ISTANBUL

Another orhan — The photographs in the dark museum house — “Me” — The destruction of the Pashas’ mansions: a sad tour of the streets — Black and white — Exploring the Bosphorus — Melling’s Bosphorus landscapes — My mother, my father, and various disappearances — Another house: Cihangir — Hüzün — Four lonely melancholic writers — My grandmother — The joy and monotony of school — Esaelp gnittips on — Ahmet Rasim and other city columnists — Don’t walk down the street with your mouth open — The pleasures of painting — Resat Ekrem Koçu’s collection of facts and curiosities: The Istanbul Encyclopedia — Conquest or decline? The Turkification of Constantinople — Religion — The rich — On the ships that passed through the Bosphorus, famous fires, moving house, and other disasters — Nerval in Istanbul: Beyoglu walks — Gautier’s melancholic strolls through the city — Under western eyes — The melancholy of the ruins: Tanpinar and Yahya Kemal in the city’s poor neighborhoods — The picturesque and the outlying neighborhoods — Painting Istanbul — Painting and family happiness — The smoke rising from ships on the Bosphorus — Flaubert in Istanbul: east, west and syphilis — Fights with my older brother — A foreigner in a foreign school — To be unhappy is to hate oneself and one’s city — First love — The ship on the Golden Horn — A conversation with my mother: patience, caution, and art

A portrait, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost man of letters. Blending reminiscence with history; family photographs with portraits of poets and pashas; art criticism, metaphysical musing, and, now and again, a fanciful tale, Pamuk invents an ingenious form to evoke his lifelong home, the city that forged his imagination. He begins with his childhood, his first intimations of the melancholy awareness of living in the seat of ruined imperial glories, in a country trying to become “modern” at the crossroads of East and West. Against a background of shattered monuments, neglected villas, ghostly backstreets, and, above all, the fabled waters of the Bosphorus, he charts the evolution of a rich 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. –