This autobiography-cum-history-cum-travelogue was written by Orhan Pamuk, and first published in 2003. The English translation, by Maureen Freely, came out in 2005.

Pamuk, born in 1952 in Moda, has lived most of his life in Istanbul. His imagination, he says, "requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate: I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am".

His was not a happy family. There were business failures, scores to settle, and recriminations to nurse. Pamuk felt he was in competition with his brother for their mother's affections, and his parents frequently split up on a temporary basis. "For me," he explains, "the thing called family was a group of people who, out of a wish to be loved and feel peaceful, relaxed and secure, agreed to silence for a while each day the djinns and devils inside them and act as if they were happy."

Not surprisingly, therefore, he struggles as a youth. He finds it hard to fit in; his first romance ends in disappointment, when the young woman is sent abroad by her father; he falls out of love with painting; he doesn't want to complete his architecture degree.

And as a backdrop to all this, there's Istanbul: "The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been in its two-thousand-year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and end-of-empire melancholy. I've spent my life either battling with this melancholy, or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own."


All the photos are from our current trip

Melancholy... This book drips with it. It's a state that is described by a very specific Turkish word -- "huzun" (with two umlauts) -- and it's very much a multi-layered phenomenon, composed of the following (not necessarily mutually compatible) elements, which Pamuk teases out over the course of the book:

-- Istanbul was once the capital of a mighty empire, and now isn't;
-- Remnants of the old culture are all around, but it has been vanquished, and nothing has come to fill the void it has left;
-- Much of Istanbul is crumbling away;
-- Westerners disparage Istanbul, which is all the more hurtful because they cannot altogether be blamed for that;
-- This melancholy is corporate, rather than individual, and binds its subjects together;
-- Istanbullus both submit to melancholy, and claim it with pride;
-- Huzun can be disempowering, feeding pessimism and fatalism.

Ultimately, it is "the huzun that gives Istanbul its grave beauty, the huzun that is its fate".

Somehow emblematic of all this is the fact that Pamuk's childhood is punctuated by conflagrations, as one after another the old princely mansions burn down. The conflicting emotions experienced by those who watch them flame and turn to ashes -- excitement, sadness, schadenfreude, guilt -- aptly illustrate Istanbul's problematic relationship with its past more generally.



It's moving, this portrayal. And it's very beautiful. Pamuk is a master at evoking atmosphere, and his moody text is further enhanced by the superb black-and-white photos scattered throughout the chapters.

I can't help wondering, though, if there's just too much melancholy... Seen through my eyes, there's life everywhere here: the old guys gathered outside the tea houses; the kids playing football in the street outside; the punters gathered at the various eateries; the busy crowds flowing on and off the ferries... But I'm the first to recognize my gaze is very superficial, and I have no way of assessing what lies beneath. And Pamuk would no doubt say that I'm an outsider, and therefore not capable of recognizing the special quality that covers the city like gossamer. Westerners, he says, often fail to notice this emotion, which Istanbullus register "as something in between physical pain and grief".

Paradoxically, Pamuk prizes the eye of the outsider -- the insider-outsider, at least -- while at the same time pinpointing a problem with many of our "gazes": "To savour Istanbul's back streets... you must, first and foremost, be a 'stranger' to them... A crumbling wall, a wooden tekke -- condemned, abandoned and now fallen into neglect -- ... a row of houses abandoned by Greeks, Armenians and Jews as a nationalist state bore down on minorities... none of these things look beautiful to the people who live amongst them; they speak instead of squalor, helpless, hopeless neglect. Those who take pleasure in the accidental beauty of poverty and historical decay, those of us who see the picturesque in ruins -- invariably, we're people who come from the outside... Istanbul's greatest virtue is its people's ability to see the city through both Western and Eastern eyes... Even when I was a child, when the city was at its most run-down, Istanbul's own residents felt like outsiders half the time. Depending on how they were looking at it, they felt it was either too Eastern or too Western and the resulting uneasiness made them worry they didn't quite belong..."

This "East and West" contrast is just one of the tensions that Davide Deriu identifies (others juxtapose the personal and the collective, the insider and the outsider). But it obviously preoccupies Pamuk (if you search for "Western" in the text, you get 161 results...), and was felt very personally: "Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, part of me longed, like a radical Westerniser, for the city to become entirely Western... But another part of me yearned to belong to the Istanbul I had grown to love by instinct, by habit and by memory."



Elsewhere, Pamuk explains: "Especially when reading the Western travellers of the nineteenth century ... I realise that 'my' city is not really mine... When I see the city through the words and images of Westerners who saw it before me: it's at times like these that I must face my own uncertainties about the city and my tenuous place in it. I will often feel that I’ve become one with that Western traveller, plunging with him into the thick of life … 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’m 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 the last hundred and fifty years."



I've talked in a Purple Tern post about Pamuk's recollections of a more diverse past. He grew up with the prejudices of his time: "One of the great pleasures of my childhood was to go to Beyoglu with my mother and wander in and out of its Greek shops... I was made to understand that the Greeks, like the city's poor and the denizens of its shanty towns, were not quite 'respectable'."

But it was a tough time for everyone: "The death toll of the First World War ran into the hundreds of thousands, and despite the steady stream of Muslim refugees fleeing from the ethnic cleansing in the new Balkan republics, both the city's population and its wealth were much diminished. During the same period, Europe and the West were getting richer, thanks to huge technological advances. As Istanbul grew ever poorer, it lost its importance in the world and became a remote place burdened with high unemployment. As a child I had no sense of living in a great world capital but rather in a poor provincial city."

(It is slightly ironic, as Deriu points out, that Pamuk's book was originally published just when Istanbul was undergoing something of a revival, and subsequent editions have coincided with renewed blips in those fortunes.)



It is when Pamuk talks of the Bosphorus that the light comes in a little: "If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy and poverty, the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure and happiness... To be travelling through the middle of a city as great, historic and forlorn as Istanbul, and yet to feel the freedom of the open sea -- that is the thrill of a trip along the Bosphorus."

Of course, this experience, too, is all tied up with angst. Many disasters took place on this waterway -- collisions, fires, explosions -- and fear of the next one is never far from the consciousness of Istanbul-dwellers. And the Bosphorus also acts as a reminder of different days: "[To see the old villas and gardens] was to know a great, now vanished, civilisation had stood here, and from what they told me, once upon a time, people very much like us had a life extravagantly different from our own -- leaving us who followed them feeling poorer, weaker and more provincial... To be caught up in the beauties of the city and the Bosphorus is to be reminded of the difference between one's own wretched life and the happy triumphs of the past."

Nevertheless, the Bosphorus carries an almost spiritual significance, and the citizens of Istanbul are apparently very attached to their ferries: "Just as others become attached to Venice's vaporettos, and love to show off their knowledge of the various shapes and models, so too do Istanbullus dote on each and every ferry ever owned by the City Lines... [Theophile] Gautier wrote that every barber in Istanbul had a picture of a ferry hanging on the wall." Which is sweet...



What else?

Well, I loved the portrait of his grandmother, an indomitable old soul who ruled the household from her bed, which is where she would spend her mornings. In the afternoons she would read the newspaper, embroider, or smoke cigarettes and play bezique with her friends. She rarely left the house, and when she did, preparations would begin days ahead. "Twenty years later," Pamuk recalls, when we were living in other houses in other parts of Istanbul, I would often go to visit my grandmother in the Pamuk Apartments, and if I arrived in the morning I would find her in the same bed, surrounded by the same bags, newspapers, pillows and shadows." What a different world...

And I appreciated being introduced to a number of writers, both Turkish and others, who in their different ways have tackled Istanbul (I now have quite a list of books to peruse).

But I don't find Pamuk an easy writer. I read Snow back in 2007. In my diary I note that "the first few pages are deeply melancholy", and a couple of days in, I'm finding it "still miserable". But then, I was reading it on holiday in bright, sunny Queensland. No setting could have been more inappropriate... I ended up not liking the book particularly. I didn't warm to the main character, and found the central love story tedious and unconvincing. But I did rate the way the atmosphere was created; I found the melding of theatre and politics very clever (coups are always coups de theatre, after all); and I was impressed by the complexity of his portrayal of Islamism. "As always," my diary entry concludes, "it made me more interested in Turkey."

Now that I'm even MORE interested in Turkey, I intend to persist a bit. Things don't have to be easy, right?