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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

"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...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

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...