»Istanbul: Memories of a City

Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul", sub-titled "Memories of a City", is wistful and poignant, but manages to be a memoir nor an autobiography. His stories meander, and characters occur and recur, but do not connect in meaningful ways. Some of the problems with this book due to the translator and editor: appositives start with a parenthesis and end with a comma or semi-colon; or the text introduces a Turkish word but does not define it, or even place it in a meaningful initial context.
I was looking forward to insight to a period in which Istanbul underwent great political and social change, both progressive and regressive: Pamuk leads us through some of this change from the limited first-person point of view, and does not always add the historical perspective necessary to fill out the details that the narrator missed. Some of the personal anecdotes come so close to presenting the upper-middle-class viewpoint for the changes in Turkey, but the promise is not always realised.

I visited Istanbul a few weeks ago. Some of my memories of the city: a boy pulling fish out of the Golden Horn; the tulips between the Haghia Sophia and Sultanahment (or "Blue") Mosques; the view of the Black Sea from a sixteenth-century fortress; and the 1€ fish sandwiches, dressed with a little oil and just off the grill just off the boat just out of the water.