This work details the author's memories during the first twenty years of his life, during which he defined his vocation, transitioning from being a painter to a writer. At the same time, it describes in luxurious detail that special city where he has lived his entire life, which is located on two continents and is called Istanbul. We can say that there are two main protagonists that develop in parallel during the work: the first is the narrator himself, Orhan Pamuk (1952), who tells us about his life in his hometown, and the other great character is the exotic and very beautiful city of Istanbul.

Orhan Pamuk, having become a writer after the age of twenty and having published his first work at around thirty, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

This powerful narrator presents Istanbul to us as already integrated as part of the Republic of Turkey, due to the extinction of the Ottoman Empire of which it was a very prominent part. Pamuk repeatedly describes the multiple and sometimes contradictory feelings that arise within him in relation to his city. Sometimes the poverty and misery of the poor neighborhoods of the city make him appreciate the beauty in a unique and intense way, and sometimes contemplating the Bosphorus causes him great bitterness.

The work is贯穿from beginning to end by the bitterness and nostalgia that, according to the author, characterize the city of Istanbul, due to the poverty and the prevailing decadence resulting from the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and at the same time presents it to us as a city with a glorious past in every sense and possessing a great tradition, whose loss has caused a feeling of bitterness not only in him but also in every single inhabitant of Istanbul. We can say that it is a collective bitterness that floats in the air and that is embedded in each person just by living there.

In this regard, Pamuk tells us that the majestic, magical, and beautiful part of Istanbul, which is the tourist part, is like the stage of a sumptuous theater, and the remote and miserable part of the city is like the backstage. I think that's how all cities are or almost all.

The chapter dedicated to "bitterness", in Turkish "Hüzün", is really outstanding from a narrative point of view and approaches the philosophical terrain, and in which his prose vibrates to discover to us with true realism the spirit of the city.

Another chapter that, in my opinion, contributes to enriching this account of memories and recollections is the interesting perspective that other great writers, both Turkish and foreign, mainly French, have of Istanbul, and that Pamuk discovers for us with all its charm. Special mention should be made of the poetic appreciations of this city by Gautier (1811-1872) and Nerval (1808-1855), derived from their respective visits to Istanbul. Among the Turkish authors, it is worth mentioning Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901-1962), who, according to Pamuk himself, wrote the best book about Istanbul.

In general, the narration is interesting, pleasant, and easy to read. In the pages of this book, a large number of photos are inserted, which contribute to a better understanding of the work and make it even more enjoyable. Altogether, it leaves us with the knowledge of a millenary, exotic, and beautiful city that lost most of its splendor after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and that has gradually become Westernized and banalized, losing its identity. The Istanbul that one can visit today, despite admiring it and finding interesting meanings and a unique beauty in it, is almost nothing like the one of yesteryear. The work is a desperate cry for the lost Istanbul, for that magical and exotic atmosphere lost in a memory, making the present incomparably poorer and more confused.

The major part of the book vividly describes what some poets, journalists, and painters have written or painted about Istanbul during the 19th century.

However, when I picked up this particular book after reading "My Name is Red," my expectation was to gain an understanding of how Pamuk himself describes Istanbul and his life in that vibrant city. It wasn't about what some 19th-century unknown travellers and century-old journalists with hard-to-pronounce names had to say.

To be fair, there were indeed some interesting chapters within the book. But we don't shell out a significant amount of money for a highly priced book, printed on quality paper, packaged with a lovely cover, and praised by many internationally acclaimed newspapers just to read a few chapters.

If you haven't read Pamuk's works yet, I would highly recommend reading his other works before delving into "Istanbul." Otherwise, you might overlook some truly great masterpieces of this literary genius.

Dearest community, dearest friends,

I am a book enthusiast. In my spare time, I enjoy talking about books, although I write less. I'm no writer. Unfortunately, this site is extremely brilliant and can almost be considered professional, at least for me. Regarding the books in front of you, I don't have much to say or may be way off the mark.

For instance, I have read this book and appreciate its honesty in depicting childhood in one's beloved city. The book is an image of growing up, with curiosity, love, wonder, understanding, and calm tranquility towards the city's past and present, its strivings and deceptions, and the men and women living there and leaving their mark on the city's horizons. He said Istanbul is a sad city with a sad face. All grand cities are sad, and all those who have lived are sad. That's because they have lived curiously and intensely and loved it. Like Baudelaire in "Spleen de Paris" or "Les fleurs du Mal," in his Parisian landscapes - those that live, like Sphinx, feel memories opened and unopened of past centuries, only to be gleaned at and loved for this well of surprises. One can guess at the perfumes of Istanbul and be caught in their vortex. It is a city of dreams, where one has memories to lean on and reflect. Creative individuals, whether poets or painters, haunt the landscapes of their beloved cities, past or present, in search of stories for inspiration that imprint on their minds like a song or a tableau, like Parisian tableaux or "Spleen de Paris." No wonder Baudelaire dedicated his "Spleen" to his friend and painter. Orhan Pamuk wanted to be a painter, had the vocation, but painting was hard for a living. It was better to be a popular novelist. Love is so exacting, and the city demands constant revaluation from Orhan, not only as a writer and author but also from all those who have lived in the city. It is a city of sad people with long faces.

Pamuk's itinerary through Istanbul follows the course of his life movement, together with its history markings, converging by way of adulthood and love to maturity, with Istanbul in the forefront and its people grappling in it. Love and vocation are so linked in this confession, witnessing both an epoch and beyond. Love and vocation strengthen the love of the city like a constant returning point, like a hub where one returns, like a haven. This is a book of one native city but also a book of an epoch of the emerging writer who has learned to love. This book is a life buoy of the man, an individual with a talent for saying things about the universe he knows best. It is his creed, his growing to maturity, and his acceptance of himself as an inhabitant of this world. Love is a basis in this travelogue through the city but also with personal touches of an autobiography. Istanbul he knows best both literary, culturally, and family-like, with a civilization dispersing in by memorable figures who made Istanbul in their personal way because they were its citizens and loved the city.

This is my last review on this lovely site. I have found a site less brilliant than GR but more suitable for me. So long and keep well.

This book, like Pamuk's stories, is a testimony of the man conscious of his life and his surroundings. He has mastered his writing, his point of view, and sharpened it with his inner self, this love he has for the city and its inhabitants. He has understood them in their deceptions and aspirations. He knows they are different but believes they are surprised and indecisive in front of history. They are rich in their testimonies - he understands them in the solitude of the historical and present choice. But he understands, this is life, and man is thus. He turns his gaze elsewhere or towards the past. And the present escapes them, which is necessary. It is a beautiful book, easy to read, and like those of Orhan, moving.

Be joyous and healthy in front of the book of your destiny.

Istanbul's biography and at the same time a kind of autobiographical confession, is actually a black and white essay on the melancholy of a city and a soul that lives in it.

With the addition of hundreds of monochrome, dark and gloomy photographs of the city as well as excerpts from family albums. It is a beautiful book.

The description of Istanbul in this work is both detailed and profound. It delves into the city's history, culture, and the emotions it evokes. The black and white photos enhance the overall atmosphere of melancholy, while the family album excerpts add a personal touch.

This book offers a unique perspective on Istanbul, not only as a physical place but also as a symbol of a certain state of mind. It invites readers to explore the city's hidden depths and to reflect on their own relationship with the places they inhabit.

For those interested in literature, photography, or simply in understanding the essence of a city, this book is a must-read.

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Hüzün – melankoli – tristesse. This is the sentiment through which Orhan Pamuk describes the atmosphere of an Istanbul that lies between the West and the glorious past of the Ottoman Empire. Only the buildings and the memories of the elderly remain from that past (impressions from the Istanbul of the 1960s are evoked).

However, Orhan Pamuk describes an Istanbul that is still European. The present, though, is different. And anyone who visits the city will see this.

The city has changed over the years. New buildings have risen, and modernization has taken place. But there are still traces of the old Istanbul, the one that Pamuk writes about. The narrow streets, the old mosques, and the bazaars all tell a story of a bygone era.

Despite the changes, Istanbul still retains its unique charm. It is a city that is both modern and traditional, a place where East meets West. And it is this combination that makes Istanbul such a fascinating destination for tourists from all over the world.

The story is a predominantly autobiographical novel about Pamuk's childhood and adolescence; in the background, his city, Istanbul.

Istanbul was once great, but now (in the time of the story - mainly the 1950s and 1960s) it is a poor and peripheral city of the Third World. Istanbul is sad, depressed, melancholy. Istanbul, whose general state of mind can be summed up with the Turkish word hüzün, which is something suspended between perennial melancholy and the Sehnsuch of the German romantics.

So it is Istanbul, the gloomy sadness that envelops its present so modest, if not lowly, in the face of the Byzantine-Ottoman grandeur of the past and that permeates the personality of its own inhabitants by osmosis, at the center of Pamuk's thoughts. He himself, and his adolescent evolution, within a fragmented family of the Turkish neo-bourgeoisie, are prey to the climate of gloomy resignation, fatalism, and immobility that outlines the contours of every corner of the city. The young, confused - like many, or all, adolescents, to be honest - who wants to become a painter, who loves to paint the landscapes and profiles of the city, who in the melancholy of this finds solace for his own, and who will then become a writer, in the end.

The book is a curious experiment: an autobiography, moreover a very honest one, that overlaps with a bird's-eye view of the city and its current miseries. At times didactic, at times encyclopedic, this bird's-eye view, done very high with rapid dives, is quite interesting, although it is lost - along with the reader's interest - over time, among too many half-finished references; also the autobiographical part is interesting, one appreciates Pamuk's unfiltered exposition, which is not a given, but the author struggles to hold together the succession of his events, of his life - all in all very normal - with the story of the city.

It is a Turkish story of the city, I want to specify: there are extremely faint traces of Constantinople, it is the Stamboul of Turkey that is told here, and that culture above all else, even in the twentieth-century evolutions to follow the West, in those imitations and in those dictates born of Ataturk's liberal revolution. One of the most interesting parts of the book lies precisely in the account of the climate of confusion, hypocrisy, contradiction, regret, nationalism, and enthusiasm that characterized those years of cultural revolution, in part just and necessary and in part devastating and homogenizing. The Ottoman Istanbul that is sinking and of which Pamuk, a young liberal bourgeois and Westernophile, mourns the disappearance, in the periodic burnings of the old wooden villas of the Ottoman elite along the Bosporus.

It is a culture, that of the Turkish Ottoman, towards which I frankly do not have a particular interest. The account of the hüzün of the city - moreover very well rendered by the numerous, and splendid, black and white photographs present in the book - at first caught me anyway, although inevitably, slowly, the hold on me wore off. The pastiche that is this autobiography-guide does not seem to me to have been perfectly successful, in the end, despite the general interest it generates.

Pamuk writes very well, with the only defect of sometimes giving in to overly baroque and psychoanalytic lexical convolutions. In any case, the book will surely please lovers of Turkish things.

The book was much different from what I thought and I must say it was far more fascinating than I imagined.

When I was traveling to Istanbul, I was wondering why I didn't read it before the trip. But now I'm glad that before it, I had experienced to some extent the places and feelings described in the book, and this made the pleasure of reading the book even greater for me.

Previously, I used to read Pamuk's books in translation, and this was my first experience of reading in Turkish. I must say that Pamuk's Turkish language is extremely charming, and I'm wondering why I didn't do this earlier. And my advice is that if you know Istanbul Turkish, you must read the original text.

I initially misunderstood the subtitle. I failed to realize that this was a collection of personal memories. Instead, I thought it would focus on how collective memory shapes our perceptions of a city. As it stands, being a sort of combination of "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce and "Magic Prague" by Angelo Maria Ripellino, it doesn't truly succeed in either regard. I ended up learning very little about Istanbul or about Orhan Pamuk.

Istanbul is the only Muslim city where I have spent any significant amount of time. My most lasting memory is the profound sense of being a stranger. The absence of women in the workplace and the difficulty of obtaining an alcoholic drink were quite striking. Pamuk devotes a great deal of time to exploring the fruitless struggle of Istanbulites to transform their city into a western one under the secular Nationalist regime. Now that the regime is leading Turkey back towards Islam, one has to wonder just how fleeting Pamuk's memories of the city will prove to be.

Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk is a captivating autobiographical memoir. Pamuk, born in 1952, grew up in an apartment complex in Istanbul with his large extended family. He vividly recounts his life from the age of four, including his family, schooling, and first love. However, the events are not presented in chronological order. The memoir ends with his decision to quit architectural studies at university.

Pamuk claims that the city is filled with a communal melancholy (hüzün) due to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the new Republic under Ataturk. This led to a significant shift from traditional Eastern beliefs to modern Western views, causing a sense of nostalgia for the past.

While Pamuk details his emotional turmoil growing up, he does not extensively describe Istanbul itself. Instead, he cites the works of others who have depicted the city. He discusses the writings of various authors, poets, journalists, and artists, including Gustave Flaubert, André Gide, and Vitor Hugo. A chapter is dedicated to Antoine Ignace Melling, who made engravings of the city in the 1800s.

I wish Pamuk had described the physical aspects of the city, such as the trees, nature, and landscape. Although he mentions the Bosporus and gives the names of streets and areas, they lack a visual description for the reader.

Pamuk focuses mainly on the communal melancholy that pervades the city. However, I wonder if familial problems could also contribute to the melancholy he sensed during his youth. His parents' constant arguing, his father's absence, and his competition with his elder brother for his mother's affection may have had an impact.

Overall, learning about Istanbul through the eyes of others and understanding what it was like to grow up in the city during the early days of the Republic of Turkey was interesting. The audiobook, narrated by John Lee, is read clearly, but I had difficulty with the Turkish names. I gave the narration three stars as I don't think it quite suits the book. Maureen Freely has done a good job translating the book into English.

Were Orhan Pamuk active on Twitter while penning Istanbul: Memories and the City, he might have spared himself and his readers a significant amount of time and annoyance. He could have simply boiled down this work to the phrase "Boo fucking hoo #firstworldproblems" and left it at that.

However, instead, we are left to plod through four hundred pages of angst-ridden ennui. These pages claim to represent the spirit of a city that mourns its days as the center of the world. In reality, they do little more than document the petty complaints of a wealthy man who never manages to leave his mother's house. It would be acceptable if melancholy merely permeated Pamuk's memoirs as he recounted stories of his youth. But there are almost no tales here, just an endless, suffocating atmosphere that reminds me strongly of the narrator in David Foster Wallace's "The Depressed Person."

I carried this book with me to Turkey and was never as delighted as when I finished it and could discard it in the library of a B&B in Sirince and pick up an Agatha Christie novel instead. Pamuk's "memoir" is pretentious, self-indulgent, and almost comically immature. It is best left forgotten.

Istanbul and the memories of Orhan Pamuk
He doesn't stop describing Istanbul. It's not just its beauty as one might imagine, but it always reminds us of its sadness, its pain, its history, the Bosphorus, the conflagrations.
For me, I enjoyed when he talked about himself and his memories, especially his first love. But his talk about the city made me extremely bored.
However, what impressed me the most was his style or to be more precise, his fictional world that he sometimes created. It sometimes reminded me of myself, especially in his childhood games alone and his imagination at that time while he was playing.
Although I tried to start one of his stories for him before, but I left it from the beginning. But I will try to meet you soon with one of your stories, Orhan.
Finally, the book is over at last

Notions of beauty or of the landscape of a city are inevitably intertwined with our memories.

In his 2003 memoir, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk vividly describes his upbringing in Istanbul during the 50s and 60s. He senses the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the crumbling houses around him, seeing his modern family home as a museum where western furnishings replaced traditional Turkish culture. His grandfather was a wealthy industrialist, but his father was losing the family fortune. As a boy, daydreams helped him escape from the ordinary.

Pamuk lived in a private apartment building with an extended family, nannies, cooks, and maids. He recalls his parents' arguments and being left with relatives. Respite from domestic troubles led him to melancholy. 'Hüzün', an emotional state of shared spiritual suffering in Turkish, becomes a theme of the book, portraying the formerly great Ottoman city in decline through people and places. His sadness projects onto the city at large.

Pamuk discusses four Turkish writers who tried to reconcile east and west after WWI, merging melancholia with modernism. An encyclopedist publishes illustrated city curiosities, a poet admires French fin de siecle literature, a novelist writes of post-war ruins, and a memoirist recreates a vanishing milieu. All lived in his neighborhood, and he imagines them crossing paths. Their stories appear unexpectedly, like chance encounters.

Pamuk recounts the ills that afflicted the city in the late 20th century, such as overpopulation, poverty, and pollution. In the quincentennial of the conquest of Istanbul, Greek shops and churches were vandalized by Turkish nationalists. As a boy, he contrasts his secular family with the pious prayers of the poor, noting the rich's lack of need for God. After Ataturk's reforms, religion was replaced with emptiness. His Ramadan fast lasts only fifteen minutes before the feast.

Pamuk recalls post-WWII class consciousness and social competition. People in his peer group aspired to be modern and western, while westerners wished the city would remain unchanged. He counts boats on the Bosphorus, watching some catch fire. Soviet warships pass by at night. The city is drawn to disasters, big and small. Istanbulites are sensitive to foreigners' feelings. This self-reflective portrait of the city reflects his idiosyncrasies as an author.

Pamuk proposes symmetry as the most important goal of a memoirist. At an early age, he believed in another Orhan living in a similar house, a twin or double. He grows up, attends college for architecture but stops going to classes. He stays in his family home, reading and taking long walks. His father is absent until late, and his mother stays up alone, leading to arguments until she discovers his father's lover in another apartment.

Pamuk uses black and white photos from his family album and of Istanbul to illustrate the book. There are pictures of rundown and empty mansions along the Bosphorus and burned-out or abandoned wooden townhouses. He includes artwork from the past, especially Antoine-Ignace Melling, an architect to Sultan Selim III. Loss and nostalgia pervade the images he chooses.

Later, Pamuk built the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, housed in a former townhouse and filled with everyday objects from the city. Intriguingly, it is tied to his novel of the same name, exhibiting real things from a fictional world. His projects explore the tension between Asia and Europe and the end of Turkish identity. The writing is well-conveyed in translation, but some parts of this memoir can be overly long-winded and self-indulgent.