Istanbul: Memories and the City

Considering that I’m a history buff, Istanbul is obviously one of the places I very much want to visit, it being smothered in history, as it were. However, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City is very different from the city I dream of visiting, and his description of Istanbul is, I'd reckon, much more authentic than the romantic and fabled city of my imagination.

Pamuk talks about growing up in a city that is acutely conscious of its lost glory of the heady days of the Ottoman Empire, and is helpless to recover it. He traces parallels between his family’s genteel and unhappy life and his beloved city, enveloped by an all-pervasive “Huzun”, or “sorrow” in Turkish. The Istanbul of Pamuk’s childhood and youth, eager to shed its Ottoman past, finds nothing to replace its lost civilization, resulting in a feeling of emptiness all around. The book has vivid descriptions of the crumbling Ottoman mansions that nobody in modern Turkey wants; besides being impractical to live in, these are also a symbol of the civilization that modern Turkey has firmly turned its back on in its quest to embrace modernity.

Pamuk also talks about the many writers, both Turkish and foreign, who “wrote about the goings on in Istanbul, from the various species of drunks to the street vendors in the city’s poor neighborhoods, from grocers to jugglers, from the beauties of the towns along the Bosphorus to its rowdy taverns and meyhanes……..”. Religion is an interesting topic, with Pamuk’s family being ambivalent about it (his mother believes in God, just in case). This attitude is reflected amongst Istanbul’s westernized elite, who are always wary of the more religious lower classes and provincials who (they believe), if they acquired political power, would use religion to get rid of the Westernized way of life of the elite.

Now for my frank opinion of this book. Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature for “Istanbul”. However, I must honestly confess that I did not enjoy this book all that much and found it depressing and somewhat boring. Not surprising, since its main theme is melancholy, Huzun, sadness. Besides, I'd prefer to keep my delusions intact and do not appreciate having my romantic notions of Istanbul shattered. This book is like spinach, you know it’s good, but you don’t really like it all that much. All in all, I feel that I ought to like this book, but do not, no fault of the writer’s.

It’s not you, Orhan, it’s me.