Istanbul: Memories and the City

Istanbul: Memories and the City
- Used Book in Good Condition
A portrait, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the worldâ€™s great cities, by its foremost man of letters, author of the acclaimed novels Snow and My Name Is Red.

Blending reminiscence with history; family photographs with portraits of poets and pashas; art criticism, metaphysical musing, and, now and again, a fanciful tale, Orhan Pamuk invents an ingenious form to evoke his lifelong home, the city that forged his imagination. He begins with his childhood among the eccentric extended Pamuk family in the dusty, carpeted, and hermetically sealed apartment building they shared. In this place came his first intimations of the melancholy awareness that binds all residents of his city together: that of living in the seat of ruined imperial glories, in a country trying to become â€œmodernâ€ at the dizzying crossroads of East and West. This elegiac communal spirit overhangs Pamukâ€™s reflections as he introduces the writers and painters (among the latter, most particularly the German Antoine-Ignace Melling) through whose eyes he came to see Istanbul. Against a background of shattered monuments, neglected villas, ghostly backstreets, and, above all, the fabled waters of the Bosphorus, he presents the interplay of his budding sense of place with that of his predecessors. And he charts the evolution of a rich, sometimes macabre, imaginative life, which furnished a daydreaming boy refuge from family discord and inner turmoil, and which would continue to serve the famous writer he was to become. It was, and remains, a life fed by the changing microcosm of the apartment building and, even more, the beckoning kaleidoscope beyond its walls.

As much a portrait of the artist as a young man as it is an oneiric Joycean map of the city, Istanbul is a masterful evocation of its subject through the idiosyncrasies of direct experience as much as the power of myth--the dazzling book Pamuk was born to write.
Country USA
Brand Knopf
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 10-17934
ReleaseDate 2005-06-07
UnitCount 1
Format Deckle Edge
EANs 9781400040957

Country	USA
Brand	Knopf
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	10-17934
ReleaseDate	2005-06-07
UnitCount	1
Format	Deckle Edge
EANs	9781400040957

Istanbul: Memories and the City

You might also like...