Before my
trip to Istanbul, I decided to read something about the city, and I
picked up this memoir by Orhan Pamuk, the greatest living Turkish
writer. Istanbul as described by this author is a decadent and gloomy
city, where people live side by side with a persistent nostalgia for
the Ottoman Empire and for the greatness of the past. By the end of
the book it becomes clear that the author uses Istanbul to talk about
himself, and that the city becomes a double for the writer. It is
undeniably true that the Istanbul of sultans and harems is long gone,
but the city the author remembers, with decrepit wooden houses,
pastry shops he visited as a child hand in hand with his mother, and
dilapidated secondary streets is also a thing of the past. Rather
than identify himself as an accomplished writer, Pamuk prefers to
depict himself as a failed painter, obsessed with the vedute of
Istanbul created by Melling, a German visitor in the city, and
therefore he embodies the spirit of this sad, bleak and dusty
Istanbul he describes and cherishes.
Pamuk writes
about his childhood and adolescent years in a big and dusty house in
an affluent neighbourhood of the city, Beşiktaş:
his large family, his love affair with a fellow student, his own
sullenness and imagination as a child, and his relationship with the
city, the countless ships cruising the Bosphorus and the opulent
Ottoman palaces falling to
pieces dotting his memories. He also lingers on his
fascination with the complex history of Istanbul, and with a quirky
encyclopedia of the city written by a certain Reşat
Ekrem Koçu,
explaining how the author freely inserted stories, personal opinions,
anecdotes and even his sexual preferences into a publication that was
inspired by Western encyclopedias but had a distinctive Turkish
flavour.
By telling anecdotes, describing parts of the town as they were when he
was young, and writing about the historians and intellectuals of
nineteenth and twentieth-century Istanbul Orhan Pamuk accompanies the
reader among sultans and paşas, Western writers fascinated by the city, yalis on the waterfront, and bankrupt businessmen trying to revive the once
prosperous commerce of the town.
The book
comes with many early twentieth-century pictures of Istanbul that are
quite fascinating. Having been there, one can see how different the
city is now: the rotting wooden houses are now heavily restored and
painted in pastel colours, to the point that it is hard to
distinguish the historic buildings from the fake new ones built in
imitation of that same style.
This is a
perfect book to learn something about Istanbul, but it's more on how
it was than on how it is. It's written beautifully, and even though
it's non-fiction it's perfectly readable and enjoyable. Pamuk may not
be everyone's cup of tea – his slow, descriptive style, and his
preference for sad tones may put you off – but if you want to know
how a contemporary master writes then give it a try. You'll learn
more about a rich and interesting culture that is Western and
non-Western at the same time, and that had a great influence on our ideas and preconceptions about the Orient.
In italiano: "Istanbul. I Ricordi e la Città" di Orhan Pamuk
Edito da Einaudi, 2008
pp.384, €11,05
