The Gazette (Montreal)
June 11, 2005 Saturday
Final Edition
Pamuk mourns the loss of Istanbul’s greatness: Born at a time of
transition, author sees a city the world has forgotten
PAUL CARBRAY, The Gazette
Merging a writer’s life with a city isn’t a new idea. It’s been tried
countless times, and a couple of publishers recently began series
marrying a writer with a city or region.
Orhan Pamuk is well-qualified to write about Istanbul. He has lived
in the city for most of his life and is Turkey’s most famous
novelist, at least in the West.
This is not a conventional guidebook. Rather, it is a moody,
introspective look at a declining city that once ruled an empire and
at the life of a young boy trapped in a family riven by squabbles.
The Pamuk family, rich by Turkish standards, lives in the Pamuk
Apartments, a five-storey block. “My mother, my father, my older
brother, my grandmother, my uncles, and my aunts, we all lived on
different floors,” Pamuk writes.
The house is ruled by his grandmother, who spends most of her time in
bed, mourning while her sons squander the family fortune and the
marriage of Orhan’s father slowly disintegrates.
The reader is led into the decaying Istanbul of the 1960s to 1980s, a
city built on past glories and one that is trying to come to terms
with its past while turning its eyes toward the West.
Nineteenth-century wooden mansions called yalis are burning down
along the Bosphorus, a symbol of the destruction of Istanbul’s
Ottoman past.
“In my childhood, these Bosphorus villas had no attraction for the
nouveau riche and the slowly growing bourgeoisie,” Pamuk remembers.
“Because the rich of the republican era were not as powerful as the
Ottoman pashas, and because they felt more western sitting in their
apartments … viewing the Bosphorus from a distance, the old Ottoman
families now weakened and brought low … could find no takers for
their old Bosphorus yalis.”
It became public entertainment to watch these yalis burn down, and
Pamuk, his young girlfriend by his side, would watch with the crowds
on the water’s edge and draw his own conclusions about the loss of
empire.
Pamuk’s book is suffused with huzun, the uniquely Turkish form of
melancholy. He is saddened by what his once cosmopolitan city has
become, its once vibrant minorities, like Greeks and Armenians,
driven out by religious and secular strife, and the city transformed
by massive migration from the countryside.
The Turkish republic was 29 years old when Pamuk was born in 1952,
but Istanbul, the Istanbullus (what residents call themselves) and
the country were still in transition. Its script had been changed
from Arabic to the Roman alphabet, new dress codes were instituted
(at one point, wearing a fez was an offence), and the state was
determined to be secular.
Pamuk grows up to despise his compatriots’ slavish imitation of the
European west and misses the social cohesion of the old Turkish
empire.
Making the book more beguiling are its wonderful pictures, many of
them by Ara Guler, which record the Istanbul of times past. “I
relived much of the excitement and puzzlement of writing this book
while choosing the photographs,” Pamuk says.
But casting a shadow over everything is Pamuk’s sense of desolation,
his huzun, at what has happened to his beloved city.
“Gustave Flaubert, who visited Istanbul 102 years before my birth,
was struck by the variety of life in its teeming streets; in one of
his letters, he predicted that in a century’s time it would be the
capital of the world,” Pamuk writes.
“The reverse came true. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the world
almost forgot that Istanbul existed. The city into which I was born
was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before
in its 2,000-year history. For me, it has always been a city of ruins
and of end-of-empire melancholy.”
Istanbul: Memories and the City
Orhan Pamuk, Knopf, 384 pages. $34.95