Istanbul
Memories and the City
A childhood spent in a city that cannot stop mourning the empire it used to be.
Pamuk grew up in a declining bourgeois family in a city he describes as saturated with huzun, a communal melancholy bound up with the loss of the Ottoman empire. The memoir moves between his own childhood, the Bosphorus, and the Turkish and foreign writers who taught him to see Istanbul, including by teaching him to see it as ruined. He won the Nobel Prize three years after it appeared.
Recommended by 1 Person
Aysegul Savas
Reading Pamuk's work has changed the ways I view my native city. I have learned to love Istanbul through his writing and have often hoped to see the city as he does, with its magnificent, melancholy ruins.
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