Urban Library
"Istanbul"
from Urban Library
13 November 2007
Orhan Pamuk, 2004
Pamuk’s Nobel Prize speach
When Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006, he said this in his acceptance speech:
What I feel now is the opposite of what I felt as a child and a young man: for me the centre of the world is Istanbul. This is not just because I have lived there all my life, but because, for the last 33 years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days and its nights, making them part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived.
Pamuk, in turn, has made his city and its inhabitants’ fears—of being on the outside, of not counting, as he puts it—real to us. And we can’t help but see and understand the humanity. Istanbul, for its loss, its melancholy, its relationship to the imagined European center, reads to me like many of our cities, once great, now forlorn, melancholic, ruined.
But Pamuk gives us his city, its particular neuroses, its streets, its tensions wound around the events of his own reflective life. He sticks his hand into the contradictions of a city that wished to be east and west, rich and poor, that to him rebuilt its own identity on its poverty and physical ruin.
For these four melancholic writers drew their strength from the tensions between the past and the present, or what Westerners like to call East and West; they are the ones who taught be how to reconcile my love for modern art and western literature with the culture of the city in which I live.
Pamuk litters his writing with photographs, drawings, and engravings presented as the late German writer W.G. Sebald does in Austerlitz and Vertigo, as physical evidence of memory. The pictures are so well-chosen they engage the reader as much as Pamuk’s prose, which isn’t incisive but mounting, slowly, as a city’s rhythm, eventually overtaking your consciousness.
Pamuk leads us carefully through the intellectual history of Istanbul—it’s in this effort as a writer of Philadelphia’s streets, I feel some affinity. He allows us to see the intersection of the physical and the metaphysical—made magic by the personal act of walking, thinking, reflecting, and composing. The result, painful as it is for Pamuk, seems always to reveal the truth. That truth and its political reality has forced him into exile. Now in New York, Istanbul only exists in the great novelist’s head. — NRP
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