Istanbul: Memories and the City

Istanbul: Memories and the City
Orhan Pamuk, trans. Maureen Freely
Vintage International, 2006
400 pages
ISBN 978-1400033881
Recommended by: Don B.




It's been such a long time since I read this book-- I finished it probably at the end of January-- that I may not have anything particularly exciting to say about it. Memories and the City is Pamuk's memoir, in a way, and it's also a book about Istanbul, but more importantly it's both. It's a book about how a place creates a person, and vice versa, how a place is seen by and created by the person interacting with it. The book is studded with beautiful photos of the city by Ara Güler, as well as photographs of Pamuk and his family from the 50s to the 70s. His meditation on hüzün-- what he describes as a communal, shared, melancholy (as opposed to individual melancholy) shared by Istanbullus and created by the city itself-- provides a beautiful, though-provoking, very striking centerpiece and connecting thread through the book.

Also, if you are reading this book secretly and somewhat ashamedly hoping for a tragic love story worthy of any of Pamuk's protagonists, don't you worry. And actually, on that note, one of the things that made reading Memories and the City so valuable was having read it immediately before beginning The Museum of Innocence, which occupies much of the same spaces (physically and philosophically) in fiction as Memories does in memoir.

In Cukurcuma, Istanbul

And of course, this was the perfect way to get excited for and acquainted with Istanbul in advance. Literature, for me, was the best form of research I could have done before travelling.

A few quotations:

"Especially when reading the western travelers of the nineteenth century-- perhaps because they wrote about familiar things in words I could easily understand-- I realize "my" city is not really mine. Just as it is when I am contemplating the skyline and the angles most familiar to me-- from Galata and Cihangir, where I am writing these lines-- so it is, too, when I see the city through the words and images of Westerners who saw it before me; at times like these I must face my own uncertainties about the city and my tenuous place in it. I will often feel as if I've become one with that western traveler, plunging with him into the thick of life, counting, weighing, categorizing, judging, and in so doing often usurping his dreams, to become at once the object and subject of the western gaze. As I waver back and forth, sometimes seeing the city from within and sometimes from without, I feel as I do when I am wandering the streets, caught in a stream of slippery contradictory thoughts, not quite belonging to this place and not quite a stranger. This is how the people of Istanbul have felt for 150 years." (289)

"Is this the secret of Istanbul-- that beneath its grand history, its living poverty, its outward-looking monuments, and its sublime landscapes, the poor hide the soul of the city inside a fragile web? But here we have come full circle, for anything we say about the city's essence says more about our own lives and states of mind. The city has no centre other than ourselves." (349)