Istanbul
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4.0 • 39 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the Nobel Prize winner and acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes a portrait of Istanbul by its foremost writer, revealing the melancholy that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost empire.
"Delightful, profound, marvelously origina.... Pamuk tells the story of the city through the eyes of memory." —The Washington Post Book World
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
With cinematic fluidity, Pamuk moves from his glamorous, unhappy parents to the gorgeous, decrepit mansions overlooking the Bosphorus; from the dawning of his self-consciousness to the writers and painters—both Turkish and foreign—who would shape his consciousness of his city. Like Joyce’s Dublin and Borges’ Buenos Aires, Pamuk’s Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Turkish novelist Pamuk (Snow) presents a breathtaking portrait of a city, an elegy for a dead civilization and a meditation on life's complicated intimacies. The author, born in 1952 into a rapidly fading bourgeois family in Istanbul, spins a masterful tale, moving from his fractured extended family, all living in a communal apartment building, out into the city and encompassing the entire Ottoman Empire. Pamuk sees the slow collapse of the once powerful empire hanging like a pall over the city and its citizens. Central to many Istanbul residents' character is the concept of h z n (melancholy). Istanbul's h z n, Pamuk writes, "is a way of looking at life that... is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating." His world apparently in permanent decline, Pamuk revels in the darkness and decay manifest around him. He minutely describes horrific accidents on the Bosphorus Strait and his own recurring fantasies of murder and mayhem. Throughout, Pamuk details the breakdown of his family: elders die, his parents fight and grow apart, and he must find his way in the world. This is a powerful, sometimes disturbing literary journey through the soul of a great city told by one of its great writers. 206 photos.
Customer Reviews
Istanbul
Melancholy, melancholy, melancholy... the author must have used the word several hundred times. He does convey a sense of the city, although through some rather gray colored glasses.