful though it is, I find the language of epic unconvincing, for I cannot accept that the myths we tell about our first lives prepare us for the brighter, more authentic second lives that are meant to begin when we awake. 

Because–for people like me, at least–that second life is none other.

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 16

BY ORHAN PAMUK

It’s a sensation as sweet as seeing ourselves in our dreams, but we pay a heavy price for it. 

Once imprinted in our minds, other people’s reports of what we’ve done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember.

 And just as we learn about our lives from others, so too do we let others shape our understanding of the city in which we live.

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 15

BY ORHAN PAMUK

I feel compelled to add or so I’ve been told.

In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. 

It is a useful distinction to make as we “remember” our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant tale of some other person. 

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 14

BY ORHAN PAMUK

When she was reading the latest on this drama, my mother was alone in her room, or so she told me with a mixture of regret and annoyance many years later. 

After taking her to the hospital, my father had grown restless and, when my mother’s labor failed to progress, he’d gone out to meet with friends.

The only person with her in the delivery room was my aunt, who’d managed to climb over the hospital’s garden wall in the middle of the night. 

When my mother first set eyes on me, she found me thinner and more fragile than my brother had been.

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 13

BY ORHAN PAMUK

In the hours before I was born, my mother had been avidly following a local story: 

Two days earlier, the caretakers and “heroic” residents of the Konya Student Center had seen a man in a terrifying mask trying to enter a house in Langa through the bathroom window; 

they’d chased him through the streets to a lumberyard, where, after cursing the police, the hardened criminal had committed suicide; 

a seller of dry goods identified the corpse as a gangster who the year before had entered his shop in broad daylight and robbed him at gunpoint.