Portrait of a writer and his city
My review of Pamuk's Istanbul; it appeared in today's Business
Standard and the link is here but the para breaks on the website are
meaningless as always. So here's the full review:
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In the first chapter of this part-autobiography, part-tribute to his
beloved city, Orhan Pamuk speaks of writers like Conrad and Naipaul,
who "managed to migrate between languages, cultures countries,
continents, even civilisations. Their imaginations were fed by
exile...mine, however, requires that I stay in the same city,on the
same same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view.
Istanbul's fate is my fate".
It isn't inappropriate for the author to mention his own name in the
same breath as Conrad and Naipaul. In recent years, especially
following the international publication of My Name is Red and Snow,
Pamuk has moved from being Turkey's best-known man of letters to being
considered one of the world's great fiction writers, and a future
Nobel candidate. This makes it difficult to think of Istanbul as just
a paean to a city: it can't be treated purely as a travelogue, or even
as a personal remembrance by a lesser-known writer. The appeal of this
book depends equally on the insights it provides into Pamuk;s life and
how he became the writer he is today. From that point of view, a
certain amount of familiarity with his fiction is recommended before
reading this.
Pamuk begins his memoir on an intimate scale, with descriptions of his
early life in the five-storey apartment block his large family
occupied in the 1950s. He speaks of family squabbles, sibling rivalry,
secret fantasy worlds and of childhood quirks that persisted into
adulthood ("I have in all honesty believed that two people with
similar names must have similar characters, that an unfamiliar word
must be semantically similar to a word spelt like it..."). Then the
world outside the apartment weaves its way into the narrative and the
book's structure turns schizophrenic. A discussion of the painter
Melling's depictions of the Bosphorus river is immediately followed by
an unrelated chapter that gives us little Orhan in his house, making
up games to deal with boredom (his account of adjusting a mirror
triptych so that he could see the reflections of thousands of Orhans,
many of them unfamiliar-looking, evokes the splintered, kaleidoscopic
narrative of My Name is Red). Another chapter on the lives and work of
four of Turkey's great writers (including the poet Yahya Kemal) is
followed incongruously by a personal account of Pamuk's grandmother.
At other times a more careful link is established, as when the author
recalls the various signs he saw on the city's streets as a child, and
then, to understand the "civilising mission" that these signs
embodied, turns to a discussion of Istanbul's newspaper columnists and
city correspondents. This structure, or lack of it, marks an
intriguing experiment but at times it almost feels like Pamuk is
trying too hard for a freewheeling effect as he places the city's life
against his own.
According to Pamuk, the chief characteristic of Istanbul is the
quality of huzun, the Turkish word for melancholy -- "not the
melancholy of a solitary individual but the black mood shared by
millions of people together". Much of this stems from Istanbul's
position as a city that stands at the crossroads of East and West (it
is situated in both Europe and Asia), and as a once-great capital now
reduced to ruins, bedevilled by reminders of its own lost glory.
(Pamuk believes a key difference between his city and, say, Delhi or
Sao Paulo, is that "in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past and
civilisation are everywhere visible".) At any rate, this very
particular form of melancholy is a theme that runs through the book,
much like the Bosphorus winding through the city.
The author also writes movingly of Istanbul's love-hate relationship
with the western gaze: of "the ambivalence that besets literary
Istanbullus on reading Western observations" about their city. He
counts the tankers, liners and fishing boats that go up and down the
river, and brings the clarity of a nightmare to an image of a looming
Soviet warship rising out of the mist. In bringing the many shades of
the city to life, he is aided by a wealth of black-and-white
photographs (many of them by the famous Ara Guler) that are spread
across the pages of this book; the pictures don't quite illuminate the
text in the intense, immediate way that, for instance, the ones in W G
Sebald's works do, but Istanbul would have been a lesser book without
them, especially for a reader who is unfamiliar with the city.
Personally, I was more interested in the portions that dealt with
Orhan's life and his muses (there's a beautiful chapter on his first
love), and the frisson-creating little moments that echo scenes from
his novels. But those portions can't be sieved out from the whole,
since, as the author admits, his own soul is part of the city's. This
book is so full of detailed information about Istanbul that it's easy
to overlook how much it reveals about Pamuk himself. In many ways,
it's more candid than a conventional autobiography might have been.
Istanbul isn't always an easy read though. Some passages -- how to say
this about a favourite author without flinching -- just aren't as
engaging as they should be. Pamuk isn't really capable of being
uninteresting but he comes close here occasionally, especially in a
couple of descriptions that amount to little more than endless
processions of semi-colons ("...of the mosques whose lead plates and
steel gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries that
seem like gateways to another world, and their cypress trees; of the
little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of
tissues to every passer-by; of the clock towers no one ever
notices...")
Whatever its shortcomings, however, Istanbul is an affectionate and
informative work that has something in it both for Pamuk enthusiasts
and for those who seek an understanding of a great historical centre
(even though the book is unlikely to satisfy either group completely).
And for a work that obsesses so much about melancholia and a forgotten
past, it ends on a heartwarmingly forward-looking note: "I don't want
to be an artist," the young Orhan Pamuk tells his mother. "I'm going
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