Istanbul (Deluxe Edition): Memories and the City Hardcover – October 24, 2017

I bought this for a friend who grew up in Turkey. Although her family is still there, she lives here in the states. She truly appreciated this lovely book which filled her with memories of her homeland.

This is a very unique book in that the city is the main character. I was pleasantly surprised to find this deluxe edition which only enhances the brilliant story line.

"Notions of beauty or of the landscape of a city are inevitably intertwined with our memories."Orhan Pamuk, Nobel laureate, wrote this 2003 memoir of growing up in Istanbul in the 50's and 60's. He senses the loss of empire in the crumbling Ottoman houses around him, describing his large modern family home as a museum where western furnishings replaced traditional Turkish culture. His grandfather was a wealthy industrialist but his father was slowly losing the family fortune. As a boy his daydreams help him to escape from everyday life.Pamuk lived with an extended family in a private apartment building with nannies, cooks and maids. He recalls his parents would argue and leave him with relatives. As respite from domestic troubles he falls into melancholy. 'Hüzün' in Turkish describes an emotional state of shared spiritual suffering. It becomes a theme of the book, using people and places to portray a formerly great Ottoman city in decline. His feeling of sadness projects on the city at large.Pamuk discusses four Turkish writers who tried to reconcile east and west, merging melancholia with modernism after WWI. An encyclopedist publishes illustrated city curiosities; a poet admires French fin de siecle literature; a novelist writes of the post war ruins; a memoirist recreates a vanishing milieu. All lived in the neighborhood where he grew up and he imagines them crossing paths. Their stories appear unexpectedly as chance encounters often do.Pamuk recounts a litany of ills that afflicted the city in the 20th century; over population, poverty and pollution. In the quincentennial of the conquest of Istanbul Greek shops and churches were vandalized by Turkish nationalists. As a boy he contrasts his secular family with pious prayers of the poor, noting the rich need no help from God. After Ataturk's reforms religion was replaced with emptiness. His Ramadan fast lasts fifteen minutes before the feast ensues.Pamuk recalls post war WWII class conciousness and social competition. People in his peer group aspire to be modern and western. Conversely westerners wish the city would stand still. He counts boats on the Bosphorus watching some go up in flames. Soviet warships rumble by in the night. The city is drawn to disasters large and small. Istanbulites are sensitive to what foreigners feel. This portrait of city navel gazing reflects his idiosyncrasies as an author.Pamuk relates symmetry as the most important goal of a memoirist. At an early age he believed in another house like his lived another Orhan, a twin or a double. He grows up and attends college for architecture but he stops going to his classes. He remains in his family home, reading and going for long walks. His father is absent until late and his mother stays up alone. This leads to arguments until she discovers another apartment where his father keeps a lover.Pamuk uses black and white photos from his family album to illustrate the book. There are also photos of Istanbul, views of rundown and empty mansions along the Bosphorus and wooden townhouses in the city burned out or abandoned. He includes artwork from the past, particularly Antoine-Ignace Melling architect to Sultan Selim III in 1784-1802, a western artist as important to Istanbul as Piranesi was to Rome. Loss and nostalgia permeate the images he chooses.Pamuk later built the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. It is housed in a former townhouse and is filled with everyday objects he collected from the city. Intriguingly it is tied to a novel of the same name, and exhibits real things from a fictional world. His projects are about a tension between east and west and the end of Turkish identity. The writing is conveyed well in translation but parts of this memoir can become too long winded and self indulgent.

The media could not be loaded. So great , my Birthday present..love it

Wonderful book

Great book with wonderful photos.

Istanbul has long had a exotic attraction for Westerners; a contestant in the wars and diplomacy games of early modern Europe, it still possessed a different religion, culture and ethnicity than the other players.This resulted in a lot of nineteenth century travelogues, particularly from Francophone writers. Of course, they wrote for the many curious about harems, Janissaries and white slavery but there was also some insightful commentary, at least according to Orhan Pamuk.As a novelist writing non-fiction, Pamuk leverages these sources to write a memoir about growing up in post-Ataturk Istanbul. Pamuk has obvious credibility since he has spent most of his life in the same house within the city.But, as he points out, natives rarely write about their hometown. For something to be picturesque there has to be something out of the ordinary—precisely what the native citizen misses.Pamuk, however, successfully describes the little known feeling of huzun, or nostalgic sadness, that haunts Istanbul dwellers. For Pamuk, Istanbul has gone from being a cosmopolitan capital to a second-rate imitation of Western cityscapes.And yet, despite the last remnants of the Ottoman heritage gradually returning to dust, the removal of the capital to Ankara and a general feeling of living in a socially and politically unimportant city, Pamuk writes with real empathy about both the past glories and modern day realities.Nor is his empathy limited to fellow Turks. He writes compassionately about the horrors suffered by Greek, Armenian and Jewish residents after the defeat in WWI.Most unexpectedly, modern Istanbul retains a sense of both similarity and difference from the West. Socialites gossip, the rich have their usual share of eccentrics and the poor make up the greater part of the population.But where else do people gather to watch shipwrecks? And what city would have merchants selling kebabs to the onlookers? Who would have a grandmother with a friend who had been in a harem? Where else could one see wealthy families erecting walls within houses because they can’t settle inheritance disputes?All of which give a taste of why a Nobel laureate would choose to live in a town where he doesn’t mind sharing some of the unpleasantries.If you’re looking for vicarious travel amidst the ever lengthening Covid crisis, this work is a good choice. It’s not an encomium, nor is it a lament—it’s more of a romantic ode to a multiethnic colossus that is no more. Recommended to all adventurers interested in the great cultures of humanity.

This book draws you into what the author describes with such imaginative language that you feel transported to his beloved city! All the flavors were there for me. Highly recommended.

A Beautiful book well put together by Orhan Pamuk,rich in history and a must if you decide to visit Istanbul,well recommend.