Istanbul: Memories and the City Book Review

“For a second, I was in control 

I had it once, I lost it though  

And all along the fire below would rise”

True Love ~ Coldplay

       When you hear the name of Orhan Pamuk, what’s the first book that comes to your mind? My Name Is Red, I suppose? It’s so because that book is world famous and also aided in Pamuk’s wining the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. Even I was introduced to Pamuk through this book; Ayon vaia recommended it. I could only read a bit of it, because the device I was reading it on got damaged and I haven’t got to get back to the book till date.

       Thankfully, I was introduced to another Pamuk by my friend Prodipto. Actually, he was interested in the book and I got it for him. And the time I had the book with me before I send it to him, I shuffled through Istanbul: Memories and the City. I read bits of the book, esp. the pages adjoining the black and white photos in it. Indeed, it was the photos that first caught my attention. But when I read those “bits” along with them, something far more striking got hold of me.

       It was the overwhelming melancholy seeping through the photos and the words that are laid upon the pages of the book.

       I have read a number of sad books until now. Those books spoke of love lost, friendship lost, betrayal and death. The emotion of sadness is so powerful in some of those books that it has made me cry.

       Melancholy is different than sadness. It does not make you cry. Melancholy is a kind of longing for what once was and isn’t there anymore. It is like a forgotten tune, that you still hum but don’t know the lyrics of. It is a craving for the past only for the sake of craving. It is kind of saudade, while saudade is itself a kind of melancholy. Melancholy doesn’t require a reason – it comes to you even in the sunniest of days. Melancholy is in the songs, that make you want to just sit down and think of nothing, although they don’t speak of sorrow. Melancholy is in the alap of an Indian Classical Music piece. Melancholy is soothing. Melancholy is peaceful.

I can hear the saudade,  

Slowly weaving an unknown tune. 

The strings are stretched to the horizon  

Where the distant stars fret over the sky.

~ Tale As Old As Time

       And I found this melancholy in the book, just by reading bits of it. So I decided to read it and downloaded an Ebook for my kindle – a luxury gifted to me by Emon. And when I started to read it properly, I was overwhelmed by the melancholy Orhan Pamuk has so beautifully put in the book.

“বইটা  আসলেই  অনেক  শান্ত, স্নিগ্ধ,  পুরনো  দুঃখের  মত।“

~ মাঈশা

       I think, by the time Pamuk sat down to write the book, there were many color photos of Istanbul. But they wouldn’t have delivered the melancholy as good as the black and white ones did. 

“To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world.”

~ Orhan Pamuk

        The photos are arranged in such a way throughout the book that you will be able to read the images as you see the words. In fact, Pamuk’s style of writing is somewhat like this. He puts more into a sentence than I can put in a paragraph. There are portions of the sentences that are like wormholes – take you to a different dimension, then bring you back to the first – just as the sentence ends.

“After reading this she would peer at me through the glasses that made her cataract look even more disconcerting and give me a strange mocking smile, leading me to wonder, as I tried to smile in the same way, whether she was laughing at herself or because she knew by now that life was nonsense.”

~ Orhan Pamuk

      The book has a sense of peace flowing through it, which I guess is actually due to the melancholy. You can read it on a sunny day, on a rainy day, after waking up in the morning, before going to sleep at night. You can read it when you are sad, or when you are happy.

       Just open a chapter and dive into the cobblestone roads of Istanbul lined with old ruins and modern apartments.

“I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down wooden mansions; only in Istanbul have I seen this texture, this shading.”

~ Orhan Pamuk

       Another beauty of the book is that the chapters are not written in any chronological order. Instead, Pamuk has written them each based on separate things. And Istanbul is in every of these chapters.

       The book is also semi-autobiographical. It shows us the life of Orhan Pamuk against the canvas of the melancholic Istanbul. In fact, there is a Turkish word for this kind of melancholy. It’s hüzün (pronounce it like hizin). Pamuk has dedicated a whole chapter on hüzün.

“On cold winter mornings, when the sun suddenly falls on the Bosphorus and the faint vapor begins to rise from the surface, the hüzün is so dense you can almost touch it, almost see it spread like a film over its people and its landscapes.”

~ Orhan Pamuk

      The book is probably the best taste of melancholy I’ve had the chance to enjoy in the form of written words. This is more than a memoir for me. While Istanbul has endured shifts of change through dynasties and governments, the city I’ve grown up in has endured such shifts in my own lifetime. And just as Pamuk longs for the old Istanbul he has seen as a child, I long for the old Rajshahi I’ve loved since I was a child.

“Why instead of the sun-drenched postcard views of Istanbul that tourists so loved, did I prefer the semidarkness of the back streets, the evenings and cold winter nights, the ghost people passing through the light of the pale streetlamps, the cobblestone views, their loneliness?”

~ Orhan Pamuk

       I think, the book Istanbul: Memories and the City has given me a new parameter to look at my Rajshahi. For those who have known Rajshahi as I have, they will also find hüzün in its old roads and houses that are still found throughout the city.

“For the natives of a city, the connection is always mediated by memories.”

~ Orhan Pamuk

       Pamuk has helped me love my city in a way I never thought I could love it.

“So it was that I finally came to relax and accept the hüzün that gives Istanbul its grave beauty, the hüzün that is its fate.” 

“I was slowly coming to understand that I loved Istanbul for its ruins, for its hüzün, for the glories once possessed and later lost.”

~ Orhan Pamuk

       I thank Prodipto for letting me get this book for him. Otherwise, I would have never known what I was missing.

“I poured my soul into the city's streets, and there it still resides.”

~ Orhan Pamuk

       Here are some more quotes I liked in the book:

“As I grew older, the ghost became a fantasy and the fantasy a recurrent nightmare.”

“My imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view.”

“Once imprinted in our minds, other people's reports of what we've done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember.”

“It is resignation that nourishes Istanbul's inward-looking soul.”

“Perhaps I look at these paintings precisely because they make me sad.”

“Then as now, home served as a center for the world in my mind - as an escape, in both the negative and positive sense of the word.”

"All civilizations are as transitory as the people now in cemeteries." - Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar.

“Both were fat, but because they lived at a time and in a culture in which this was not stigmatized, they were at ease about it.”

“I came to understand that the place they called school had no part in answering life's most profound questions; rather its main function was to prepare us for "real life" in all its political brutality.”

“When you see a beautiful woman in the street, don't look at her hatefully as if you're about to kill her and don't exhibit excessive longing either; just give her a little smile, avert your eyes, and walk on.”

“Religion may have been the province of the poor, but now I saw that - contrary to the caricatures in newspapers and my republican household - religious people were harmless.”

“But the comfort of this thought was dissolved by the fear that one day the poor might use their special relationship with God against us.”

“The joy I felt upon finishing a painting was so great that I wanted to touch it, pick out some detail to embrace, even take it into my mouth, bite it, eat it.”

“Because for me happiness occurred when the people who loved me were suppressing their demons and I was free to play.”

“Flaubert was the first to note that the gravestones one saw all over the city were, like the memories of the dead themselves, slowly sinking into the earth as they aged, soon to vanish without a trace.”

“It was in this way, and without announcing itself as a love affair, that the relationship between a nineteen-year-old artist and his even younger model began to dance in harmony with a strange music whose notes we did not even understand.”

“As we kissed, we held each other's faces in our hands as if they were as fragile as porcelain.”

“Here amid the old stones and the old wooden houses, history made peace with its ruins; ruins nourished life and gave new life to history.”