As Orhan articulates, “these writers were vexed by contradiction they felt between these two injunctions-to be Western, and yet, at the same time, to be authentic” (Pamuk 101). While growing up in Hong Kong, I both coveted the Western comforts enjoyed by my cousins living overseas, and resisted their appeal.Įven as a child, I understood incoming Western commodities as a fundamental reason contributing to cultural disintegration. By creating a twofold dialogue, I was able to insert myself into Orhan’s shoes and feel the combating emotions of living as both a stranger and an insider to the city. Touching not only upon the past and present, Istanbul is perceived through the new and crumbling, a place of first love and heartbreak and as an exotic creation of the foreigner and melancholic experience of a citizen. To insist on one proponent of Istanbul’s dichotomy over the next would hamper and oversimplify our understanding of both Pamuk’s and Istanbul’s internal conflict.

I found Orhan’s twofold portrait of Istanbul accessible and intelligible. “Blackened” vernacular and a selection of black and white photographs inserted within the text portray his affinity for ancient ruins, humbling minarets and his misgivings towards newly constructed Western infrastructure. Our understanding of this dichotomy is augmented through Pamuk’s use of various literary techniques. On the other hand, the present, marked by the process of Westernization and Ataturk revolution, describes Istanbul as “a pale, poor, second-class imitation of a Western city” (Pamuk 78). On one hand, the past, thoroughly glorified, represents the lost Ottoman Empire. The past and present comparison exists as the centerpiece guiding Orhan’s narrative.

Overall, with the help of Orhan’s dichotomous comparisons, the reader can diaphanously observe and examine the paradoxical nature of Istanbul and the deep, collective melancholy arising with the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Exploring the vicissitudes of Orhan’s childhood to adulthood, the reader garners a greater understanding of life in Istanbul and the conflicts confronting its inhabitants at the start of a new Westernized era. The narrator creates dual, often conflicting thematic trends, unfolding Istanbul both internally and externally in terms of past and present, East and West and black and white.

Orhan Pamuks’s Istanbul: Memories of a City pseudo-memoir weaves an intimate and often meandering portrait of Istanbul and its inhabitant’s collective experience of hüzün. Orhan Pamuks’s Istanbul: Memories of a City

Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk