Istanbul - Memories and the City

"The most memorable, saddest, and most magnificent book ever written about a city." Pamuk recounts his childhood and youth... "I felt this rupture in my soul, grew anxious about my approaching loneliness, and fearing that the darkness I was falling into would become a way of life, I decided to be like everyone else: For a period in my seventeen, eighteen years, I managed to appear as a community man who made everyone laugh, joked at every opportunity, and got along amiably, even mischievously, with everyone...

Why did I have to grit my teeth, strive, and then hate myself for pretending, to do the things everyone else did without thinking too much?" The story, which begins with the author's first self-perception as "I" and extends to his mother, father, and family, opens up to the streets of Istanbul as a source of both sadness and happiness. As we discover the streets of 1950s Istanbul through the eyes of today's great novelist – the cobblestone streets, the burning and collapsing wooden mansions, the disappearance of an old culture, and the difficulties of a new one rising from its ashes and ruins – we also rapidly progress through the formation of Pamuk's spiritual world, much like reading a detective novel...

In this original and unique work, there is that unity of spirit and emotion characteristic of books we can't put down. Orhan Pamuk's photographs, selected from tens of thousands of frames taken by Istanbul's great photographers, especially Ara Güler, and from his own personal album, accompany the story. "Mr. Orhan Pamuk, you have made Istanbul an indispensable literary city, like Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg, Joyce's Dublin, and Proust's Paris, where readers from all corners of the world can recognize and experience a second life as if living their own!"