At the start of Istanbul: Memories and the City, Pamuk admits that he must cut a peculiar figure for a cosmopolitan novelist. He has never left his native city. Our age, he observes, is “defined by mass migration and creative immigrants.... My imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.” This searching memoir establishes Istanbul, with its Byzantine, Ottoman, European, Mediterranean, Turkish, Christian, and Islamic influences and inheritances, as providing a difficult and beguiling enough pluralism for Pamuk to write about home from home.
From boyhood through early life, with over 200 personal and historical prints accompanying his painterly prose, Pamuk comes into knowledge of self and world through his explorations of Istanbul’s criss-crossed cultural lineage. He meditates on the writings of its famous European visitors, among them a miserable Gustave Flaubert, who suffered through a case of syphilis while in town but also found ample matter to nurture his “interest in the strange, the frightening, the filthy, and the queer.” Pamuk also celebrates Istanbul’s idiosyncratic local voices, notably the ambitious Resat Ekrem Koçu, who, over the course of three decades, wrote over 5,000 pages of “the world’s first encyclopedia about a single city” but never got past the letter G.
Pamuk devotes much space to tracing out both his city’s and his own artistic lineage but is more concerned with sketching his education as a member of a down-at-the-heels bourgeois family. Though he recommends that “Istanbul’s greatest virtue is its people’s ability to see the city through both western and eastern eyes,” the biographical evidence and critiques on offer in this book suggest that the East/West gateway vision that the city affords comes at a cost. The Pamuks live among extended relatives in an expansive apartment building brimming with the depression and drama of genteel poverty. These people fit remarkably well into modern Istanbul, an “ageing and impoverished city buried under the ashes of a ruined empire.”
His early life, having developed amid pervasive gloom, Pamuk identifies melancholy—in its distinctively Turkish form, hüzün—as the defining feature of the city and its citizenry. His accompanying descriptions of twentieth-century Istanbul in its dusky richness provide many wistful moments. Pamuk finds hüzün in “the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, unpainted, fallen-down wooden mansions;” in “seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels;” in “the broken see-saws in empty parks;” and in “the chiaroscuro of twilight” that spreads over Istanbul’s dim streets and seeps into its crumbling buildings.
Beyond his melancholic poetics, Pamuk also explores hüzün’s ugly origin in the Faustian pact that Turkish elites have kept for decades with the military that regulates the nation’s westward secularism. In the memoir’s most punishing moments, Pamuk rebukes his family and their comfortable counterparts for their self-serving support of the “secular fury of Atatürk’s new Republic.” Assuming that “to move away from religion was to be modern and western,” these Istanbullus were poised for material success and bourgeois refinement in the new, European-minded nation. Surveying his family’s resultant diminishments, Pamuk regards this gambit as no great cause for boasting. Not only has the ruling class condoned forty years of military interventions aimed at the country’s impoverished religious majority, but for those well-heeled, enlightened citizens apparently benefiting from the generals’ putsch, “nothing came to fill the spiritual void. Cleansed of religion, home became as empty as the city’s ruined yalis [mansions] and as gloomy as the fern-darkened gardens surrounding them.”
Depictions of the spiritual alienation, cultural smugness, military might, and class divisions that infuse this desolate cityscape compel us to renounce romance for more exacting considerations. How are we to receive beauty born of a civilization that remains in turmoil because of its schizophrenic history and contemporary makeup?
While Istanbul falls short of a sustained treatment of this question, Pamuk’s latest masterpiece, Snow, leaves Istanbul to address it with atomized intensity. This novel responds to Turkey’s continued effort to pound a modern Western patina onto its post-imperial, God-haunted landscape by detailing the many lives blunted and broken for patriotism and progress. Taut and compulsively readable, Snow also recounts the unexpected poetry and love cultivated beneath contemporary life’s grim harrows of fundamentalism and nationalism.
Snow’s protagonist is Ka, a poet in political exile who returns to his native Istanbul from Frankfurt to attend his mother’s funeral. A spate of suicides by Muslim schoolgirls has broken out as a result of state-mandated prohibitions against wearing head scarves in school. Ostensibly seeking to write about the situation, Ka travels to Kars, a depressed town near the former Soviet border where young women have been taking their lives in particularly large numbers rather than baring their heads. With “Suicide is Blasphemy” signs dotting the landscape and citizens accepting a surveillance society and prefabricated news, the setting encapsulates greater Turkey’s uneasy position as a civilizational switching point. The local newspaper is called the Border City Gazette; Kars’ architecture and culture owe much to six centuries of competing traversals by Ottoman, Russian, and British imperial armies; and its population is made up of Persian, Greek, Circassian, Armenian, and other tribes, migrants, and refugees that have settled and resettled in its environs. This deep and multifarious history, having been summarily reinvented as strictly Turkish in the name of patriotic purification by the descending national army during the 1920s, bequeaths universal “destitution, depression, and decay” to Kars’ modern-day residents, along with a contemporary social order as thick and confusing as the city’s genealogy.
Arriving just as the town becomes isolated by a snowstorm that goes on for days, Ka is quickly embroiled in Kars’ chaotic politics. The players include Islamic terrorists, Muslim feminists, student radicals, Turkish nationalists, Kurdish insurgents, unbowed socialists, secret police, neighbourhood power brokers, newspaper editors, state bureaucrats, municipal election candidates, and the omnipresent army, not to mention the leaders of a revolutionary theatre company, who stage a nationalistic, anti-Islamist play that turns out to be a pretext for a coup. These parties seize on each other like a clutch of cockroach dervishes, competing to manipulate Ka into their intrigues and machinations.
As he gets swept up in the crisis engulfing Kars, Ka attempts to revive his faltering poetic abilities, and to kindle a romance with Ipek, a recently divorced former classmate. The novel’s ensuing interplay between the public and the personal reveals that its protagonist moves so naturally and willingly between political commitments, private desires, and artistic achievements because, in this world, where convenient divisions of East and West have been outmoded since the fall of Constantinople, love and betrayal and brutality and beauty can be similarly indistinguishable.
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