Iletisim Publishing
The Pleasure of Ruins

David Flusfeder reviews
Istanbul: Memories of a City
by Orhan Pamuk

Europe has its share of melancholy cities: the citizens of Lisbon take each destructive fire as fate's latest grim joke; Warsaw has been regularly ripped apart by foreign invaders; and it's hard to be cheerful in Trieste or, indeed, Cardiff. But the Istanbullu novelist Orhan Pamuk makes a persuasive, if repetitive, case for his city to be ranked as the most melancholy of all.

The Turkish word for melancholy is hüzün; in Pamuk's view, the city is soaked with the stuff, and so are its writers: "For the poet, hüzün is the smoky window between him and the world." Istanbul is a black and white city, Pamuk says, and in this combination of memoir and sad urban love letter the pages are illustrated with dozens of rather beautiful black and white photographs, whose romantic purpose is to allow the foreign reader to experience the same pangs as the city's inhabitants. In the ruins of Ottoman greatness, there now stands "a pale, poor, second-class imitation of a Western city", where only the mosques and the packs of wild dogs survive from the city visited by rapt or disgusted Orientalists a century and a half ago.

Describing cities and city life is one of the things that literature does supremely well, but up until the 20th century all the literature inspired by Istanbul was written by Westerners, usually French visitors in pursuit of the exotic.

The influence of Verlaine, Mallarmé, Valéry and Gide has been disproportionately large, but it was Gérard de Nerval and Théophile Gautier who gave Istanbullus their images of the city- "a place where, for the past 150 years, no one has been able to feel completely at home".

"To be caught up in the beauties of the city and the Bosphorus is to be reminded of the difference between one's own wretched life and the happy triumphs of the past," writes Pamuk. Of course, the past was never as happy as all that, and the present hasn't always been so bad either, especially if, like Pamuk, you come from a privileged background. With the help of 20th-century Turkish novelists, poets and journalists, Pamuk does a good job picking at lines of received wisdom.

It's a difficult task, which requires perhaps too many expository lessons in culture and history along the way, and isn't helped by Pamuk's essayistic technique, which perversely chooses to move from the general to the particular. ("Allow me to illustrate this with a story about Flaubert's penis," is one of the happier versions of this conclusion-to-evidence device.)

For the novelist Tapinar, the poor neighbourhoods of Istanbul were symbolic of Turkey's own impoverishment in the modern world. Pamuk tells us this first, rather stealing the thunder of "Turkey's greatest 20th-century novelist", so, when we read Tapinar's words making the same observation, the argument has the diminished power of the already-read.

There is plenty, however, to entertain and interest. The story of Flaubert's penis is a good one, with its components of syphilis, hair-loss, mother-love, orientalism and literary history. The account of the obsessive - and failed - encyclopedist Koçu is fascinating: a life devoted to building literary curiosity chests of city anecdote and homoerotic mutilation fantasy. But the book comes alive in the chapter on first love, when it casts off its didactic purpose to become pure memoir.

The overall effect of Istanbul is like being in the melancholy company of a learned, egotistical uncle, who takes you on a slow tour of his photo albums in twilight. This uncle has perfect recall for details, but his memory is almost entirely visual - Pamuk's highest adjective for other writers is "painterly". As we are taken through the sights of ruins, as changes in the light are described to us, the other senses get hungrier. We become pathetically grateful when we are allowed any food, such as when Pamuk mentions the taste of his grandmother's sweet tea, which she always drank with a piece of hard goat's cheese in her mouth.

As with any writer's memoir of his early years, the central story here is the making of the writer, the significant events, both internal and external, the movements of sensibility that have sent him on this path. Fans of Pamuk's fiction will be grateful for this book; travellers familiar with Istanbul will be stimulated; those unfamiliar with either may well be wearied.

(DAILY TELEGRAPH, 13.4.2005)