I first came across Orhan Pamuk by "mistake." I picked up his book Snow and read it in one sitting. The story was endearing and the setting memorable, it was great. Then I found out he was infamous! A friend gave me the book Istanbul which captures the essence of Turkey's major city and the feeling of the people as they transition from what the author calls the past to present but what the west calls east to west. It is so poignant and I am loving it.
Something I found interesting, that has very little to do with the book, was to learn that Turkish has a story telling tense. I love a good story teller, I feel like it's a dying art and I love that this language has an entire tense dedicated to this art. I wonder what it would be like to hear Orhan tell the story of Istanbul using this story telling tense.
He's so accurate at depicting feeling. Though I've never been to Turkey I can sense that I would walk to these famous places as see them just as he does. As I read his remembrances I tap into my own history and I see overlaps of things one would assume were unique to just your family, if not culture, at the very least. He describes a sitting room so sacred, the TV was placed in the hallway. I think about watching cartoons on the ceramic tiled floors as my grandmother walked past carrying the groceries from outside through the hallway to the kitchen. Surely that was only her house? Family ties, described only as a "mounting pile of unsettle scores" whose only certainty was that resolution would never come. Was he listening to us as we spoke?
Orhan Pamuk frames this distant city through the lives of it's people and makes me feel a closeness to the Turkish community I hadn't expected.
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