The book is a combination of Orhan Pamuk's own life (autobiography) and the description of the city of Istanbul. As the author himself says in the book: "I described Istanbul when I described myself and I described myself when I described Istanbul." (p. 382) The author narrates Istanbul from his own perspective, his memories, the painters and writers who have depicted and described Istanbul. The historical period of these descriptions is at the end of the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of the Turkish Republic.

Note: I didn't like the book. It was a dull and long world, and things like "the melancholy of Istanbul" were constantly repeated in it, which made reading the book itself melancholy! Of course, it was useful to get a general sense of Istanbul in that period.

P.S: Because of the holiday trip that I want to take to Turkey, I decided to read books by Turkish writers. It seems that Pamuk is a good choice because of the descriptions he has of the city. I borrowed the book from Mehdi Afrouzmaneshi in the newspaper.

https://goo.gl/LgU5o7

I started this before my trip to Istanbul and it ended after the trip. There was an unknown excitement and then, reading about the familiar environment and spaces. The things and people I had written about, I had seen before and now I felt sad for them. The boy who was practicing English to meet his friends after his family had immigrated to Turkey, the dark-haired and colored-haired boys and girls who were sitting on the cobblestones at the end of the street in their shabby clothes, looking like the children one sees in the slums, the old men and women who were taking the ferry, the big posters of Erdogan, the slums, the branded shops that were divided and their space was completely different from the space of the slums from the ground to the sky, and its cold and gentle air which was the best air in the world for me.

Last night when I was returning home, he said, "You know I was happy here before, but not anymore. I know it and I can manage it, but it's not mine. It's like I'm a traveler who came to hit my head and then returned home from this place that's not mine."

Don't think that I can write about "Tehran" one day like Pamuk wrote about "Istanbul". Pamuk knew Istanbul with "hüzün" (melancholy), but Tehran has a deep wound. It hurts and blood is constantly flowing from it and it never heals.

My father used to tell me: The best thing a person can do is to live his own way - money can never be the goal, but if happiness depends on it, then it can be a means to achieve it..

Nothing in the world matters to me, I don't care about the future or what people will say or any institution or even the literary fame that I spent long nights in the past dreaming of. This is me and this is my personality..

The autobiography of the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk.. It is a qualitative journey in an emotional journey
It is a deep composition and a new understanding of life
It is an autobiographical novel for every person who lived in a provincial city.. and grew up within a fragmented family
It is an expression of the hidden complexity in our lives..

A book that talks about the emergence of an inspired writer among the alleys of Istanbul
This city full of melancholy and the smoke of expressions
This city that has changed its face many times
A city that lived its greatest days and then lived its days of decline, so it colored its people with its fluctuations..

This book was for me the best journey in which I became Istanbul while I was sitting behind my desk
I passed over the Galata Bridge.. and wandered in the alleys of Cihangir and then passed by Nishan Tash
I took the steamboat and walked along the shores of the Bosphorus..

And as the writer says: "It is not certain that life will be this bad, sometimes my heart fears that no matter what befalls me, I can always walk a long way along the shores of the Bosphorus."

I drank boza from Wafaa and then climbed the Süleymaniye and descended to Tophane
How lucky and provincial I am because I got to know Istanbul
How lost I am within its alleys, not finding the answers
Nevertheless, it is better for me to continue asking in any case..

In the book, there are also recommendations for other books that lived with Istanbul
There is a reference to the painter Ara Güler.. the melancholy painter whom I love and love his black and white albums and the sad black and white that does not satisfy my eyes from watching and following it as if it were a real film..

And there is a mention of Yashar Kemal and the novel "Peace" by Tanpinar
And there is a depiction of Istanbul as the Europeans saw it during the Ottoman Empire and after its fall..

In it, there is a witty talk about the Westernization movement after World War I and the dramatic transformation that Turkey went through..

How skilled Mr. Orhan is in hunting his feelings and writing them and expressing them with sophistication
This biography is beautiful in everything it contains.. in its simplicity and its captivity, in its depth and its shallowness
In short: If you want to learn about life, then live in Istanbul
We can only love our city as we love our family, but we must decide which part of the city we love and why?

When I started reading the book, on one of the pages I wrote: "I must read this book with more patience." Now as I am writing this, the 473-page book has been completed in one week, and throughout all the hours of my day and everywhere, it was like the dearest thing in my heart.

Let's read Istanbul to love cities, even if with their sorrows, even if with their long history and destiny, even if they cast a gray color on our memories. We don't understand, but the "city" has an active presence in shaping our future, past, and present. Let's read Istanbul to get lost in the beautiful mind of the author, let's read it until we go crazy, let's read it until we go crazy, let's read it until we go crazy!

Istanbul must always be held dear like Hafiz and Saadi and... and whenever we look at it, we should be filled with wonder and be amazed!

I was sitting and thinking, why is such a profound mark of sorrow engraved in the midst of our country's fields, shores, and the sky of red dawn?
— Rabindranath Tagore, Shahjadpur, June 1891, Fragment

Istanbul: Memories of a City. In this remarkable work by Pamuk, mainly three stories are described together: how the author's desire to become a writer was awakened exactly, his own position with the group of troubled writers in Turkey, and his views and reminiscences about the troubled and evocative historical and cultural situation of Istanbul as a fallen city.
Just as we claim to be Dhakaiya, Chattogramiya etc. according to our place of birth, Pamuk also claims himself as an Istanbullu at the beginning of his work.

After that, comes into view the history and culture of Istanbul created by Western and Turkish writers and painters that Pamuk takes up, and along with that, we can see what kind of trouble, or in his words, the mark of hüzün is engraved everywhere in his consciousness on the paths, neighborhoods, bazaars, streets, Bosporus system, mosques, minarets, and church domes of Istanbul. He believes that there is a difference between trouble and hüzün. Although that difference was not so clear to me. The word has its origin from the Arabic language. The word is also used in the Quran. It has a close association with the pain of losing something, with the death of a dear person.

"We might call this confused, hazy state melancholy, or perhaps we should call it by its Turkish name, hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private”

“I’ve spent my life either battling this melancholy or making it my own”

“So it was that I finally came to relax and accept the hüzün that gives Istanbul its grave beauty, the beauty that is its fate”

The matter starts to become clear to me when I can understand that this pain is the pain of losing an empire, the pain that is embedded in every Istanbullu, in the midst of cultural events after the loss of the Ottoman Empire. We can understand this pain of losing the empire in a slightly different way. In 1934, a short story by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay titled 'The House of Bhandul Mama' was published. The narrator of the story sees from his childhood to his youth that one of his uncles is building a big house in the rural environment but he can never complete the house fully. Even at the last moment of his life, his dream of building the house remains incomplete. The narrator seems to see a kind of profound mark of sorrow in the midst of the dilapidated house with creeping vines until the end. Can the house here be taken symbolically as the empire? Then not only Orhan Pamuk, there are thousands of Orhan Pamuks in the world who are shaken by the pain of losing the empire. A very excellent analytical book on this subject is: Thinking of Nirad C. Chowdhury by Ian Almond.

I don't have much reading and writing on the subject of psychology. If I had, I would have delved into the psychological analysis of Orhan's work. Because after finishing the book, only this exclamation remains in my mind: The psychological analysis of this reminiscence is very much needed.

Pamuk, in this autobiographical novel, speaks completely truthfully about his life - family, education, faith, and finally the city where he was born and where he spent most of his life. All his memories he ties to that city, thus giving a portrait of Istanbul from his birth until the moment when he decided to engage in writing. He speaks truthfully about everything that oppressed him, about the city that suffocated him in his youth and about the deep-rooted problems, the gradual impoverishment caused by his father's bad business in the family enterprise, then about painting, the study of architecture, first love.

The middle part of the book is occupied by data on the writers that the author considers worthy of mention. It is about several well-known Turkish writers who have written more or less about Istanbul in their works. Pamuk thus makes a parallel between the time described in those works and the Istanbul in which he lived his life. The novel extends to 400 pages and each chapter contains appropriate photographs that are very useful for readers like me who have never visited Istanbul. There are Istanbul streets throughout history, as well as private photographs of his family, mother, father, brother, and grandmother to whom he dedicated one chapter. Interesting is also the sudden change that Istanbul was hit by at the beginning of the 20th century. It is known that the great Empire was then gradually disappearing and the Republic was being created under the leadership of Ataturk. Those changes marked the lives of many Istanbul residents - some of them constantly suffered for the old times, while others tried with all their might to approach the West.

No matter how autobiographical this novel is, it is at the same time a tribute to one great city, a city of rich and interesting history.

"I write so that the whole world will know what I am like, what others are like - we, all of us who have lived and are living in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pencils, and ink. I write because, more than anything else, I believe in literature, the art of the novel. I write because it is a habit and a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten."

From among fifty books, they are selected in the Kindle book list.

And my choice fell on Orhan. I read this book because Orhan is the innovator, as I read about him in his other book "Colors" which I haven't finished yet.

And because it's Istanbul that I love. This book, once you start reading the first page, the memory of possibilities will waft to you.

This book is deep in the memory of Istanbul, the sadness of Istanbul, the family home centered in Istanbul, the white and the black in Istanbul.

The sadness of the Bosphorus and the yali that no longer exist after the fall of the caliphate. All these details that are brushed by the smell of the past, or rather, they are truly from the past, are read to you by Orhan as if he is whispering in your ear.

This is how I felt when I read this book. That Orhan speaks with confidence and great dignity as he recalls his childhood.

Jihan Gir, Nishan Tash, the dilapidated houses, and the sadness that overwhelmed him several times because he spent a period in his aunt's house which is hidden from the Bosphorus shyly behind several buildings.

I heard about Orhan and what I heard amazed me. And I read Orhan and what I read shocked me.

A charming and enjoyable book

It writes about the author's life in the city he lived in and his relationship with it

The author was born in a city that was in decline, with the glory of the empire fading, the streets in ruins, and the beautiful palaces that were built on the banks of the Bosporus during the Ottoman era now in a state of decay

The author was born into a wealthy family, but his father and uncle lost their wealth in failed projects

The book follows two lines, one about the city and the other about the author's family and himself, his memories and his observations of Istanbul

From the luxurious mansion of the wealthy family, with its rooms that resembled museums, of course due to the influence of Westernization

His early memories, his thoughts, and the later author who was searching for himself, the conflicts between his father and mother, his discovery of the leadership of the family and its members, their meetings and the rituals that preceded their departure from the mansion, and their relationships with religion, fasting, prayer, and the outings that he went on with his family on the Bosporus in their boat

Most of the book is enjoyable when the author talks about the books of those who visited Istanbul and wrote about it, recorded their impressions of the city, and the Turkish books that loved the city and wrote about it. These are the four favorite books of the author and those that expressed the melancholy of the city as the author saw it

The author inherits his city.

Istanbul: Memories and the City is a remarkable work by Orhan Pamuk. Published in 2005, it offers a deeply personal and melancholic account of the author's life in Istanbul.

The book delves into the profound cultural changes that have swept through Turkey, highlighting the ongoing struggle between modernization and the fading past. It also serves as a poignant tribute to the lost tradition of the joint family.

At its core, this memoir is about the Bosphorus and Istanbul's rich history with the strait. Pamuk's vivid descriptions bring the city to life, painting a picture of its beauty, complexity, and the emotions it evokes.

Translated into English by Maureen Freely in 2005, the book has gained international acclaim. It has been widely read and studied for its insights into Turkish culture, society, and the human experience.

Pamuk's writing style is both lyrical and engaging, making it a pleasure to read. He weaves together personal memories, historical facts, and literary references to create a multi-layered narrative that is both informative and moving.

In conclusion, Istanbul: Memories and the City is a must-read for anyone interested in Turkey, its history, and its people. It offers a unique perspective on a city that has long fascinated the world and will leave readers with a deeper understanding and appreciation of its significance.

This writing is not about the book itself, but rather about one of its margins. Perhaps later I will write more about Istanbul.

The margin of a book can often hold hidden gems of information or personal thoughts. It might be a place where the reader has jotted down their own insights, or where the author has added a note for themselves. In this case, the margin seems to hint at something more, something related to Istanbul.

Istanbul is a city rich in history, culture, and diversity. It has been a crossroads of civilizations for centuries, and its influence can be seen in everything from architecture to cuisine. Maybe the author has some interesting stories or observations about this fascinating city that they will share in future writings.

For now, we can only speculate about what lies ahead. But one thing is for sure: the margin of this book has piqued our curiosity and left us eager to learn more.

http://anthropology.ir/article/26285....

This book is truly great fun and is certain to please any member of Good Reads. After all, those who join Good Reads have a passion for books like nothing else.

The memories of a football player might be about kicking a ball if they are European or butting heads if they are American. However, the memories of an author are centered around reading books, and what could be more interesting than that - reading about reading.

Pamuk's Istanbul will bring the greatest pleasure to those who are familiar with French literature. It is the melancholy Frenchmen like Theophile Gauthier who have written some of the best works about Istanbul. Nevertheless, there is still plenty in this book for the English reader. Istanbul, although theoretically in Asia, in fact occupies both continents. It is an adventure in exotic travel like no other city in the world.

I completely share Pamuk's deep and profound disappointment that Herge never set a TinTin Graphic Novel in Istanbul. Fortunately, the movie industry has come to our aid. In 1961, the French released Tintin and the Golden Fleece (Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d'Or) which was set in Istanbul and featured George Wilson (father of Lambert Wilson) as the unforgettable Captain Haddock. I recommend that French readers watch the Toison d'Or with their children or grandchildren after reading Pamuk's book, which is a delightful homage to the high and low culture inspired by Istanbul.

(B+) 79% | Good
Notes: This piece presents an effective and inviting blend of history and memoir. It manages to draw the reader in with its engaging narrative. However, there is a slight drawback. The word "melancholy" is employed rather liberally, to the extent that it begins to verge on being a cliché. This overuse might potentially detract from the overall impact and新鲜感 of the text. Nevertheless, despite this minor flaw, the combination of historical elements and personal reminiscences makes for an interesting read. It offers a unique perspective that allows the reader to both learn about the past and gain insights into the author's experiences. Overall, it is a good piece that has the potential to be even better with a bit more variety in its vocabulary.