An Ottoman autobiography
By George Rosie
Sunday Herald/Scotland
10 April 2005
THERE’S a passage in Orhan Pamuk’s latest book which pretty well
sums up what it is all about. “After the Ottoman Empire collapsed,”
he writes, “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 in its 2000-year history. For me it has always been
a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I’ve spent my life
battling with this melancholy, or (like all Istanbullus) making it my
own …” Well, maybe. I’ve a few Istanbullus in my time and most of
them seemed cheerful enough. There’s a tendency among writers to make
large generalisations from the particular of themselves. Essentially,
Pamuk’s book is a middle-aged novelist’s account of his childhood,
adolescence and student career in his home city of Istanbul Into this
autobiography he weaves the history – or at least some of the history –
of the ancient city which was once one of the most cosmopolitan places
on the planet.
Pamuk was born in 1952 into a family which had flourished hugely
under the late Ottomans but was on the skids due to his father’s
lack of business acumen. In describing his relations he offers a
fascinating insight into middle-class Turkey with its German nannies
and enthusiasm for the social ronde of Paris. He creates a portrait
of a family in decline, anxious to be Western but rooted in a culture
becoming steadily more “Turkified” (his word) and Islamic.
“Great as the desire to Westernise and modernise may have been,” he
writes in his opening chapter, “the more desperate wish, it seemed,
was to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire: rather
as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions
and photographs – the effect on culture was reductive and stunting,
leading families like mine, otherwise glad of Republican progress,
to furnish their houses like museums.”
It was in just such a museum-like household that Pamuk was raised.
Home was a large Ottoman villa converted into flats with his widowed
grandmother living above him and his father’s brother and his family
living below. Pamuk’s mother, Sekure, was a handsome, ambitious,
highly-strung woman who took years to discover her husband, Gunduz,
kept a mistress in another part of the city. She did her best to keep
Pamuk on track to be an architect while he aspired to be a painter
and then a writer. This tension between Pamuk and his mother is played
out in the very last chapter.
But if Pamuk’s book has a central character, it is Istanbul, known
as Constantinople and the heart of eastern Christianity until it
fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. “Like most Istanbul Turks, I had
little interest in Byzantium as a child,” Pamuk writes. “I associated
the word with spooky, bearded, black-robed Greek Orthodox priests and
with the lively Greek families who “Cran the shoe stores, patisseries,
and haberdashery shops of Beyoglu”.
According to Pamuk, the modern descendants of those Byzantine
Christians are less secure than they used to be. They’ve never
forgotten the Muslim mobs who rampaged through the Greek and Armenian
quarters of the city in 1953, killing, pillaging and raping. It seems
that more Greeks have abandoned Istanbul in the past 50 years than
fled after the conquest of the city by the Ottomans in 1453. Which
is a sorry comment on modern Islam.
For all Pamuk’s talk of hamuz and the “city of ruins”, he paints
an engaging picture of life in a great city getting along in the
modern world. Istanbul plainly fascinates him. He writes fondly of
the apartment blocks and art galleries, the cobbled streets and old
palaces, the bridges and the mosques, the battered old taxis and the
rusting old Bosphorus ferries, the cafes and cinemas. In the process
he serves up some surprising facts about Istanbul. I’d no idea that,
until recently, only Bollywood cranked out more movies than the
Turkish film industry. Or that Istanbul usually sees a week or two
of snow during the winter.
And Pamuk has been handsomely served by his translator, Maureen
Freely. Many a fine book has been damaged en route to another
language. Too many translations have a nasty habit of clunking
along . But Maureen Freely is one translator who knows how to turn
a phrase. She deserves to be congratulated for her work here.
Which, however, is not without its faults. It would have benefited
from some picture editing. I’ve never seen a book with quite so many
pointless photographs, all of them in black and white and most of
them grainy. They come from a variety of sources, including the Pamuk
family. There are far too many of Orhan Pamuk himself as an infant,
toddler, and schoolboy. Most are neither interesting nor revealing,
and they give the book an unfortunate air of self- indulgence.
And while many of the Istanbul street-scenes are interesting
(particularly the older ones) I got a bit tired of looking at
similar-looking courtyards, lanes and buildings, none of which were
captioned. I became seriously irritated by not knowing where I was.
I found myself longing for a street map to locate the places that
Pamuk describes so vividly. Given that the book is rooted entirely
in Istanbul, a map of the city strikes me as pretty essential. For
all that, an absorbing, and so far as I can tell, well-written book.