The view from a rainy tram window at dusk; a slim man, glamorous in suit and sunglasses, disembarking from an aeroplane branded with the Turkish flag; porters bowed low crossing the Golden Horn; a woman and two small boys before a mirror, the younger turning back to face her; washing strung before a cityscape of domes and minarets; men clearing snow from a ferry roof, grey smoke filling the air around them; more snow, on tram tracks and across parked cars; a child camouflaged in the shadows of crumbling waterside mansions. The black-and-white photographs that run through Orhan Pamuk’s meditation on his hometown of Istanbul echo the words surrounding them: beautiful but melancholic, labyrinthine and occasionally disorienting. The mosaic of personal history and public life evokes the work of G. W. Sebald, another great modern novelist who used photographs to expose the past’s double nature: its strangeness and its intimacy.
In its scope Pamuk’s book also resembles the sprawling Istanbul Encyclopedia he loved as a boy. But where the author of that 12-volume tome struggled to make the city’s disorder and variety conform to foreign ‘scientific’ categories, Pamuk freely delights in his subject’s Protean nature and the particular obsessions of his own biography, giving chapters to street signs, his grandmother, religion, famous fires, newspaper columnists, Flaubert, painting, and fights with his older brother.
There is a symmetry to these many parts, however. The balancing point is a concern with the past. For Pamuk, Istanbul’s present is but a wreck of its past, ‘an ageing and impoverished city buried under the ashes of a ruined empire’. The dilapidated mansions, crumbling fountains, and demolished gardens of modern Istanbul exist in painful contrast to the Ottoman wonders recorded in artists’ prints and travellers’ tales. The gloomy legacy of Istanbul’s vanished glory is found not only in its streetscapes but also in its spirit—its hüzün, or melancholy, a concept which is the ruminative centre of Istanbul: Memories of a City. Introducing the term, Pamuk launches into one of the descriptive tours de force that characterise his memoir, listing in page after page its essential images:
…I am speaking of the old booksellers who lurch from one financial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between