Istanbul: Memories and the City

Zusatztext Delightful! profound! marvelously original. . . . Pamuk tells the story of the city through the eyes of memory." – The Washington Post Book World "Far from a conventional appreciation of the city's natural and architectural splendors! Istanbul tells of an invisible melancholy and the way it acts on an imaginative young man! aggrieving him but pricking his creativity." – The New York Times "Brilliant. . . . Pamuk insistently discribes a]dizzingly gorgeous! historically vibrant metropolis." – Newsday “A fascinating read for anyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with this fabled bridge between east and west.” – The Economist Informationen zum Autor Orhan Pamuk's novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in Istanbul. Klappentext A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy-or h ü z ü n- that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire.With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters-both Turkish and foreign-who would shape his consciousness of his city. Like Joyce's Dublin and Borges' Buenos Aires, Pamuk's Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving. Chapter One Another Orhan From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: Somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double. I can’t remember where I got this idea or how it came to me. It must have emerged from a web of rumors, misunderstandings, illusions, and fears. But in one of my earliest memories, it is already clear how I’ve come to feel about my ghostly other. When I was five I was sent to live for a short time in another house. After one of their many stormy separations, my parents arranged to meet in Paris, and it was decided that my older brother and I should remain in Istanbul, though in separate places. My brother would stay in the heart of the family with our grandmother in the Pamuk Apartments, in Ni?anta?ý, but I would be sent to stay with my aunt in Cihangir. Hanging on the wall in this house–where I was treated with the utmost kindness–was a picture of a small child, and every once in a while my aunt or uncle would point up at him and say with a smile, “Look! That’s you!” The sweet doe-eyed boy inside the small white frame did look a bit like me, it’s true. He was even wearing the cap I sometimes wore. I knew I was not that boy in the picture (a kitsch representation of a “cute child” that someone had brought back from Europe). And yet I kept asking myself, Is this the Orhan who lives in that other house? Of course, now I too was living in another house. It was as if I’d had to move here before I could meet my twin, but as I wanted only to return to my real home, I took no pleasure in making his acquaintance. My aunt and uncle’s jovial little game of saying I was the boy in the picture became an unintended taunt, and each time I’d feel my mind unraveling: my ideas about myself and the boy who looked like me, my picture and the picture I resembled, my home and the other house–all would slide about in a confusion that made me long all the more to be at home again, surrounded by my family. Soon my wish came true. But the ghost of the ot...

Report

"Delightful, profound, marvelously original.... Pamuk tells the story of the city through the eyes of memory." The Washington Post Book World

"Far from a conventional appreciation of the city's natural and architectural splendors, Istanbul tells of an invisible melancholy and the way it acts on an imaginative young man, aggrieving him but pricking his creativity." The New York Times

"Brilliant.... Pamuk insistently discribes a]dizzingly gorgeous, historically vibrant metropolis." Newsday

A fascinating read for anyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with this fabled bridge between east and west. The Economist

Product details

• Authors: Orhan Pamuk
• Assisted by: Maureen Freely (Translation)
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 11.07.2006
• EAN: 9781400033881
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-3388-1
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 134 mm x 202 mm x 22 mm
• Series: VINTAGE BOOKS; Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Travel > Travelogues, traveller's tales