A Strangeness in My Mind

Mevlut and the Boza

Boza is a lightly fermented drink made from millet — slightly sour, slightly sweet, low in alcohol, thick — that has been sold on the streets of Istanbul for centuries, the vendor calling out into the winter night with a distinctive cry that announces his presence to the apartments above. By the time Mevlut Karataş begins selling it in the 1970s, boza is already a disappearing tradition: most Istanbullus who buy a glass from him are buying something from their childhoods, a connection to a city that is rapidly becoming unrecognizable to people who grew up in it. Mevlut sells boza for forty years, and he is always the last.

His arrival in Istanbul from a village in central Anatolia — he comes at twelve to join his father, who sells yogurt from a pole on his shoulder — is one of millions of similar arrivals that transformed the city during the second half of the twentieth century. The migrants who came built the gecekondus, the overnight squatter settlements whose name means “landed at night,” on the hills above the Bosphorus, and the city that grew up around and through and despite them is the Istanbul of the novel. Mevlut is a fictional individual within this enormous collective movement, and Pamuk uses him to make the movement human and specific rather than statistical.

The story of his marriage is the novel’s comic heart. At a relative’s wedding Mevlut falls for a girl across the room and spends three years writing her love letters. When the time comes to elope — which is how certain marriages were arranged in this world, the girl escaping without her family’s consent — he runs away with the wrong sister, Rayiha rather than the beautiful Samiha for whom the letters were intended. He spends the rest of the novel not quite sure whether he married the wrong woman and is merely reconciled to it, or whether Rayiha was always the right one and the love letters were addressed to a fantasy.

Istanbul 1969–2012

The forty-year span of the novel is also the span of Istanbul’s transformation from a mid-sized city still living partly in the Ottoman past to a metropolis of fifteen million that has consumed its own history in concrete and commerce. Pamuk maps this transformation through Mevlut’s wanderings — the neighborhoods he serves, the streets he walks, the buildings that replace the buildings he knew — and through the voices of the people around him, because the novel is not told exclusively from Mevlut’s perspective. Cousins, wives, friends, rivals speak in their own voices at intervals, adding angles of view that Mevlut himself, for all his observation, cannot supply.

The political history is present but not foregrounded: the military coups of 1971 and 1980, the political violence of the late 1970s when leftists and rightists killed each other on the streets, the economic liberalization of the 1980s under Özal, the Islamist political rise of the 1990s and 2000s, the earthquake of 1999 — all of these move through the novel as things that happen to or around Mevlut rather than things he acts within. He is not a political man. He sells boza. But the history reaches him anyway, as history reaches everyone, and the novel’s patient attention to the texture of ordinary Istanbul life across four decades produces something close to a social history of the city from below — from the squatter settlements and the street-level economy rather than from the apartments overlooking the Bosphorus.

The gecekondus are perhaps the novel’s most important historical subject. These squatter neighborhoods — built overnight on land that didn’t belong to their builders, gradually legalized, eventually demolished or absorbed into the formal city — were where the migrants lived, and the story of their rise and fall is also the story of how Istanbul became what it is. Mevlut lives in them, loses them, watches them turn into apartment blocks, and keeps selling boza on streets that keep changing while his cry stays the same.

Pamuk’s Most Generous Novel

Pamuk’s Nobel Prize, awarded in 2006, was partly for the Istanbul memoir of that name and partly for the formally experimental novels — My Name Is Red, The Black Book, Snow — that had established him as one of the major novelists working in any language. A Strangeness in My Mind (published in Turkish in 2014; in Ekin Oklap’s English translation in 2015) represents a deliberate turn away from formal experiment toward the capacious, warmhearted social novel — Tolstoy and Dickens are the implied models, not Borges or Nabokov.

The title comes from Wordsworth’s Prelude — “a strangeness in my mind, / A feeling that I was not for that hour, / Nor for that place” — and the epigraph connects Mevlut’s sense of being slightly out of step with his own life to the Romantic tradition of the figure who is present everywhere and at home nowhere. Mevlut is not an intellectual, does not read Wordsworth, does not know that his condition has been named; but the condition is real, and it is what makes him a poet of the streets even as he is, commercially speaking, a failure.

For readers new to Pamuk, A Strangeness in My Mind is the most accessible long entry point — more immediately affectionate than My Name Is Red, less melancholy than The Museum of Innocence, more novelistically conventional than The Black Book. For readers already familiar with his work, it is the novel that shows what Pamuk looks like when he gives his naturalistic impulse full rein, trusting that the story of an ordinary man walking through a transforming city is itself enough.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Pamuk’s most generous and warmhearted novel: a forty-year portrait of Istanbul through the eyes of a boza-seller who is always slightly out of place in a city that keeps changing around him. Long, leisurely, and completely absorbing.