Istanbul

Dec 29, 2008 Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, always-on-my-mind, worlds-lost-dead-and-dying, turkey-and-ottomans, identity-crisis, 21st-century, grand-opera

It is just lucky that I happened to read Menocal's Ornament of the World just before this, as it perfectly prepared me for the psychological labyrinth that is this book. It introduced me to a beautiful, helpful image for Pamuk's creation- the "memory palaces" and "memory gardens". This is not an introduction to Istanbul, it is a memory palace worthy of the wildest child's fantasies that haunt this tapestry. Perhaps John Adams, the minimalist composer, put it best when discussing his piece On the...more It is just lucky that I happened to read Menocal's Ornament of the World just before this, as it perfectly prepared me for the psychological labyrinth that is this book. It introduced me to a beautiful, helpful image for Pamuk's creation- the "memory palaces" and "memory gardens". This is not an introduction to Istanbul, it is a memory palace worthy of the wildest child's fantasies that haunt this tapestry. Perhaps John Adams, the minimalist composer, put it best when discussing his piece On the Transmigration of Souls, which was dedicated to 9/11, as he said:

"I want to avoid words like 'requiem' or 'memorial' when describing this piece because they too easily suggest conventions that this piece doesn't share. If pressed, I'd probably call the piece a 'memory space.' It's a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions. The link to a particular historical event - in this case to 9/11 - is there if you want to contemplate it. But I hope that the piece will summon human experience that goes beyond this particular event."

Similarly, Orhan Pamuk is not writing a Decline and Fall of Istanbul, in a strict economic and political reactionary sense. It's much more than that.

Pamuk chooses to depict the city in which he has lived all fifty years of his life through his own personal experience. This is an experience created out of the analysis and painting childhood memories, personal family tragedy and happiness, famous literary figures and creations, perspectives of newspapers, and reports of oddities. Added to this is descriptions of city-wide feelings, doings, and happenings, and most importantly, the concept of "huzun", a complicated, honorable, tenaciously held communal melancholy that Pamuk believes lies over the city, and of course- the endless big words East and West shoving their heads together in the midst of people just trying to live their lives.

Pamuk deals with big questions that fascinate me, such as- How do you go on when all that you know has died?, Do you have to burn the past in order to live in the present?, What does this word "West" mean, and whom does it mean this to?, How do you deal with multiple identities that tear you apart?, What is the psychological effect of the generations who repress themselves in order to get along with the new power nations on the block and survive?, How do you live when all the legends have done it better?, What /is/ this attachment we have for certain places?, Who is allowed to have a "valid" perspective on a place, or a culture, and why do perspectives from certain sources produce such anger?.. etc.

He also deals with questions on a smaller, more personal scale, which is why this is as much a personal psychological study as it is a national one- How do we become who we are?, Why must we be 'other', in order to see ourselves?, endless questions on personal identity and choice and conflicts with family, the past, the present, and the impossible future and trying to come up with choices that please or rebel against all.

Pamuk shows us an Istanbul drenched in longing- a longing that it appears nobody knows how to solve, caught between so many poles that people's heads spin. It is a place covered in huzun- the melancholy stressed above that somehow people just cannot get rid of, nearly a century after the Ottoman empire fell. He describes its honorable nature, its communal nature, the complicated opinions people have towards the past and the Westernizing present and future. Anyone who has paid attention to Turkish politics should recognize the pull between East and West where what people think is "Western" is sometimes misunderstood, and what being "modern" really is. He shows us a tortured place where even beauty is full of pain. The Bosphorous is presented as an endless possibility, a soothing slice of heaven surrounding the city, a place to escape at the beginning of the book, and the author's complicated outlook morphs it into a source of threats and danger by the end. He shows us stark pictures of the poverty of the "wings" of Istanbul, and then writes tortured chapters arguing with 19th century western authors who praised the "picturesque" beauty of the broken down areas of the city. He shows us a place where people ape "Western" thought and ideas and dress, and look down on anyone who isn't European enough, and yet a place where the newspapers publish glowing accounts of the poor neighborhoods with romanticized accounts of people living "pure, Turkish, old fashioned" lives every year, and where the checkered Ottoman past is more openly celebrated each year. He writes a chapter on "Under Western Eyes," describing this conflict, and yet openly admits that it is Westerners who see the city the way that he does... and then he tortures himself about that too.

... Pamuk's city is, needless to say perhaps after all that, a place where nobody can be easy with themselves, where they are going, where they are, or where they came from.

And in that way, I think, Pamuk is able to make a microcosm of our ever more complicated, globalized world, where the 19th century savior of identity, nationalism, is breaking down, and what will rise to replace it is so far uncertain. Therefore, I really don't care if you ever want to go to Istanbul or not, this book helped Orhan Pamuk win the Nobel Prize for a reason. I think that we would all be a little more patient with the world if everyone listened to what Pamuk has to say.

PS: Whoever put this in the "Travel" section next to "Under the Tuscan Sun,"... EPIC FAIL.(less)

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Jul 29, 2012 Eric rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: alwayscloseathand, decadence, historiophantasmagoria, photography, travels, turkey

Pamuk adds another layer to Istanbul’s proverbial description as “the bridge between east and west” by showing how the major Istanbul modernists – poet Yahya Kemal and novelist A.H. Tanpinar, new names to me, I have to follow up – derived a poetics of post-imperial ennui and urban decay from the melancholic image of their city recorded or dreamed by travelling French writers in the nineteenth century. “[T]he roots of our hüzün [urban melancholy] are European: the concept was first explored, expr...more Pamuk adds another layer to Istanbul’s proverbial description as “the bridge between east and west” by showing how the major Istanbul modernists – poet Yahya Kemal and novelist A.H. Tanpinar, new names to me, I have to follow up – derived a poetics of post-imperial ennui and urban decay from the melancholic image of their city recorded or dreamed by travelling French writers in the nineteenth century. “[T]he roots of our hüzün [urban melancholy] are European: the concept was first explored, expressed and poeticized in French,” he writes. And the nineteenth century French, the literary critics will tell you, were dealing with their own post-Napoleonic, post-imperial fatigue, and a Mal du siècle which made for what is called a “Late” Romanticism: dark, sexually anguished and routinely syphilitic (“The day the young writer corrects his first proofs he is as proud as the schoolboy who has just caught his first dose of the clap” - Baudelaire), as well as more perverse and pessimistic than the verdant and Liberty-extolling English variety (outcast, exiled, dark-locked Lord Byron being the founding hero, the revolting Satan for the French Romantics). I love that whole nervous crew; the Horror of Life Club, with their flamboyant despair and macabre brilliance (an 1874 entry of the Goncourt Journal begins, “Dinner at the Café Riche with Flaubert, Turgenev, Zola...We began a long discussion of the special aptitudes of writers suffering from constipation and diarrhea; and we went on to talk about the mechanics of the French language”). For such Istanbul visitors as Gautier, Nerval, and Flaubert melancholy was salutary and decadence authentic, the human norm. They relished the “Orient” for what they saw as its frank spectacles of violence and decay. Flaubert was especially taken with what he saw as the unworried kinship of pomp and squalor; writing a friend from Istanbul in November 1850, he marveled at the “splendid faces, iridescent existences that glisten and gleam, exceedingly various in their riches and robes, rich in filth, in their tatters and finery. And there beneath it all, the old immutable, perennial rascality.” – antiquity and authenticity in contrast to the European bourgeoisie’s fatuous conflation of moral and material progress, its aesthetics of engineering, its religion of convenience. When the Istanbul modernists, like all the other modernists, made their pilgrimages to the French wellsprings, they found their city already a literary image of melancholy – and just in time, what with Istanbul now the defunct capital of a fallen empire, poor, isolated, and afflicted by Westernizing republicans – a virulently progressive form of authoritarian bourgeois, in Pamuk’s picture – eager to raze the old Ottoman mansions and pour concrete Corbusian apartment blocks in their place. I thought of Baudelaire on the demolitions of medieval Paris – “the form of a city changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart.”

My favorite sections of the book were those devoted to Istanbul writers. Kemal and Tanpinar had two interesting associates, bachelor flâneurs like themselves: the Proust-like recluse Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, and the historian Reşat Ekrem Koçu, compiler of the lurid and idiosyncratic Istanbul Encyclopedia (its entries on Ottoman torture devices and techniques thrilled young Orhan) who lived alone amid ceiling-high piles of nineteenth century newspapers and archival scraps. I love the image of a coterie of urban dreamers engrossed by a city, people for whom the layered landscape of their 2,500 year old home is a complete cosmos, the inexhaustible ground for diverse passions – creative and curatorial, novelistic and antiquarian; sexual, architectural, philosophical. (I think of Joseph Cornell reading Mallarmé after a day rummaging in New York City’s junk shops.) Pamuk is, of course, one of these writers. I was deeply impressed to read that the composition of his latest novel, The Museum of Innocence, was preceded by two decades of collecting hundreds of objects that would “belong” to the characters and figure in the book. And then he opened a real museum to display the collection. Elif Batuman in the London Review of Books:

The inspiration for the Museum of Innocence came to Pamuk in 1982, while he was having dinner with the last prince of the Ottoman dynasty. Exiled after the formation of the Turkish republic, the prince ended up in Alexandria and worked for decades at the Antoniadis Palace museum, first as a ticket collector and then as director. Now, back in Istanbul after a fifty-year exile, he needed a job. The guests discussed the delicate subject of employment for the straitened septuagenarian prince of a defunct empire. Someone said the Ihlamur Palace museum might need a guide: who better than the prince, who had lived there as a child? Pamuk was immediately taken by the idea of a man who outlives his era and becomes the guide to his own house-museum. He imagined how the prince would greet visitors – ‘Ladies and gentlemen! Seventy years ago, in this room, I sat with my aide-de-camp and studied mathematics!’ – before crossing the velvet cordon to sit once more at his childhood desk, demonstrating how he had held the pencil and ruler.

Ten years later, Pamuk came up with an insane plan: to write a novel in the form of a museum catalogue, while simultaneously building the museum to which it referred. The plot of the novel would be fairly straightforward: over many years, an unhappy lover contrives to steal a large number of objects belonging to his unattainable beloved, after whose untimely death he proceeds to buy her family’s house and turn it into a museum. You might think that Pamuk’s first step, as a writer, would have been to start writing. In fact, his first step was to contact a real-estate agent. He needed to buy a house for his future heroine, Füsun. During the 1990s, Pamuk visited hundreds of properties, trying to imagine Füsun and her parents living in them. It was beyond his means to purchase a whole building in Nişantaşi, the posh neighbourhood inhabited by Kemal, the hero of the novel. He could afford a single floor in a stone building in the old Ottoman commercial centre of Galata, but then the remodelling would be difficult...

For the next ten years, writing and shopping proceeded in a dialectical relationship. Pamuk would buy objects that caught his eye, and wait for the novel to ‘swallow’ them, demanding, in the process, the purchase of further objects. Occasionally an object refused to be swallowed, as happened with some carriage lanterns and an old gas meter. Pamuk published The Museum of Innocence in 2008. It resembles less a museum catalogue than a 600-page audio guide. A ticket printed in the back of each copy grants one free entry to the museum. By that point he had already acquired nearly all of Füsun’s belongings, so the museum could, in theory, have opened the next day. But Pamuk was worried about the example of Edouard Dujardin, the French writer sometimes credited with pioneering, in a largely forgotten text called Les Lauriers sont coupés, the stream of consciousness. Pamuk didn’t want to be Dujardin. He wanted to be Joyce. It wasn’t enough just to build the world’s first synergetic novel-museum. The museum had to be a thing of beauty. He hired a team of artists and curators and worked full time in the museum for several months, taking naps on Kemal’s bed in the attic.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n11/elif-bat...(less)

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Jan 07, 2011 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: literature-biography, lit-middle-near-east-turkey, letters-diaries-memoirs

This is the second book by Pamuk that I have read. I would like to point out that it seems that this book should be read either before or after The Museum of Innocence because I found myself making it notes of where the novel and this memoir collide.

I've never been to Istanbul, but now I want to go. What Pamuk does is not only describe his family but a city as a conflict between East and West. While it is not something that my own western city feels, it is somewhat akin to the feeling that Phila...more

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Jul 21, 2011 Arakah Mushaweh rated it 5 of 5 stars

من بين خمسين كتاباً يصطفون في قائمة الكتب في الكيندل .. وقع اختياري على أورهان ، قرأت هذا الكتاب لأنه أورهان المبدع كما قرأت له في كتابه ألوان أخرى الذي لم أكمله بعد .. ولأنها اسطنبول التي أعشق .. هذا الكتاب الذي ما إن تبدأ بقراءة أول صفحة حتى تفوح لك ذاكرة الأمكنة .. هذا الكتاب المتعمق في ذاكرة اسطنبول .. حزن اسطنبول ، بيت العائلة المتمركز في اسطنبول ، الأبيض والأسود في اسطنبول .. حزن البسفور والياليات التي لم تعد موجودة بعد انهيار الخلافة .. كل هذه التفاصيل التي تشوبها رائحة الماضي بل هي من ال...more

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Oct 17, 2009 Irwan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: finished

The most enchanting thing about this book is its symmetry. He opens with a statement that from a very young age he suspected that somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, there lived another Orhan so much like him that he could pass for his twin, even his double. In the last chapter, his father apparently led a double life just like in his imagination.

Pamuk manages to intermingle the story about Istanbul and himself - reflecting each other along the way. The writing style is mostly visual - his tr...more

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Feb 01, 2008 Cortney rated it 1 of 5 stars

This was not, first of all, the book I espected it to be. It was not truly an autobiography of the author, who gave nothing at all away, at least in the context of the west (perhaps it would shock conservative Turks that he apparently had a sexual relationship with a girl as a young man, but I don't know what Turkish mores are, so I shouldn't judge) and gave away little in terms of the city that he was supposedly also biographying. It gave tantalising hints of things, and there were potential th...more

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Mar 20, 2009 htanzil rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Istanbul adalah memoar dari peraih nobel sastra 2006 asal Turki, Orhan Pamuk. Namun berbeda dengan memoar-memoar lainnya yang biasanya lebih mengutamakan kisah hidup si penulisnya, dalam memoarnya ini Pamuk tak hanya berkisah mengenai sejarah hidupnya. Dengan cara betutur seperti dalam novel-novelnya , Pamuk mencatat penggalan memori kehidupan masa lalunya yang dikaitkan dengan memori kolektif Istanbul, kota kelahirannya yang begitu ia cintai. Jadi bisa disimpulkan bahwa buku ini merupakan serpi...more Istanbul adalah memoar dari peraih nobel sastra 2006 asal Turki, Orhan Pamuk. Namun berbeda dengan memoar-memoar lainnya yang biasanya lebih mengutamakan kisah hidup si penulisnya, dalam memoarnya ini Pamuk tak hanya berkisah mengenai sejarah hidupnya. Dengan cara betutur seperti dalam novel-novelnya , Pamuk mencatat penggalan memori kehidupan masa lalunya yang dikaitkan dengan memori kolektif Istanbul, kota kelahirannya yang begitu ia cintai. Jadi bisa disimpulkan bahwa buku ini merupakan serpihan-serpihan memoar dan essai panjang Pamuk tentang dirinya danIstanbul

Bagi Pamuk yang begitu lekat dengan kota kelahirannya, takdir Istanbul adalah takdir dirinya sebab Istanbullah yang membuat dirinya seperti sekarang ini. Istanbul baginya adalah mata air yang terus menerus memberinya inspirasi. Tak heran jika sebagian besar novel-novelnya berlatar Istanbul, kota yang merupakan warisan kesultanan Usmani yang tak henti bergumul dengan identitas Barat dan Timur. Begitupun dalam memoarnya ini, di mata Pamuk, Istanbul dimetaforkan sebagai mahluk yang berwajah murung, atau istilah dalam bahasa arabnya adalah “huzun”.

Setelah Kesultanan Usmani ambruk, dunia nyaris lupa bahwa Istanbul ada. Kota tempat saya dilahirkan ini lebih miskin, lebih kumuh, dan lebih terasing ketimbang sebelumnya selama sejarahnya sepanjang dua ribu tahun. Bagi saya, Istanbul selalu merupakan kota penuh reruntuhan dan kemurungan masa akhir kesultanan. Saya menghabiskan hidup memerangi kermurungan ini atau (seperti semua penduduk Istanbul) menjadikannya kemurungan saya. (hal 7)

Istanbul modern dalam kacamata Pamuk memang telah mengalami kemunduran sejak jatuhnya Kesultanan dan berdirinya pemintahan Republik dengan reformasinya yang dipimpin oleh Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (pendiri Turki dan presiden pertama Turki). Bagi Ataturk satu-satunya jalan untuk melangkah maju adalah mengembangkan konsep baru mengenai ke-Turkian yag modern, sayangnya konsep ini dilakukan dengan cara melupakan masa lalu sehingga kultur, seperti bahasa dan pakaian tradisional, dilupakan. Bahkan literatur tradisional pun dilupakan.

Kemurungan Istanbullah yang menjadi benang merah seluruh kisah dalam memoarnya ini. Karenanya jangan harap dalam memoarnya ini kita akan disuguhkan panorama keindahan Istanbul, alih-alih membicarakan bangunan megah Hagai Sophia atau situs-situs bersejarah lainnya, kita malah akan disuguhkan deskripsi rumah-rumah kayu yang kumuh yang dibangun diatas reruntuhan bangunan megah dari era kejayaan kesultanan Usmani dan kehancuran puri-puri para Pasha karena tak terawat atau terbakar.

Dalam memoarnya ini, wajah Istanbul modern yang kini semakin carut marut itu dikisahkan secara parallel dengan kehidupan masa lalu Pamuk yang dilahirkan dari keluarga kelas menengah yang hidup dalam budaya sekuler Barat. Dengan begitu hidup Pamuk menceritakan tentang dirinya dan keluarganya, apartemen-apartemen yang pernah didiaminya, jalan-jalan yang sering dilaluinya, peristiwa-peristiwa yang pernah dialaminya, kisah cinta pertamanya yang kandas, serta keinginannya yang besar untuk menjadi pelukis sebelum ia banting setir dan akhirnya memutuskan untuk menjadi penulis.

Karena setiap jejak langkah masa lalu Pamuk senantiasa dikaitkan dengan memori kolektif Istanbul maka daya pikat memoar ini bukan hanya terletak pengalaman pribadi penulisnya, melainkan dalam identifikasi puitisnya dengan Istanbul . Hasilnya adalah semacam essai yang berisi sejarah dan kehidupan sosial masyarakat Istanbul baik dari apa yang diperolehnya dari pengalaman dan risetnya sendiri maupun dari catatan orang-orang yang pernah menulis sejarah Istanbul seperti, Yahya Kemal, seorang penyair, Resat Ekrem Kocu, seorang sejarawan, Tampinar, seorang novelis, dan Abdulhak Sinasi Hisar, seorang kronologis. Sedangkan untuk penulis barat terwakili oleh Gerard du Nerval, Teophile Gautier, Gustave Flaubert.

Untuk lebih menghidupi memoarnya ini, Pamuk juga menampilkan ratusan foto hitam putih baik yang berasal dari koleksi keluarga Pamuk sendiri maupun foto-foto Istanbul karya fotografer lokal, Ara Guller. Dan yang tak kalah menarik adalah foto-foto lukisan engraving Antoine-Ignace Melling, pelukis Jerman yang merekam Istanbul di abad ke 18. Jika foto-foto karya Ara Guller didominasi wajah Istanbul modern yang muram, maka pada karya Mellinglah keindahan masa lalu Istanbul terungkap.

Sebagai seorang novelis terkemuka, Pamuk menyajikan memoarnya ini dengan begitu menarik dan hidup sehingga membaca ke 37 bab kisahnya tak membuat kita bosan kendati dia terkadang menceritakan hal-hal yang sederhana yang pernah dialaminya. Hal-hal sederhana itu ia hubungkan dengan, lukisan, buku-buku, landskap, bangunan kuno, legenda, sejarah, politik, dll sehingga potret dirinya dan Istanbul terekam dengan menarik.

Sayangnya memoar Pamuk terhenti di era 70-an ketika Pamuk memutuskan merubah jalan hidupnya dari seorang pelukis menjadi seorang penulis. Jadi dalam memoar setebal 363 halaman ini kita tak akan menemukan jejak Pamuk dan Istabul ketika ia meniti kariernya sebagai seorang penulis. Semenjak kecil hingga menjadi seorang mahasiswa arsitektur tampaknya tak ada tanda-tanda Pamuk yang kelak akan menjadi seorang penulis terkenal kecuali kesenangannya membaca.
Akhir kata novel yang terbit untuk pertama kalinya pada tahun 2003 dalam bahasa Turki dengan judul Istanbul : Hatiralar ve Sehir ini memang sangat-sangat menarik, kisah kehidupan Pamuk, pergumulan batinnya , serta responnya atas lingkungan yang membesarkannya membawa pembacanya pada sebuah perenungan yang dalam. Berbagai kisah mengenai Istanbul membuat kita memahami sejarah dan kultur Istanbul modern di tahun 50-70an yang menyiratkan wajah Turki yang murung dan terbelahnya kultur masyarakat Turki antara Islam dan sekularisasi, modern dan tradisional, timur dan barat, yang ternyata masih bisa dirasakan hingga kini.

Seperti yang ditulis oleh Irish Times sebagai pujian untuk buku ini bahwa memoar Pamuk ini layak disejajarkan dengan karya-karya terbaik Pamuk dan buku-buku terbaik yang pernah ditulis mengenai Istanbul. Buku ini wajib dibaca dan kota itu wajib dikunjungi.(less)

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Feb 14, 2011 Enesra rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir-biography, to-be-reread

Can't believe I've finished the book. After reading the first half, I thought it very evocative and compelling. I was deeply touched by the melancholy atmosphere, or rather, that Hüzün spirit mentioned in the book. So did I enjoy thoroughly those moments of satire and contemplation through layer upon layer of which the author constructed his train of thought. However, its repetitiveness grew a bit tedious later. As a matter of fact, the poor Istanbul does have some characters in common with my d...more

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Feb 22, 2011 عبد الحميد بوحسين rated it 4 of 5 stars

أورهان باموق طفلا و شابا،اسطنبول في زمان اندثر،السوداوية كسمة للمدينة و سكانها ،و مواضيع أخرى تؤطر هذا الثالوث الذي يشكل العمود الفقري للنص
تنساب الكلمات و الجمل بشكل أبعدني عن سأمي خلال تصفحي السابق لروايتي باموق "إسمي أحمر" و "ثلج" (أتمنى أن يكون مزاجي حينها هو السبب).هنا استمتعت بالذكريات
هنا وجدت نفسي في مدينة عظيمة(وجها لوجه مع الصور المرفقة التي تمثلها) بدات تفقد ألقها بعد انهيار العثمانيين.مدينة تتجه عل متن مركبة فضائية نحو التغريب ،لتترك عمارتها لجمال الخرائب الخاص و أسلوب حياتها الخاص لزم...more أورهان باموق طفلا و شابا،اسطنبول في زمان اندثر،السوداوية كسمة للمدينة و سكانها ،و مواضيع أخرى تؤطر هذا الثالوث الذي يشكل العمود الفقري للنص
تنساب الكلمات و الجمل بشكل أبعدني عن سأمي خلال تصفحي السابق لروايتي باموق "إسمي أحمر" و "ثلج" (أتمنى أن يكون مزاجي حينها هو السبب).هنا استمتعت بالذكريات
هنا وجدت نفسي في مدينة عظيمة(وجها لوجه مع الصور المرفقة التي تمثلها) بدات تفقد ألقها بعد انهيار العثمانيين.مدينة تتجه عل متن مركبة فضائية نحو التغريب ،لتترك عمارتها لجمال الخرائب الخاص و أسلوب حياتها الخاص لزمن غير متصالح مع الماضي أحيانا كثيرة أو لأشخاص يعيشون تناقضا داخليا بين التغريب و الماضي،الذي بدأت في مخو رموزه:تكايا الصوفية ،اللباس العثماني،ختى الحروف العربية استبدلت بما يحفز نظرات الأتراك نحو نموذج أوربا الحديثة
هنا وجدت نفسي أتصفح طفولة باموق و شبابه في ظل أسرة ثرية ستتبع نفس خطى المبراطورية نحو الاضمحلال،أسرة علمانية بنزاعاتها المتواترة بين الوالدين ،بصراعاتها المالية مع أطراف العائلة الأخرى..أورهان باموق المتروك لعالمه الغريب و لسوداوية لم يفلت منها ،لكنه حاول تدجينها بالرسم القراءة و الكتابة و بتأملاته لأبيض و أسود اسطنبول
هنا استحضر كتاب اسطنبول السوداويين،صحافتها،الكتاب الغربيين الذين زاروها (نرفال ،غوتييه،فلوبير،جيد..) و عبر عن رؤاه لكل هؤلاء ..خاصة الغربيين الذين بحث بين كلماتهم عن اعجاب معلن أو سري بالمدينة ،بدون أن يجده سيصاب بجرح الغربي الذي يريد أن يكونه،التركي الذي يبعده الغربيون عن ثقلفتهم
هنا رممت علاقتي بباموف،سأقرأ"القلعة البيضاء" قريبا ،و أحاول إعادة قراءة "إسمي أحمر "و ثلج" ربما (less)

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Nov 18, 2011 أميــــرة rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: سلسلة-الجوائز, رحلات-ومدن, سيرة-ذاتية

ليس كتابًا هو بل موسوعة أهداها كاتب مرموق لمعشوقته "اسطنبول" فخرجت مليئة بالتفاصيل التي تدهشنا من فرط بساطتها وصدقها وألفتها ...
ومما زاد من غنى الكتاب الصور الفوتوغرافية واللوحات التي انتشرت بين صفحاته ، فكان كل مشهد يصفه الكاتب تجد بجانبه الصورة المعبرة عنه ، فشعرت معه أنني قطعت تذكرة سفر لاسطنبول وأنا جالسة بمكاني..
أدهشني كم التشابه بين مصر وتركيا ، وبين اللغتين العربية والتركية ، وجعلني هذا الكتاب حقا في توق لزيارة تلك المدينة..

الترجمة بديعة ولكن عابها شئ واحد وهو طول الجُمل المبالغ فيه ، فتج...more

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Jul 01, 2012 Michiyo 'jia' Fujiwara rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir, asian-literature, biographies-memoirs, ebook, novel-dewasa, orhan-pamuk

Sebuah Memoar..

Bak mengintip buku harian seseorang, buku ini bercerita tentang apa yang terjadi dalam diri sang penulisnya. Latar Belakang keluarganya (ayah, ibu, nenek dan kakak lelaki: Shevket..) Shevket nama kakak lelaki yang ternyata juga nama yang ia pakai sebelumnya dibuku My Name is Red (ingat: Sakure, Shevket dan si kecil Orhan yang penurut), tentang cinta pertamanya, tentang awal mula keinginannya menjadi seorang penulis (bukan sebagai Pelukis seperti yang disangka oleh ibunya) dan ceri...more

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Sep 06, 2011 Margot rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Il me semble certain que Orhan Pamuk a choisi de placer son livre sous l'égide de la tristesse ("hüzün") et on sent bien de quelle manière celle-ci est présente durant tout le récit, à la fois dans les souvenirs de l'auteur et dans le portrait que ce dernier dresse d'Istanbul, et je crois qu'irrémédiablement, cette tristesse, cette mélancolie qu'il décrit comme inhérente à Istanbul (et aux Stambouliotes en général) finit par nous gagner au fur et à mesure que l'on avance dans notre lecture.

L'as...more Il me semble certain que Orhan Pamuk a choisi de placer son livre sous l'égide de la tristesse ("hüzün") et on sent bien de quelle manière celle-ci est présente durant tout le récit, à la fois dans les souvenirs de l'auteur et dans le portrait que ce dernier dresse d'Istanbul, et je crois qu'irrémédiablement, cette tristesse, cette mélancolie qu'il décrit comme inhérente à Istanbul (et aux Stambouliotes en général) finit par nous gagner au fur et à mesure que l'on avance dans notre lecture.

L'aspect que je trouve le plus intéressant, c'est ce lien inaliénable entre les souvenirs de l'auteur et ceux de la ville qu'il choisit de partager, comme si les uns et les autres dépendaient de ce lien. Et au fond, il me semble juste de dire que nos souvenirs sont liés aux lieux dans lesquels nous les vivons, de même que notre perception de certains lieux se voit changée et nourrie par un moment vécu, riche de sens, source de joie, d'inspiration, de déception ou de profonde tristesse.

Le portrait que Pamuk dresse d'Istanbul se caractérise par cette tension entre d'une part une forte volonté d'occidentalisation (et tous les avantages ET conséquences que cela implique), et un désir de préserver cette identité orientale qui est celle de la ville, et de la Turquie en général. Cette hésitation se voit encore renforcée par le paradoxe que constitue la ville en elle-même, à cheval entre Orient et Occident, comme un pont tendu entre deux cultures, entre deux mondes, entre deux rêves. Mais il semble qu'au jeu de la capitalisation et de l'occidentalisation, Istanbul n'ait perdu beaucoup plus qu'elle n'a gagné. L'idée que Pamuk explique, selon laquelle Istanbul n'a été finalement véritablement vue que par des Occidentaux, tels que Nerval, Gautier ou Flaubert et qui du coup n'a offert de la ville qu'une vision "exotique", voire "pittoresque" (au sens qu'en donner John Ruskin, définition on ne peut plus juste à mon sens) de la ville est vraie, mais au fond je pense qu'il en est de même pour la plupart des villes et pays. En outre Pamuk le souligne lui-même en précisant que seuls les étrangers sont capables de voir pleinement un pays ou une ville donnés, car ils sont libres de tous souvenirs personnels en lien avec celui-ci ou celle-ci. Je pense que son enfance quelque peu solitaire, son caractère secret et ouvert à l'imaginaire, l'a amené à cristalliser toute cette mélancolie qui est celle d'Istanbul, ancienne Byzance, lieu de tous les rêves et de tous les possibles, aux couleurs de soleil couchant et aux senteurs d'épices. Comme il lisait les auteurs occidentaux, il se nourrissait en même temps de cette imaginaire qui était celui de l'Ouest envers cet Orient si mystérieux, tout en gardant cette vision profondément honnête et partiale sur sa propre ville à travers les écrits des auteurs turcs et les peintures de Melling. A tel point qu'il en est venu à se demander dans laquelle de ces deux visions se trouvait la part de rêve, et je pense également que dans son enfance il s'est posé cette question que l'on se pose tous un jour: "Vaut-il mieux rêver sa vie ou la vivre?" (même si d'après Proust, rêver sa vie s'est déjà la vivre un peu). C'est cette question que j'ai ressenti en filigrane tout au long de ma lecture, comme une chanson que l'on fredonne à longueur de journée parce que l'on ne peut pas se la sortir de la tête, et l'atmosphère que crée Pamuk, avec ses nombreuses évocation du Bosphore qui semble à proprement parler être les poumons d'Istambul, le ballet complexe des vapurs, le souvenir pittoresque du palais de Topkapi et de la gloire des sultans, les vieilles rues délabrées de la ville avec leurs vieilles maisons à la peinture écaillées, les cafés sombres et miteux dignes d'images de cartes postales, le souvenir fort d'Atatürk, ce cosmopolitisme d'Istanbul qui évoque un bruissement de couleurs mais qui se voit noyé dans la grisaille de cette mélancolie stambouliote, leitmotiv du livre...

Et il en arrive à ce questionnement que la plupart des gens connaissent un jour ou l'autre dans leur vie. Qui suis-je et que vais-je faire de ma vie? Ce sentiment d'appartenance à une ville, et en même temps l'expérience d'une exclusion totale du monde et de la société. Si je suis habitant d'Istanbul, comment puis-je écrire à la manière d'un Occidental? Si j'écris comme Nerval, Loti ou Gautier, rendrais-je véritablement hommage à cette ville que je chéris par dessus-tout, la verrai-je toujours comme je la vois avec mes yeux, lors de mes promenades hasardeuses dans les quartiers de la ville? Faut-il y insérer ma part de souvenirs pour la rendre plus vivace, ou dois-je m'en tenir à une stricte description nourrie de réflexions sur la ville et son évolution? Il me semble qu'Orhan Pamuk a trouvé le parfait équilibre et en un sens, je trouve ce livre bouleversant parce que l'on en vient à partager les sentiments qu'il évoque, et on parvient presque à se sentir Stambouliotes. Je pense qu' Istanbul nous fait passer du statut de touriste à celui d'hôtes (ce qui pour moi n'est pas la même chose) et ayant été moi-même à Istanbul, je regrette de ne pas avoir eu cette vision plus tôt. (less)

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Mar 03, 2010 Ratih rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites, my-book-collection

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Title : Istanbul: Memories and the City
Writer : Orhan Pamuk
Year : 2005
Language : Turkish/English (translated into Indonesian)

This is the third book of Orhan Pamuk I’ve read so far. It is interesting because it’s a kind of biography of himself revealing not only his past, but also the grow of the city in which he has been living for years and which shaped his life and characters.

He starts with his childhood, imagining himself having a twin brother in another house. It is him, I would say, but he...more Title : Istanbul: Memories and the City
Writer : Orhan Pamuk
Year : 2005
Language : Turkish/English (translated into Indonesian)

This is the third book of Orhan Pamuk I’ve read so far. It is interesting because it’s a kind of biography of himself revealing not only his past, but also the grow of the city in which he has been living for years and which shaped his life and characters.

He starts with his childhood, imagining himself having a twin brother in another house. It is him, I would say, but he feels that he never be that one. He feels different from the one in the other house. That feeling then drives him to be convinced that later on he has another life, another world. He is likely to live in two worlds, of which the one side is his world of art. When he draws or paints something (mostly scenery of Istanbul, Bosporus in particular), he feels like he exists in another world, far from his real life. He continues to feel so; even when he’s with his friends he can be different persons.

The best thing here is how the city he lives in kind of shaped his characters, sadness, and sorrow. He thinks that the fall of Ottoman brings the former kingdom to the fall Istanbul, and the fall of Istanbul brings him to the fall of himself. He’s grown up within and with the sorrow of the city. The sorrow, poverty, and backwardness of Istanbul are undeniable after the last war. He reveals the irony in which the people of Istanbul feels that being westernized and putting aside Islam as their religion are the only way to recover from their suffering of the fall. The people of Istanbul feel that being ‘western people’ are the best way to be back to the glory of their country as the ‘new republic’. Yet, they can’t really be the ‘western people’ because they are not western people in any sense. Silly, they even see the true Muslims who implement the real Islam are the backward people.

This book is very much interesting and amazing in that it can honestly state the tone of the writer and his personal feeling towards his beloved city. He’s not only honest in putting forwards his personal life and characters, but also in telling the secret of his family. By reading this book, I can precisely see how Turkey is, how the people are, how the growth of Istanbul is, and how the whole of the last civilization of Islam becomes.

Rating: 3.5
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Jan 30, 2010 Harun Harahap rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: punya, terjemahan, non-fiksi, memoir-biografi

Buku ini karena merupakan sebuah memoir, jadi tidak perlu mengerutkan dahi dan berpikir keras untuk memahami tulisan beliau. Saya sangat suka kalimat akhir di bagian pertama. " Jadi, perhatikan baik-baik, pembaca yang terhormat. Izinkan saya berterus terang kepada Anda dan sebagai balasannya izinkan saya memohon simpati Anda." Seorang Penulis besar peraih Nobel memohon kepada pembacanya, aneh sekali, tapi jauh lebih baik dari penulis baru yang menghujat pembacanya.

Memoir karya Orhan Pamuk ini ti...more Buku ini karena merupakan sebuah memoir, jadi tidak perlu mengerutkan dahi dan berpikir keras untuk memahami tulisan beliau. Saya sangat suka kalimat akhir di bagian pertama. " Jadi, perhatikan baik-baik, pembaca yang terhormat. Izinkan saya berterus terang kepada Anda dan sebagai balasannya izinkan saya memohon simpati Anda." Seorang Penulis besar peraih Nobel memohon kepada pembacanya, aneh sekali, tapi jauh lebih baik dari penulis baru yang menghujat pembacanya.

Memoir karya Orhan Pamuk ini tidak hanya menceritakan kehidupan pribadinya dari terlahir ke Bumi hingga ia memutuskan menjadi seorang Penulis, tapi jua menceritakan sebuah kota bernama Istanbul. Sebuah kota yang MURUNG yang membentuk sisi-sisi kepribadiannya. Sebuah kota yang penduduknya mencoba melepaskan fez(topi khas Turki) dan memakai jas Eropa. Beliau juga menggambarkan selat Bosphorus yang diluar dari segala kemurungan yang dibawanya, Bosphorus sangat indah seperti halnya kehidupan.

Orhan Pamuk dimasa kecilnya hingga dewasa senang sekali berkhayal. Khayalannya meliputi pribadi Orhan Pamuk lain yang hidup disudut kota Istanbul yang lain. Orhan Pamuk yang kehidupannya sempurna sesuai dengan keinginan dan imajinasinya. Sya juga baru tahu ternyata beliau berasal dari sebuah keluarga yang kaya raya dan modern.

Saya sangat tertarik dengan bagian 20, tentang Agama. Orhan Pamuk yang dididik secara sekuler mencoba untuk betapa besarnya peran Tuhan. Bagaimana Tuhan hanyalah milik orang miskin. Bagaian akhirnya juga cukup memikat. "Meski demikian, setiap kali saya berada di keramaian, di atas kapal, di jembatan, dan bertatap muka dengan seorang perempuan tua berkerudung putih, saya tetap merasa gemetar".

Buku ini mencapai klimaksnya ketika Orhan Pamuk mulai santai dan menerima kemurungan yang membuat Istanbul menjadi sebuah kota yang indah karena kemurungannya, huzun(murung) sebagai takdirnya. Dan ditutup dengan keputusan beliau untuk berhenti menjadi pelukis dan memilih PENULIS sebagai profesinya.

NB: Saya sangat suka dengan gambar foto dan lukisan yang begitu banyak tersebar dibuku ini. Membantu saya memahami seberapa murungkah kota Istanbul dan Bosphorus. Walaupun saya menyayangkan buku yang saya baca ada beberapa halamannya yang tidak tercetak.

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Jan 15, 2009 James rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir, lincoln-park-group, nobel-prize, istanbul

Orhan Pamuk begins his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, with a meditation on his doppelganger, the other Orhan in his life when he was a young boy. This is both an indication of the budding artist within and a metaphor for the city without, the city in which he was to grow up and live. Capturing a sense of the Istanbul of memory and tradition and juxtaposing it with the Istanbul as seen by outsiders, especially the literary lights that visited Istanbul over the years, Pamuk creates a ric...more Orhan Pamuk begins his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, with a meditation on his doppelganger, the other Orhan in his life when he was a young boy. This is both an indication of the budding artist within and a metaphor for the city without, the city in which he was to grow up and live. Capturing a sense of the Istanbul of memory and tradition and juxtaposing it with the Istanbul as seen by outsiders, especially the literary lights that visited Istanbul over the years, Pamuk creates a rich texture for his story of the memories and city. Augmented by literally hundreds of photographs of city, family and history this is a unique look at one of the great centers of civilization.

The memoir is colored by melancholy, a word rooted in the Greek melankholia referring to pensive reflection marked by a dark or sad outlook. The Turkish word for melancholy is huzun and it has an Arabic root with a much more nuanced meaning that spans thoughts of both material pleasure and spirtual loss. According to Pamuk:

"The huzun of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its music and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating." (p 91)

It is this feeling that Pamuk tries to capture in his discussions and digressions on his own experience of Istanbul and that of the others, often from the West, who have observed its life. So we encounter comments and thoughts from writers as diverse as Levi-Strauss, Ruskin, Flaubert, Gide and Gerard de Nerval. But there are also the insights of local writers like the novelist Tanpinar who, influenced by the French poet Theophile Gautier, wrote in a poetic and painterly mode of the vistas of Istanbul and extolled "the painterly style of writers like Stendahl, Balzac, and Zola" (p 227).

While Pamuk discusses the view of Istanbul "Under Western Eyes" (pp 234-44) he also finds the source of this melancholy in the ruins of the old city as seen both in his personal experience and through his reading of Tanpinar and others. He also meditates on the impact and meaning of the Bosporus to himself and his family. The city becomes a dream to which its denizens could aspire. "We might call this dream -- which grew out of the barren, isolated, destitute neighborhoods beyon the city walls -- the 'melancholy of the ruins'" (p 253)

The sum of all these thoughts and more is a brilliant and evocative image of the Istanbul that encourages the reader to read more and the traveller to visit and see for himself. This reader found in this memoir everything that he had come to expect from Pamuk's fiction melded with a passion for family, literature and city. It has become another favorite of mine from the pen of this great writer.(less)

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Feb 21, 2013 Mazin Alyasery rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

ليس هنالك مثيل لبراعة باموق في خلط السرد بين وصف عائلته ومحيطه
انه كتاب مذكرات بطريقة فريدة من نوعها
باموق يؤرخ لمدينة بكل تفاصيلها وحياتها وجذورها وفنونها واحداثها ومشكلاتها وثقافتها وطابعها الاجتماعي والسياسي من خلال سرد لحياة اسرته
الدهشة وحدها ستتملك قارئ هذه الرواية وهو يسير بين صفحاتها المصورة

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Dec 22, 2008 Anthony rated it 2 of 5 stars

I am shortly going to Istanbul for the first time and, rather than a Rough Guide or Lonely Planet it seemed that this Nobel Prize winning author might be a rather better guide. It is largely autobiographical and recounts his growing up in this great City. He is at his best for me when it becomes a memoir of his early life - a portrait of the artist as a young man. It is not quite so good when talking of other Istanbul authors of the 19th & 20th century. The chapter on his 'first love' is mov...more

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Jan 12, 2008 Nika rated it 3 of 5 stars

It wasn't really what I expected, though I'm not sure what I expected. It says a lot about people who described Istanbul at some point in the history. Poets, writes, historians, journalists, painters, etc. Lots of them are foreign, but there are some Turkish ones as well. The author talks a lot about melancholy of the inhabitants of Istanbul and the city itself. I can't say I felt it when I was there, but one can notice that the nation is still searching for themselves. I enjoy the descriptions...more

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Apr 01, 2009 Robertisenberg rated it 4 of 5 stars

In preparation for my May journey to the Balkans, I found my first excuse to read Pamuk. Everybody brags about his novels, but this nonfiction biography -- of himself and his lifelong home -- also won some acclaim. And it's no wonder: The book blends personal reflection, in roughly chronological order, with a survey of the city and its peculiar character.

In short, Pamuk diagnoses Istanbul with chronic depression, but it's not all bad. The term he uses is "huzun", which roughly means "societal me...more

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Dec 09, 2008 Mukikamu rated it 4 of 5 stars

Orhan Pamuk’s book about Istanbul is an odd book on this blog, for it is not about a travel experience, but about a personal journey and the spirit of the city where Pamuk lived all his life. I must admit, I lived in Turkey for three years when I was a child, so the book brought back familiar sceneries and was thought-provoking in a peculiar way. This personal attachment made it impossible to read as a curious traveler and I clinged to those details of everyday life that brought back my own memo...more

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May 10, 2013 Jennifer rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013-reads

Were Orhan Pamuk active on Twitter back when he was writing Istanbul: Memories and the City he could have saved himself and his readers a great deal of time and frustration by simply distilling this work down to "Boo fucking hoo #firstworldproblems" and leaving it at that.

Instead, we're left to slog through four hundred pages of angsty ennui which purport to represent the zeitgeist of a city that mourns the days it stood at the center of the world but in fact do little more than chronicle the th...more

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Apr 05, 2013 Mkeirsbi rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: r-52-books

This is a cleverly en beautifully written book. Unfortunately it fails to captivate the reader completely.

It's a biographical novel, and those have a tendency to be overly sentimental. Pamuk decided to side-step this possibility by distancing himself from his writing. He's very objective and descriptive when he tells his story. Almost like an academic text. Literally. The quotations and namedropping echoe an academic book far more than it conforms to the genre of the biography. That distance su...more This is a cleverly en beautifully written book. Unfortunately it fails to captivate the reader completely.

It's a biographical novel, and those have a tendency to be overly sentimental. Pamuk decided to side-step this possibility by distancing himself from his writing. He's very objective and descriptive when he tells his story. Almost like an academic text. Literally. The quotations and namedropping echoe an academic book far more than it conforms to the genre of the biography. That distance suggests an objective and truthful story, which really works if you consider this to be the story of Istanbul, instead of Pamuk's story.
At the same time it shows how Pamuk's life is, whether he wants to or not, intertwined with the city of Istanbul -- almost empirically detectable.

Very clever indeed. However, as a novel this doesn't work for me. Because of the distance, the novel never got to me. The first part of the novel, describing his childhood memories, are extremely self-indulgent. And perhaps he whines about his mother a few pages too long. But the descriptive tone of the text seems forced. All emotion is objectified, which feels rather strange considering his earliest memories and rivalries with his brother all draw on emotion. But it gets even more strange when he talks about 'melancholy'. Not once he evokes the feeling of melancholy. He just discribes it, and teaches us the importance of that feeling for the city of Istanbul. One could argue his style and tone is a clever attempt of - almost in absentia - conveying that sense of melancholy. But to me it doesn't work. The mechanics of the text draw far too much attention to how clever it is in trying to convey all sorts of things, it just fails to really tap into any emotion at all.

That last part is perhaps the biggest issue I have with this novel: instead of telling us stories about Istanbul, it teaches us the history of the city. Whether he talks about history, art history or literature, it's all wrapped up as a lesson. That just doesn't speak to me. If I would've wanted to learn about the history and art and culture of Istanbul, I would've read a traveller's guide. I expect more from literature. When I read a book about a city, I expect to be swept away by a good story that immerses me completely. I don't want to read lessons larded with personal indulgences, covered in a pretention of objectivity.
For crying out loud, when he teaches us about the city's poets, that are known for their melancholia, he tells us about escaping in literature. He DESCRIBES losing oneself in literature, while trying to academically justify that feeling...

I am seriously disappointed by this book. Yes it's written beautifully and is very clever. But, I expected a novel, I expected literature. This book tries so hard in being more than "just a novel", it falls completely short on all accounts. (less)

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Dec 16, 2012 Valie rated it 3 of 5 stars

I found it a bit tedious to be honest. It was interesting enough as a background of Istanbuls history and culture but the narrator's navel gazing got a bit on my nerves after a while. Maybe this is an irreverent thing to say about a Nobel Prize winner. I normally quite like essayistic works about places (see my obsession with W.G. Sebald) but this was too much Pamuk and not enough Istanbul. While Sebald uses the places he describes as springbords for meditiations on history, place and memory, Pa...more

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Sep 16, 2012 Daryl Leyesa rated it 3 of 5 stars

The images rose above the Bosphorus, enveloped by the mist of the bay; then just as sudden, the images were engulfed by the waves. I caught a glimpse of shadows bigger than anything else, of window shutters like eye lashes shuddering with news entering the apartments, of streets hosting a parade of all sorts except for lovers holding hands, of a smile that lingers as a century-old house falls into ashes. Then i understood what melancholy was.

I've never been to Istanbul but all these i saw from...more

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Sep 03, 2012 Tim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"The city has no center other than ourselves." Pamuk's Istanbul is certainly not a travelogue, but is instead a memoir of himself and of the city he was born and raised in and has lived in for most of his life. His memories of the city are mixed with the images and memories of European writers and artists from the 18th and 19th centuries and Turkish writers from the 20th and center on huzun, the communal melancholy of a lost, past greatness. It is not a question of Orientalism (he directly dism...more

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Jul 27, 2012 Joy Stocke rated it 4 of 5 stars

Paying attention to beauty in all its forms, but especially its melancholic form comes naturally to Orhan Pamuk, who tells us in his new memoir, Istanbul, Memories and the City, that before becoming a writer he had planned to become a painter.

By the time he reveals that fact he has used his painterly eye and gift for language to draw us into a world where life with his charming, philandering father, his beautiful, sad mother, and his older brother echoes and reflects the complicated, melancholy...more

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Jun 18, 2012 Rosalba rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Se la città ci sembra bella e magica, anche la nostra vita dev'essere tale."

Un Pamuk malinconico, piegato su stesso, ripercorre i ricordi della sua infanzia e adolescenza, la sua passione per la pittura che abbandonerà per diventare uno scrittore e racconta la sua città, che è anche la sua essenza, e guardandola con gli occhi della nostalgia la vede in bianco e nero e sfumature di grigio, le nebbie sul Bosforo, le ville e i vecchi palazzi anneriti dal tempo, che ricordano gli antichi fasti di u...more "Se la città ci sembra bella e magica, anche la nostra vita dev'essere tale."

Un Pamuk malinconico, piegato su stesso, ripercorre i ricordi della sua infanzia e adolescenza, la sua passione per la pittura che abbandonerà per diventare uno scrittore e racconta la sua città, che è anche la sua essenza, e guardandola con gli occhi della nostalgia la vede in bianco e nero e sfumature di grigio, le nebbie sul Bosforo, le ville e i vecchi palazzi anneriti dal tempo, che ricordano gli antichi fasti di un impero ormai decaduto. Il mio personale ricordo di Istanbul è fatto invece di colori e di suoni, di profumi di spezie e rumori, di folla e di musica e di bellissimi tramonti sul Bosforo. Ma io sono un occidentale e, come scrive Pamuk, “l'occidentale che arriva in città, spesso non percepisce questa tristezza, né la malinconia”. Un libro a tratti lento, proprio per la tristezza che lo impregna, ma colmo d'amore e di poesia per la sua amatissima città. http://youtu.be/GazbLpUloi0
ASCOLTO ISTANBUL (Orhan Veli Kanik)
Ascolto Istanbul ad occhi chiusi, spira una leggera brezza, dapprima. Lentamente oscillano le foglie sugli alberi. Da lontano, molto lontano i perenni trilli degli acquaioli. Ascolto Istanbul ad occhi chiusi, e mentre passano gli uccelli a stormi e stridii dall'alto le reti si ritirano dalle chiuse e i piedi di una donna sfiorano l'acqua. Ascolto Istanbul ad occhi chiusi, sono freschi i bazar, allegro Mahmut pascià, pieni di colombi i cortili, pervengono battiti di martello dai bacini, dalla dolce brezza primaverile odori di sudore. Ascolto Istanbul ad occhi chiusi, ebbra di passati favori, una villa dalle darsene buie fra il mugghio dell'acquietato scirocco. Ascolto Istanbul ad occhi chiusi, passa una fraschetta sul marciapiede imprecazioni, motivetti, canzoni, frizzi dalla sua mano cade qualcosa sul selciato, dev'essere una rosa. Ascolto Istanbul ad occhi chiusi, ai suoi piedi si dibatte un uccello. non so se la tua fronte scotti o no. Dietro i pistacchi nasce una luna candida lo percepisco dai battiti del tuo cuore. Ascolto Istanbul.
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Jun 02, 2012 Jeremy Allan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

I am terribly ambivalent about Pamuk the man. Or, more specifically, Pamuk the Author-Character. He clearly believes in and promotes the cult of the writer, the cult of the artist, and the mythos that surrounds all forms of "genius." There is something wildly admirable about the fact that he so boldly sees these mythic qualities in himself, but that something is fairly well-checked by my distaste for myth-making.

And in this memoir, Pamuk the Author-Character reveals himself to be deeply confused...more

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May 08, 2012 Carl Brush rated it 4 of 5 stars

We’re going to Turkey in the fall despite the fact that our IRA ship has sprung leaks worthy of a certain iceberg-bashed White Star Liner. Probably we should wait for better economic conditions, but for why? We’ll soon reach our proverbial three-score and ten, and though life expectancy has improved since biblical times, time’s a-wasting even faster than the money.
Knowing our plans, certain of the offspring blessed us with Istanbul--Memories and the City by the Nobel Prize winning Turk, Orhan...more We’re going to Turkey in the fall despite the fact that our IRA ship has sprung leaks worthy of a certain iceberg-bashed White Star Liner. Probably we should wait for better economic conditions, but for why? We’ll soon reach our proverbial three-score and ten, and though life expectancy has improved since biblical times, time’s a-wasting even faster than the money.
Knowing our plans, certain of the offspring blessed us with Istanbul--Memories and the City by the Nobel Prize winning Turk, Orhan Pamuk. They also included Snow in the package, and though I’d read it (See the April 24, 2007 comments.), Susanne hasn’t, so thanks to them.
Why Turkey? For one thing, they’re not on the Euro yet, so things are reputedly cheaper. For another, we have friends with connections, so that will help reduce expenses some. Finally, though, it’s always been such an exotic crossroads of religions, nationalities, ethnicities. You can swim where Byron swam if you want to (I don’t), and it’s a great complement to our trip to Greece, where we stood on Rhodes, saw Turkey no more than a SF-to-Oakland’s distance away, and realized graphically how interrelated these peoples have been for centuries--millennia.
Our friends say you can take a water taxi from their place on the Turkish Aegean coast and have a great dinner at a restaurant on Lesbos. I recall a church on Mykonos named after Saint George whereon a classic icon was painted of George on a horse slaying a dragon at his feet. Except that the dragon is a Turk. I remember all the tales of sultans and harems and the Ottoman empire, which in all my long academic career I’ve studied only as a footnote. And there’s a place in Istanbul where you can put one foot on Europe and the other on Asia. And many folks we’ve talked to say you shouldn’t miss it. So we won’t. However, it won’t be because of Pamuk’s book on Istanbul.
The man is a wonderful writer, and Istanbul is a fiercely honest examination of himself, his native city, and their parallel development from his 1952 birth to the present. However, as a promotion for the beauty and virtue of Istanbul nee Constantinople nee Byzantium it’s a loser. Pamuk has lived in Istanbul for the entirety of his fifty years. Not particularly remarkable, but it is remarkable that he has lived in the same building, a starkly undistinguished high-rise apartment house of that depressing 1950’s utilitarian architecture that has infected so many cities the world over. His family started out wealthy. His grandfather built the apartments. His father and uncle spent most of their lives frittering away through unsuccessful schemes the fortune their father had garnered. Similarly, from Pamuk’s point of view, Istanbul, and by extension Turkey and the Turks have frittered away the glories of their Ottoman past.
Since the mid-to-late nineteenth-century dissolution of a 300-plus year old empire that had been in decline for some time, Turks have been living among ruins. With neither the riches nor, apparently, the inclination to repair or recover the prosperity of the past, the crumbling walls, palaces and mansions one finds throughout the city are emblematic of the depressed spirit of a depressed people. Pamuk even devotes a whole chapter to what he calls Huzun, a special form of melancholy endemic to Turks--or at least Istanbullus--alone. Left without material or spiritual resources of their own, they look to the west for inspiration. Not surprisingly, the results are distinctly unsatisfactory.
Pamuk details not only various Western writers’ responses to Istanbul (Gautier, Flaubert), but Turkish writers’ response to the responses. The Turks seem unable to get in touch with their own feelings about their homeland, but are condemned to filter it through a Western consciousness. All this is complicated by the admirable and largely successful efforts of the famous Attaturk, who arabacized the alphabet and strove to secularize all aspects of Turkish life. Unfortunately, according to Pamuk, this resulted in a cultural chauvinism which ignored the contributions and vitality of the thriving Jewish, Greek, and Armenian cultures that had helped make the empire a glorious economic and ethnic crossroads. Ironically, then, the successful drive for a strong national and cultural identity resulted in further isolation.
Throughout, Pamuk connects his own personal, artistic, and educational development to his perceptions of Istanbul itself. He sees in his family’s declining fortunes a reflection of his country and culture’s diminution. He walks the poor neighborhoods and wallows in the hopelessness of their decrepit grime, watches the glorious old wooden mansions along the Bosphorus burn and crumble, no one with the money or inclination to repair or restore them. He has some talent as a painter, but seems unable to find, or at least value, his own style, instead seeking to imitate. He likes best those painting of his that are the best copies of other--usually western--artists rather than those of landscapes in front of his face.
This sense of depression, of living in the shadow of Europe pervades Snow as well. It’s striking how the mood I described in my comments about Snow also fit Istanbul:
Westerners seldom get a chance at insight into the mind of the Muslim world. I’m not talking here about political posturing or slaughter of innocents or quaint costumes. I’m talking about a first-rate artist showing us what it means to live constantly with the idea that your culture is inferior, playing catchup with a world that has passed you by and judges you while glancing over its shoulder as it speeds far down the road ahead. It’s not an idea you necessarily accept or live by, but it permeates your world like a bad smell you can’t get rid of.
Pamuk has chosen to live amid that smell, and he’s made the most of it. I just wish he and his countrymen--if indeed his mood does reflect those of his countrymen--had a more joyous time of it. I certainly hope we have a better time of it. In the meantime, Orhan’s bad moods have made for my good reading, and I’m grateful to him for it. (less)

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Feb 01, 2012 Stephen rated it 5 of 5 stars

While other writers travel for inspiration, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk says that he prefers to remain home and in front of a window that looks out on his "melancholy" Istanbul. His self-image is so interwoven with his vision of Istanbul that when Pamuk speaks of his city, he is speaking of himself; and when he speaks of himself, he is speaking of his city. So what we have in this wonderful book is an autobiography, concerning only Pamuk's first eighteen or so years, that is entitled "Istanbu...more

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