Response to Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul"

Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul is a memoir detailing Pamuk’s life and upbringing, an autobiographical account of the author’s experience in a city where East and West collide and where the older, wealthier, western way of life is slowly being replaced by a newer, eastern way of life. Pamuk’s family is part of this dying upper class, a remnant of the old city, and his childhood home, a large apartment building inhabited by the majority if Pamuk’s extended family, is described as a “museum.” This description seems to parallel Pamuk’s view, at least in retrospect, of the entire city at the time of his upbringing. In the midst of the dying remnants of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Republic of Turkey, Pamuk is walking through a museum, in a sense. He is living in a time and place with significance beyond the present. Instabul, as a city, is incredibly old, with a history much longer and more complex than the American cities with which we might be more familiar. This city, in many ways, tells a story, and rather than a strict autobiography, Istanbul seems like Pamuk’s way of inserting himself into this larger story and telling as best he can based on his own eyewitness account.

One of the most important ideas that Pamuk presents in Istanbul, by my observation at least, is the concept of shared melancholy. “Hûzûn,” a Turkish word that seems to go beyond the traditional English meaning of “melancholy,” is described as a sort of all-encompassing sadness shared by the city. Hûzûn, however, is not merely an emotional experience, it is a state of existence in which Istanbul exists, a mass knowledge and recognition of loss and of change, of the old way of life that is being forgotten. The word “melancholy” comes up again and again in Pamuk’s memoir, and more often than not, Pamuk seems to be using it to refer to the loss, or at least the ignorance, of the city’s past. Istanbul is a city with a story, and this story has not always been a happy one. The change occurring in Pamuk’s own lifetime is one that comes with a profound sense of loss and a somber recognition that the influx of a new cultural era means the loss of an old way of life, one that Pamuk and his family are still part of.

These larger ideas seem the primary reason that Istanbul is a successful piece of literature and an autobiographical account that manages to avoid becoming a self-serving rant or a volume full of unnecessary and vain detail relating to the life of the author. While the book is certainly autobiographical in many ways, it is not a book about Pamuk, and using the name of the city as the book’s title seems an appropriate choice. Istanbul is about the story of the city, a sort of museum in which Pamuk is only a visitor.