Istanbul: Memories of a City

by Maureen Freely (Translator), Maureen Freely (Translator), Orhan Pamuk (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $11.70

  Istanbul is a shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2006, was born in Istanbul, 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 huzun- that all Istanbullus share: the sadness that comes of living amid the ruins of a lost Ottoman Empire. As he companionably guides us across the Bosphorus, through Istanbul's historical monuments and lost paradises, its dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways, he also introduces us to the city's writers, artists and murderers. Like the Dublin of Joyce and Jan Morris' Venice, Pamuk's Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $11.81

  'From a very young age, I knew I was not alone: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double...' For Orhan the day-dreaming child, the heart of the great teeming city of Istanbul was the building known as 'Pamuk Apartments', where each branch of his large and extended family occupied its own separate floor. Now the writer Orhan Pamuk, with his unique sense of history and extraordinary gift for narrative, revisits his own family's secrets and idiosyncracies, discovering what made them typical of their time and place. And as he companionably guides us through Istanbul's monuments and lost paradises, its dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways, he introduces the writers, artists, columnists and mad popular historians who have tracked Istanbul through one hundred and fifty years of 'modernisation'. And so, in a beautiful and quite riveting fashion, Pamuk transforms the form of autobiography, and what begins as a portrait of the artist as a young man becomes a portrait of the artist as a city.