Pamuk's ode to Istanbul, "the capital of the world"

No one can say with certainty how far Istanbul reaches and ends; even Turkish urban planners cannot answer that question. Ten years ago, Turkey's then-prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan expanded the city to cover the entire province, tripling the area of ​​Istanbul to an area roughly seven times the size of New York.

Orhan Pamuk tried to clarify what even experts cannot answer, in his new novel, "Strange feeling in me" (Geopoetics 2015). The Turkish Nobel laureate describes the development of his hometown from the 2012s to 13, when Istanbul's population grew from three to XNUMX million souls. Joyce allegedly said that if Dublin was destroyed, it could be rebuilt, brick by brick, with the help of Ulysses. The same could be done in the case of Istanbul, with the help of Pamuk's new novel and the previous ones, "My Name is Red" and "The Museum of Innocence", and the indispensable memoir "Istanbul, the City and Memories".

In the new novel, which he worked on for six years, talking to hundreds of people who let him into their lives and homes, Pamuk describes the great waves of migrants who populate new neighborhoods, conservatives from Anatolia and the Black Sea coast who invade the Bosphorus, acquire wealth and they begin to build a neman that threatens to suck the life out of the original Istanbul and its inhabitants. Among the new arrivals is 12-year-old Mevlut Karatas, from a village in central Anatolia.

"A strange feeling in me" is largely a bildungsroman, but there is no doubt that Istanbul, and not Mevlut, is the main character of this novel by Orhan Pamuk. Like Mevlut, like the main characters of most of Pamuk's novels, he is essentially himself. It is more acceptable to the reader when the hero is convincingly portrayed as a sensitive, literary soul, and not a modest Istanbul salesman.

"Strange feeling in me" skilfully manages to depict the monotony of everyday life. He photographically captures not only the appearance and emotion of the city, but also its culture, beliefs and traditions, its people and their values. Of course, Pamuk is not an impartial and uncritical observer - he focuses on the vices that he sees as the basic characteristics of modern Istanbul, phenomena such as political corruption and private greed. Through Mevlut's eyes, Pamuk describes the main events in Turkish history during the last half century: political coups, the conflict between Turks and Kurds, earthquakes, the violent destruction and erasure of the city's powerful historical Greek community, even Turkey's vision of 11/XNUMX. Mevlut remains on the margins of all these events; like the novelist, the street seller of sour milk and boza observes life from the outside, from a certain angle. But it allows him to see it more clearly and more poetically than most people.

In Pamuk's gallery of characters, including Ka from the political, engaging novel "Snow", Kemal from "The Museum of Innocence" and Crni from "My name is Red", Mevlut stands out as the most sentimental, the purest of heart and the most modest of ambitions. Through Mevlut's experience of the world - the "strange feeling" in it - Pamuk paints a clear contrast between natives and newcomers, "white" and "black" Turks, subtly naming and clearly marking the difference between the two Turkeys, Kemalist and neo-Ottoman, and in the attitude and way of life of the members his hero's family: Mevlut's father, a traditionalist, a man who hardly accepts any change and progress, upon arriving in Istanbul takes the surname Karataş (black stone), and his uncle and his sons, open to everything new, enterprising and ultimately successful, Aktaş (white stone).

It is no coincidence that Pamuk's Mevlut is a boza seller - until the legalization of alcohol under Ataturk, the dual nature of this traditional Asian drink for centuries allowed drinkers to circumvent strict Islamic laws. Rakija (Turks say raki, where our word comes from) and wine, since then they were drunk freely and publicly, so that in today's Turkey, still halfway between East and West, more re-Islamized than Kemalist, alcohol would once again become a taboo, this first through prices, and then through state and religious propaganda. But, already at the time when Mevlut starts selling it, the boza is a part of nostalgia, a symbol of the past, "good, old", but overcome Ottoman times.

Pamuk is always very clear: he does not live in the Ottoman Empire, the world he described so magnificently in the novels "My Name is Red" and "The White Fortress". He clearly and uncompromisingly fights against the idea of ​​the good old Ottoman times as a kind of model for modern Turkey; according to him, the Turkish entity is not the same as the Ottoman Empire. Pamuk believes that Turkey has the strength for reforms, that it should be directed towards itself, greater concern for human rights, issues of freedom of speech and respect for minorities. His Istanbul is what, in fact, is the true Turkish being, what best reflects him, that great city that has so little in common with the rest of the country, which for him is the capital not only of Turkey, but of the world.

Through many years of dedicated work, from novel to novel, Pamuk managed to make his native Istanbul an unavoidable literary territory, as Dostoevsky did long before him with St. Petersburg, Joyce with Dublin or Proust with Paris, a place where readers from all over the world they can live a new life, as believable as real, filled with an alien feeling that they immediately recognize as their own.

About love, confusion, marriage

The story of the City is one, central concentric circle of Pamuk's narrative; the chronology of the dynamic and turbulent development of Turkey second, Mevlut's life and experience of the City and the world around him next; but what would Pamuk's novel be without a love story, complicated, of course.

Rajiha enters the story, almost as if in a comedy of confusion: at a cousin's wedding in his hometown, Mevlut falls in love at first sight, after corresponding, the young people decide to run away, but, as it turns out, Pamuk's hero does not end up with the woman of his dreams, but with her older, less beautiful sister. Although he realizes his mistake in time, the virtuous Mevlut maintains his marriage and finds true love instead of the blind, youthful passion he pursued.

However, this cycle of the story Pamuk does not stop only at the high moral act of his hero, but develops him into complex psychological dramas that are the consequences of the original trick by which Rajiha entered Mevlut's life, through the decades of the hero's existence, and serves as a stimulus to the plot of the novel whenever needed.