Some thoughts on Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk's Memoir Istanbul
Without getting too personal, I always feel like an outsider. Whether I’m with a group of strangers or surrounded by people I love and trust, I always feel just a bit disconnected. Yet, when I’m reading a book I truly love, this shadow—likes a sense of loneliness—seems to go away.
This certainly happened with Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, a memoir with which I felt a genuine kinship—even though I grew up in suburban Long Island. Understandably touted by critics as a book on melancholy, Istanbul is so much more that. Picture a young boy staring out a rain-slicked window into a world caught between East and West, tradition and modernity, peace and revolution. Istanbul, its history and its quirks, becomes a metaphor for Pamuk’s life as artist and outsider, as he chronicles his childhood and the spectral memories of his large extended family. It is these recollections, of his young life and of a city—haunted corners, crumbling streets and vacant places where loved ones once resided—that evoked my own memories of growing up. Maybe I’m not so disconnected after all.
