His work is as grounded in the city as Dickens’s was in London
and Naguib Mahfouz’s was in Cairo.
Novels such as “The Museum of Innocence” and
“The Black Book” and the autobiographical “Istanbul: Memories and the City”
evoke both a magical city and a melancholy one, reeling from the loss of
empire, torn by the clash between secularism and political Islam and seduced by
the West.
Most of Mr. Pamuk’s characters are members of the secular elite,
whose love affairs, feuds and obsessions play out in the cafes and bedrooms of
a few neighborhoods.
-Joshua Hammer
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