Istanbul, Hatıralar ve Şehir = Istanbul: Memories and the City, 2005, Orhan PamukIstanbul: Memories and the City is a largely autobiographical memoir by Orhan Pamuk that is deeply melancholic. It talks about the vast cultural change that has rocked Turkey – the unending battle between the modern and the receding past. It is also a eulogy to the lost joint family tradition. Most of all, it is a book about Bosphorus and Istanbul's history with the strait. It was translated into English by Maureen

This is a duel memoir, that of the author’s first twenty years of life and that of Istanbul during the same period. Pamuk has a poet’s voice. By that, I don’t mean that he uses flowery or metaphoric language, but rather that he has the ability to conjure the abstract into palpable form: the atmosphere of a neighborhood, the bonds in a family, the mood of a people. I was surprised how much I enjoyed this book that lacked any plot or narrative tension. I must have been in just the right mood.

(B+) 79% | GoodNotes: An effective, inviting blend of history and memoir. Though the word "melancholy" is overused to the point of cliché.

Pamuk was already one of my favourite authors when I read his memoir of his beloved city - Istanbul - in conjunction with a family vacation there. What an amazing reading experience that was!Imagine that old, old city, full of stories after centuries of human interaction, of cultural clashes and exchanges, of architectural wonders and wars of destruction. And then imagine one of its most talented writers, a storyteller with the power of 1001 nights, telling the story of the city from his person...

It feels very odd to be writing this review now, sitting in a car on my way back home, feeling bored and tired for no particular reason. And out of nowhere this book- which I finished more than a month ago, and entirely gave up on ever being able to write a decent review about- comes to my mind unbidden, as though deeply connected with my present state of mind. This is going to be one of the most personal reviews I’ll ever write, but that’s merely because Istanbul: Memories and the City has aff...

Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk (1952-) is an autobiographical memoir. He speaks of his life growing up in Istanbul in an apartment complex housing several generations of the large extended Pamuk family. He recounts events starting from the age of four. He speaks of his family, his schooling and his first love. Events are not told in chronological order. His decision to quit his architectural studies at university is where the memoir ends. Having lived all these years in Istanbul

Along with The World's Literature group, I have been reading a lot of books set in Turkey this year. Just check out what I've covered so far! One of the best known Turkish authors has to be Orhan Pamuk. I've only managed to read one book of his so far, but there are many more on my to-read list to get to. I actually think reading this autobiography/memoir first will add some understanding to any of his books that I read in the future. It covers his childhood in Istanbul, up through his coll...

Major part of the book describes what some poets, journalists and painters have written or painted about Istanbul during 19th century.But, when I picked this one up after reading My Name is Red, the expectation was to know how Pamuk describes Istanbul and his life in that city, not what some 19th century unknown travellers and century old journalists with difficult names to pronounce had to say. There were some interesting chapters, but we do not buy a highly priced book, printed on quality pape...

Were Orhan Pamuk active on Twitter back when he was writing Istanbul: Memories and the City he could have saved himself and his readers a great deal of time and frustration by simply distilling this work down to "Boo fucking hoo #firstworldproblems" and leaving it at that.Instead, we're left to slog through four hundred pages of angsty ennui which purport to represent the zeitgeist of a city that mourns the days it stood at the center of the world but in fact do little more than chronicle the th...

The sufi poets often compare their love for God to that of legendary lovers like Laila-Majnu and Heer-Ranjha for each other. This love which is just a painful longing (all those love stories are of star crossed lovers) for something worth annihilating oneself for - is called 'Huzun'. Despite its being melancholic, they still prefer having it - having an unrequited love is better than having none.Writers, the ones I like, often have little such love for God. Some of them seem to searching for suc...

This is the second book by Pamuk that I have read. I would like to point out that it seems that this book should be read either before or after The Museum of Innocence because I found myself making it notes of where the novel and this memoir collide.I've never been to Istanbul, but now I want to go. What Pamuk does is not only describe his family but a city as a conflict between East and West. While it is not something that my own western city feels, it is somewhat akin to the feeling that Phila...

It is just lucky that I happened to read Menocal's Ornament of the World just before this, as it perfectly prepared me for the psychological labyrinth that is this book. It introduced me to a beautiful, helpful image for Pamuk's creation- the "memory palaces" and "memory gardens". This is not an introduction to Istanbul, it is a memory palace worthy of the wildest child's fantasies that haunt this tapestry. Perhaps John Adams, the minimalist composer, put it best when discussing his piece On the...

For me, a good day is a day like any other, when I have written one page well. Except for the hours I spend writing, life seems to me to be flawed, deficient, and senseless. Those who know me well understand how dependent I am on writing, tables, pens, and white paper, but they still urge me to 'take a bit of time off, do some travelling, enjoy life!' Those who know me even better understand that my greatest happiness is writing, so they tell me that nothing that keeps me far from writing, paper...

Pamuk adds another layer to Istanbul’s proverbial description as “the bridge between east and west” by showing how the major Istanbul modernists – poet Yahya Kemal and novelist A.H. Tanpinar, new names to me, I have to follow up – derived a poetics of post-imperial ennui and urban decay from the melancholic image of their city recorded or dreamed by travelling French writers in the nineteenth century. “[T]he roots of our hüzün [urban melancholy] are European: the concept was first explored, expr...

This was not, first of all, the book I espected it to be. It was not truly an autobiography of the author, who gave nothing at all away, at least in the context of the west (perhaps it would shock conservative Turks that he apparently had a sexual relationship with a girl as a young man, but I don't know what Turkish mores are, so I shouldn't judge) and gave away little in terms of the city that he was supposedly also biographying. It gave tantalising hints of things, and there were potential th...

"Notions of beauty or of the landscape of a city are inevitably intertwined with our memories."************Orhan Pamuk, Nobel laureate, wrote this 2003 memoir of growing up in Istanbul in the 50's and 60's. He senses the loss of empire in the crumbling Ottoman houses around him, describing his large modern family home as a museum where western furnishings replaced the traditional Turkish culture. His grandfather was a wealthy industrialist but his father was slowly losing the family fortune. As

There's really no nice way to say this. One of the deservedly obscure authors he spends a chapter praising is described as being some kind of pedophile. This isn't a pretend metaphor in Lolita, this is Pamuk's loving description of a nobody. If that's not enough, his best description of Istanbul, one of the largest cities today, and, more importantly, in history, is mopery about his apartment and decaying wooden houses near it. To spend a day in the tiny English section of a large bookstore and

A beautiful memoir and nostalgic look at Istanbul, this book is very readable and poetic. It is also an autobiography of the author's childhood and the emergence of his desire to be a writer and how that is tied to his sense of melancholy. Literary references abound and helped me appreciate the uniqueness of Istanbul and its part in history. It is probably a must for the next time I get to Istanbul with the time and luxury to explore and dream like Orhan.

Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Istanbul, it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.And likewise this is a deeply moving memoir of a life lived in Istanbul. The Turkish tradition of melancholy is brought to focus by accounts of the author's life in the city and bejeweled by haunting photographs. This is winding stroll the history -- the collapse of the Ottoman era -- and through memory. Pamuk's grandfather was was quite wealthy but his two sons apparently lacked financial...

neo-nostalgiaI remember the Boston of my childhood, though I remember Marblehead (a small town to the north) much better because I actually lived there. The two places had certain sights, sounds, smells, and "feelings" that, for the most part, have vanished like a morning fog off the Atlantic. But anchoring all those sensory aspects of the places was history, a giant kaleidescope of shifting people, institutions and events that created the then present, that created the new present, and will cre...