Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk's autobiography (or "memoir", as he calls it himself), Istanbul, explores his childhood and maturity as carefully and profoundly as it catalogues the fall of a great Eastern empire (325). Only in the last few chapters are we able to place our confusion as to why the book is as much as a historical documentary on Istanbul as it is an autobiography: "But here we have come full circle, for anything we say about the city's essence says more about our own lives and our own states of mind. The city has no center other than ourselves"  (349). Pamuk cannot help but resonate with Istanbul and its melancholic ruins, writers, steam ships, and crowded streets of the rich minority and poor majority. He accepts and agrees with the city's hüzün, a communal sense of loss and "spiritual agony and grief", that stems from its dichotomous reality (90). It's caught between western and traditional culture, bickering ethnic groups, and waves of immigrants and is still "a place where, for the past 150 years, no one has been able to feel completely at home" (115). Although he acknowledges that "it won't do to use the city's melancholy to explain away my own", Pamuk simultaneously admits that if he does "feel deeply connected to my city" because it has given him a "deeper wisdom and understanding than any [he] could acquire in a classroom" (351-52).

Pamuk implies that this greater maturity that the city has granted him was more enlightening than any school education he received. Throughout the autobiography it is clear that his rich exploration of himself as an artist, thinker, brother, and son does indeed occur outside the classroom more often. Pamuk skipped school (primary, lycee/secondary and Technical University) out of "boredom", "shame", knowing that he'd have too much to do if he went to school, having an argument with his parents, "pure laziness or irresponsibility", or because he was a "house pet" and wanted solitude (304). His "melancholy, [my] existentialist despair" were also excuses for exploring familiar streets, where "everything was real and beautiful and irresistible as it had been when [he] was a child" (305-6).

I enjoyed this book. It's a particularly clever way of writing an autobiography, and at first glance, no one would easily guess that "Istanbul" is an autobiography. In fact, the title (and book cover) gives off the impression that it is a historical analysis, a personal travel log, or some sort of semi-biographical novel. It was tempting to get bogged down by the minute finicky details of both Istanbul's history and Pamuk's life. The black and white photos - an unchangeable fact of early photography, a reflection of the "tarnish of history", and implication of dichotomy - are welcome respites within the rich passages of biography and history. At first I was slightly peeved at Pamuk for talking so much about Istanbul, when he should include more explicit passages on his childhood, his family, his brother, school life if it is truly an autobiography. I realized, much to my relief, that the chapters on Istanbul and Pamuk were not exclusive: in talking about the city, he was writing about himself.