Born in Istanbul in 1952 to a wealthy industrialist family, Orhan Pamuk has become one of Turkey's most internationally celebrated writers. His novels often deal with the complex interplay between Islamic traditions and modern European values. His writing has increasingly dealt with postmodern concepts of identity, reality, and the instability of narration, communication, and history. Since his first novel was published in 1979, Pamuk has received numerous awards in his home country and beyond, more...
Born in Istanbul in 1952 to a wealthy industrialist family, Orhan Pamuk has become one of Turkey's most internationally celebrated writers. His novels often deal with the complex interplay between Islamic traditions and modern European values. His writing has increasingly dealt with postmodern concepts of identity, reality, and the instability of narration, communication, and history. Since his first novel was published in 1979, Pamuk has received numerous awards in his home country and beyond, including the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Award in 2003 for his novel MY NAME IS RED, a murder mystery set in 16th-century Istanbul that is narrated, in part, by the corpse of the victim. In 2005 Pamuk was charged with insulting Turkey by referring to the Armenian genocide in an interview, an offense punishable with up to three years in prison. The case was particularly controversial because it came at a time when Turkey was eagerly seeking admission to the European Union, and the attack on free speech threatened to derail their bid. When the government refused to participate in the case, the charges were dropped. In 2006, Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for literature.less...
Laurent wrote a review on Istanbul Memories And the City
This is the first book I’ve read by Pamuk, and the more I think about it the more I wonder how and why he received the Nobel prize… The book is not bad, though and reading can at times be a pleasure, but it just isn’t any amazing, that’s all. It doesn’t grip you, doesn’t take your attention and keep it, doesn’t move you as great novels do and as all literature should do. The book is not well structured, its not really structured in fact, but that doesn’t matter at all, on the contrary it serves the purpose of the author, which is to show us the atmosphere of Istanbul and permeate us with it, by telling us about the city and his childhood and adolescence. The problem is, it looks as though he does not know where he is going ; the different stories are just added one after the other, and many of Pamuk’s thoughts are laid down near the beginning and endlessly repeated throughout, creating a particular atmosphere but also boring us to death in the process : his nostalgia, his walks throughout the neighbourhoods, his mix of admiration for and need to distance himself with western artists, their ambiguous relationship with the city… All these are things we know, if only by looking at turkish history and the history of Istanbul, but he goes on to attempt to make a whole work of art about these, adding a few recollections of his childhood and his family. Maybe the book is too much about Pamuk and not enought about Istanbul. What’s more, Pamuk has a special opinion about the city. Granted, I have only seen Istanbul three times and do not know it as much as he does, but the particularly melancholic and sad vision that he has of it is not shared by all Istanbullus, to say the least : the impression I gathered during my sojourns there, as well as the opinion of friends who live there, are entirely different. All in all, its a fairly good book, but not a great piece of literature.
This is the first book I’ve read by Pamuk, and the more I think about it the more I wonder how and why he received the Nobel prize… The book is not bad, though and reading can at times be a pleasure, but it just isn’t any amazing, that’s all. It doesn’t grip you, doesn’t take your attention and keep it, doesn’t move you as great novels do and as all literature should do. The book is not well structured, its not really structured in fact, but that doesn’t matter at all, on the contrary it serves the purpose of the author, which is to show us the atmosphere of Istanbul and permeate us with it, by telling us about the city and his childhood and adolescence. The problem is, it looks as though he does not know where he is going ; the different stories are just added one after the other, and many of Pamuk’s thoughts are laid down near the beginning and endlessly repeated throughout, creating a particular atmosphere but also boring us to death in the process : his nostalgia, his walks throughout the neighbourhoods, his mix of admiration for and need to distance himself with western artists, their ambiguous relationship with the city… All these are things we know, if only by looking at turkish history and the history of Istanbul, but he goes on to attempt to make a whole work of art about these, adding a few recollections of his childhood and his family. Maybe the book is too much about Pamuk and not enought about Istanbul. What’s more, Pamuk has a special opinion about the city. Granted, I have only seen Istanbul three times and do not know it as much as he does, but the particularly melancholic and sad vision that he has of it is not shared by all Istanbullus, to say the least : the impression I gathered during my sojourns there, as well as the opinion of friends who live there, are entirely different. All in all, its a fairly good book, but not a great piece of literature.