Saturday, April 6, 2019

ISTANBUL: MEMORIES AND THE CITY -- 29


BY ORHAN PAMUK

Pamuk tells the story of the city through the eyes of memory, warning the reader at every step that "these are the words of a fifty-year-old writer who is trying to shape the chaotic thoughts of a long-ago adolescent." 

His accounts of his parents' difficult relationship, his eccentric grandmother, his embattled friendship with his brother, his sexual awakening and his first self-guided explorations as an artist lead inexorably to the book's final, decisive words: "I'm going to be a writer." 

And yet even that foregone conclusion is lent a slightly duplicitous tone, a dreamlike, remembered quality.

--The Washington Post

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