Iletisim Publishing
Eastern Glow, Western Grays

Reviewed by Sandip Roy

Istanbul
Memories and the City

By Orhan Pamuk;
translated by Maureen Freely
KNOPF; 384 Pages; $26.95

Even if you didn't know Orhan Pamuk as the author of acclaimed novels such as "Snow," even if you had no familiarity with Istanbul as a city, Pamuk's memoir, "Istanbul: Memories and the City," would still be a fascinating literary adventure. In part tales of the city, laden with photographs, in part the portrait of the artist as a young man, it is overall a skillful literary exercise using the personal to map a larger portrait of a society at a crossroads.

Turkish society, as Pamuk describes it, is suspended, like his family, between the strident secular Westernization of the Ataturk years and the mossy decay of the Ottoman Empire exemplified by the stately mansions or yahs of the pashas along the Bosporus, which regularly go up in flames. Turkey sits at the confluence of Europe and Asia. But this melding of East and West produces a sense of cultural unease rather than vibrancy.

It is perhaps best symbolized by Pamuk's own living room. "Sitting rooms were not meant to be places where you could lounge comfortably; they were little museums designed to demonstrate to the hypothetical visitor that householders were westernized." So they are stuffed with locked glass cabinets of teacups and crystal glasses no one ever uses and pianos no one ever plays.

It gives the city what Pamuk calls the "melancholy of this dying culture. " He writes that the Istanbullus of his generation have shunned the vibrant reds, greens and oranges of their royal past that many Orientalists were enthralled by. Instead, Istanbul seems draped in a shade that lies between gray and charcoal, much like the coats of the roaming packs of dogs that infest the city.

If this all sounds drab and depressing, the book is far from that. It's an erudite memoir, rich in detail and research, though not warm and fuzzy. What Pamuk struggles to describe in this memoir is a Turkish word for which there is no English equivalent. Hüzün is a communal melancholy that stems not from the ruins of a civilization but from the heartache that comes from living every day amid those ruins. In the West, writes Pamuk, the remains of empires are preserved in museums. "The people of Istanbul simply carry on with their lives amid the ruins." And while Western observers might find picturesque the image of clothes hanging out to dry along ruined minarets, for Istanbullus, it's a constant reminder that their city will never again attain its former heights of culture and wealth. "Those of us who see the picturesque in the ruins -- invariably, we're people who come from the outside," Pamuk observes wryly.

Though the book does not extend to contemporary times, it is interesting to read about the debate over whether Turkey should join the European Union in the light of Pamuk's observations on the tangled relationship between Turkey and the West. He follows the footsteps of many Western writers, including a syphilitic Flaubert, Gide and Gautier, trying to look beyond the usual fascination with the exotic, the harems and dervishes, to see his own city through different eyes. In fact, few Turks actually wrote about their city until the 20th century. And even when they did, Pamuk worries that because the standard was already set, Istanbul's own columnists and diarists might know how to acquire their identity only by imitating others.

When he wants to abandon his architectural courses to become an artist, his mother scolds him, saying, "In Europe they don't think of an artist as a tradesman or a pickpocket, they treat artists as if they're special. But do you really think you can be an artist in a country like this and still keep your pride?"

It's unclear how much Pamuk's mother really knew of artists in Europe. As Pamuk tells it, while his grandmother was theoretically all for Ataturk's Westernization, in practice she was interested neither in East nor West, since she rarely left her house. Perhaps there is a connection between his housebound grandmother and the rise of Islamic parties in Turkey. Like the rest of Turkey's secular bourgeoise, Pamuk's fears are "not of God but of the fury of those who believed in Her too much."

But he admits that the Westernized secularization that has been spoon-fed to the nation has not been able to fill its spiritual void. It had given property owners the right to govern over the "semiliterates" in the name of modernization. It had made them able to talk about mathematics, business and soccer. But they suffered in silence the basic questions of life, religion, love and compassion. As more and more nations in the West grapple with waves of immigrants from other cultures and faiths, these are issues that all of us must contend with, not just hüzün-stricken Istanbullus.

(SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, 12.6.2005)