Istanbul: Memories and the City — A Memoir of the City

Hüzün

The Turkish word hüzün means melancholy, but Pamuk’s project in this book is to show that Istanbul’s hüzün is something more than personal emotion: it is a collective condition, a way of inhabiting the ruins of greatness that the city has turned into a form of identity. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, after the departure of the minorities who had given the city its cosmopolitan texture, after the grand yalıs on the Bosphorus had been allowed to rot and the wealth that once sustained them had dispersed, Istanbul became a city that knew it was lesser than it had been—and had learned to carry that knowledge not as shame but as something closer to dignity.

The decaying wooden mansions along the Bosphorus, the crumbling walls of Topkapı, the coal smoke that hung over the city in winter, the black-and-white photographs that Pamuk reproduces throughout the book—all of these are the visual texture of hüzün, the material evidence of a city living among the physical remains of a world it can no longer inhabit. Pamuk grew up seeing this and absorbing it before he had words for it, and the memoir is in part the story of how he found the concept and what it explained.

The chapter in which Pamuk defines and defends hüzün against the more individual Western concept of melancholy is the philosophical core of the book. He draws on Ibn Arabi’s Islamic usage, which treats hüzün as the pain of spiritual distance from God, and on the Ottoman poets who developed this into an aesthetic, arguing that Istanbul’s collective grief has always been spiritualized in this way—turned outward, shared, made beautiful. This is not mere consolation but a genuine cultural achievement: the transmutation of historical loss into a way of seeing that produces art.

Growing Up in Istanbul

The memoir’s other organising thread is Pamuk’s own childhood and adolescence in the Nişantaşı district of Istanbul, in a large apartment building owned by his family where various relatives occupied various floors. His father was absent much of the time; his mother was present but not quite available; his older brother was his first rival and companion. The family was bourgeois, Westernized, moderately prosperous, and inhabiting the same ambivalence toward Turkish identity that Pamuk would spend his career anatomizing: committed to Western modernity and simultaneously uncertain what had been surrendered in order to achieve it.

The photographs are integral to the memoir’s argument, not illustration of it. Pamuk uses family albums and archival photographs of Istanbul alongside his prose to establish that the city he is describing was real and particular, not merely a psychological projection—and also to acknowledge that what he is doing is always already a form of construction, a selection from the archive of memory and image that leaves as much out as it includes. The photographs show his family in their apartment, on the street, at summer houses on the Bosphorus, in the poses of people who believe they are permanent and do not know what is coming.

The painter manqué runs through the book as a counterfactual life: Pamuk studied architecture and then devoted himself to fiction, but he drew and painted obsessively as a child and adolescent, and the visual sensibility that training produced is evident in every novel he has written. Istanbul is partly the story of how he chose words over images—and partly the acknowledgment that the choice was never entirely clean.

The City and the Novelist

Every major Pamuk novel is set in Istanbul or shaped by it, and Istanbul functions as the key to the whole body of work. My Name Is Red is set in the Ottoman Istanbul of the sixteenth century, but its anxieties about Eastern versus Western representation are grounded in the same questions Pamuk absorbed growing up in the city’s decline. Snow is set in the eastern Anatolian city of Kars, but its protagonist is a poet from Istanbul whose Westernized detachment is the problem the novel diagnoses. The Museum of Innocence maps the bourgeois Istanbul of the 1970s and 1980s with an obsessiveness that makes more sense once you understand what the city meant to Pamuk personally.

Reading Istanbul also helps with the middle sections of several novels where Pamuk’s narrators expatiate on the city’s history, architecture, and cultural texture. These passages are not digressions but the substance of his argument, and knowing Istanbul’s account of hüzün, of the writers he admired (Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Yahya Kemal, the eccentric encyclopaedist Reşat Ekrem Koçu), and of what it felt like to grow up in a city conscious of its own faded grandeur makes those passages arrive with their full intended weight.

The Nobel Prize was awarded in 2006, the same year the Vintage English edition of Istanbul was published. The Swedish Academy’s citation mentioned Pamuk’s discovery of “new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”—a phrase that describes Istanbul at least as precisely as it describes his fiction. For anyone who wants to understand where those symbols came from, this is the book.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Pamuk’s only nonfiction book is essential for anyone who wants to understand his fiction: a meditation on hüzün, a childhood memoir, and a portrait of a city conscious of its own decline, illustrated with the photographs that shaped how he learned to see.