Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan PamukMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
"For anything we say about the city's essence says more about our own lives and our own states of mind. The city has no center other than ourselves."
I think this memoir would be best appreciated by either a passionate lover of either Istanbul or Pamuk. As this is my first by the author, I don't qualify, hehe.
The pictures are gorgeous, there's no doubt. And Pamuk did write in the intro that he meant it to be picked up and read in snippets, with a tenuous narrative thread that can read forwards or backwards. Part history, part travel guide, mostly a memoir of an author's unhappy childhood in a rich family, Pamuk drew comparisons to his own family's dwindling fortune with the melancholy "hüzün" pervading Istanbul's people, who "simply carry on with their lives amid the ruins" of a once-powerful city made powerless by its defeats by the West.
Taken as a literary whole, I found the book too long-winded, repetitive at times, and it was difficult to sympathize with the first-world problems of a man in a poor country, who felt himself better than everyone around him, who admitted that he could afford to be kept by his parents in comfort even if he didn't seek a profession of his own.
I suppose I went into this with too high expectations, and left rather disappointed. I hope his other works don't! After all, one doesn't win a Nobel for nothing!!
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