Istanbul
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Istanbul, through the mind of its most celebrated writer
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
'A declaration of love.' Sunday Times
'A fascinating read for anyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with this fabled bridge between east and west.' The Economist
'An irresistibly seductive book' Jan Morris, Guardian
In a surprising and original blend of personal memoir and cultural history, Turkey's most celebrated novelist, Orhan Pamuk, explores his home of more than fifty years.
What begins as a portrait of the artist as a young man becomes a shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world's greatest cities. Beginning in the family apartment building where he was born, and still lives, Pamuk uses his family secrets to show how they were typical of their time and place. He then guides us through Istanbul's monuments and lost paradises, dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets and waterways, and introduces us to the city's writers, artists and murderers.
Like Joyce's Dublin and Borges' Buenos Aires, Pamuk's Istanbul is a triumphant encounter of place and sensibility, beautifully written and immensely moving.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Turkish novelist Pamuk (Snow) presents a breathtaking portrait of a city, an elegy for a dead civilization and a meditation on life's complicated intimacies. The author, born in 1952 into a rapidly fading bourgeois family in Istanbul, spins a masterful tale, moving from his fractured extended family, all living in a communal apartment building, out into the city and encompassing the entire Ottoman Empire. Pamuk sees the slow collapse of the once powerful empire hanging like a pall over the city and its citizens. Central to many Istanbul residents' character is the concept of h z n (melancholy). Istanbul's h z n, Pamuk writes, "is a way of looking at life that... is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating." His world apparently in permanent decline, Pamuk revels in the darkness and decay manifest around him. He minutely describes horrific accidents on the Bosphorus Strait and his own recurring fantasies of murder and mayhem. Throughout, Pamuk details the breakdown of his family: elders die, his parents fight and grow apart, and he must find his way in the world. This is a powerful, sometimes disturbing literary journey through the soul of a great city told by one of its great writers. 206 photos.
