It gives the city what Pamuk calls the "melancholy of this dying culture. "Sitting rooms were not meant to be places where you could lounge comfortably they were little museums designed to demonstrate to the hypothetical visitor that householders were westernized." So they are stuffed with locked glass cabinets of teacups and crystal glasses no one ever uses and pianos no one ever plays. It is perhaps best symbolized by Pamuk's own living room. But this melding of East and West produces a sense of cultural unease rather than vibrancy. Turkey sits at the confluence of Europe and Asia.
Turkish society, as Pamuk describes it, is suspended, like his family, between the strident secular Westernization of the Ataturk years and the mossy decay of the Ottoman Empire exemplified by the stately mansions or yahs of the pashas along the Bosporus, which regularly go up in flames. In part tales of the city, laden with photographs, in part the portrait of the artist as a young man, it is overall a skillful literary exercise using the personal to map a larger portrait of a society at a crossroads. By Orhan Pamuk translated by Maureen FreelyĮven if you didn't know Orhan Pamuk as the author of acclaimed novels such as "Snow," even if you had no familiarity with Istanbul as a city, Pamuk's memoir, "Istanbul: Memories and the City," would still be a fascinating literary adventure.
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