Innocence of Memories: Orhan Pamuk"s Museum and Istanbul

Auteur, Authors:  Film and Literature was a series June 2-3 at the BAMPFA in  Berkeley.  Kathy Geritz, who I know and like is the PFA film curator, worked with Telludride FIlm Festival co-director Tom Luddy to bring the international collection to this series which kicked off the Bay Berkeley Book Festival. She says, "The series features incredible films, including portraits of writers, tributes to the power of poetry and explorations of fictional novels, all presented by guests, writers, critics, scholars and film makers. "


A poetic rendering in this film  has Orhan Pamuk, who I met and heard when he read after winning the Noble Prize, in Philadelphia in the series at the Public Library. I have read most of his books, and find him one of our finest novelists of the 20th-21st century.

This quote from a NYT book review by Pico Iyer expresses it best: " Pamuk has two enduring loves: books and Istanbul. Often thy converge as his journeys through his hometown come to resemble excursions through memory itself. Like Proust, Pamuk has spent decades of his life — 15,300 days, he calculates — in the same room in his beloved birthplace, alone with his books and thoughts. Yet his window is always open to catch the sound of the sandwich vendors in the street, the men in the teahouse, the metallic whine of the ferries as they dock “at any of the little wooden tire-ringed landing stations .” Turkish writers pride themselves on their long sentences, and Pamuk’s most virtuoso catalogs, some stretching across hundreds of words, take in all the barbershops, the horse-drawn carriages, the winter afternoons and rainy backpassages of old Istanbul until he seems a Turkish Whitman, ready to contain all contrarieties."  "My Father's suitcase" shown with the Turkish title, Babamin Bayulu" treats Pamuk's childhood and his life in Istanbul. 


The film brings out that during a decade of repression, Pamuk devoted himself to actually creating a museum of "innocence", documenting the obsession of the novel's character who was modelled upon the stories told to him, by a young lover...in this period.  Readers have often construed that it is autobiographical, but no, it is the invention of Pamuk's imagination, but employing the "real" stories of those he knew...it is a brilliant book. All a writer needs, for Pamuk, is “paper, a pen and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.”



Istanbul is a fascinating city, and due to political issues, in the 70.s and 80.s not many Americans travelled here.  It is one of the great cities of the world, and one finds the Byzantine, the Ottoman Empires, in the tile work, the calligraphy, the carpets, the water pipes, the coffee, the apple tea, the sound of the mosques and minarets singing at noon...the river flowing through the city, - exotic and filled with rich art, and a decaying gentility in the neighborhood balconies over which rugs air...






I taught "The White Castle when teaching for the EU Reforms in Education, in transitional socities in Kosovo and Macedonia. .The events of this story take place in 17th century Istanbul. The story is about a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples who is taken prisoner by the Ottoman Empire. Soon after, he becomes the slave of a scholar known as Hoja (master), a man who is about his own age, and with whom he shares a strong physical resemblance.Hoja reports to the Pasha, who asks him many questions about science and the world. Gradually Hoja and the narrator are introduced to the Sultan, for whom they eventually design an enormous iron weapon.   The slave is told to instruct the master in Western science and technology, from medicine to astronomy. But Hoja wonders why he and his slave are the persons they are and whether given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities.  Always tantalizing! 

I have read these essays and short stories and memoir pieces  a few times...and employed some of the essays while teaching the essay and creative writing. 

Again, Pico Iyer, NYT:  In “Other Colors,” his first big assemblage of nonfiction, Pamuk gives us several of his many selves in a centrifugal gathering of memory-pieces, sketches, interviews and unexpected flights. The result is a gallery of Pamuks: here is the author of the haunted, half-lit inquiry into melancholy and neglect, “Istanbul: Memories and the City,” with further glimpses of the “forest of secret stairways” that is his home; here is the man who so loves books that he wrote a whole novel, “The New Life,” about a character whose life is turned around by a book, with essays on the writers who possess him.,,,Yet “Other Colors” makes clear (even in its title) that he has always been more at home in the world of the imagination, hanging out with Nabokov or Calvino, than in the doctrinaire position that circumstances pushed him into. 

“Other Colors” is too eagerly inclusive to make up the single-pointed, honed narrative that its author promises. Like the maximalist “Black Book” or “My Name Is Red,” it is more a fireworks display than a rounded sculpture (it’s no surprise that a favorite Pamuk character is the “encyclopedist ”). Yet what emerges powerfully, and often movingly, from it is Pamuk’s faith in writing as a “consolation” and refuge, “our only defense against life’s cruelties.” 

Iin the book “My Books Are My Life,” he seems to be speaking both for the way that he has put almost all his adult life into his work (sitting in his room 10 hours every day and barely leaving Istanbul until he was 31 ), and for the fact that his shrine is his library of 12,000 books (in a culture that “views the nonreader as the norm”). Where a writer like Haruki Murakami offers up a cool and somewhat dystopian vision of globalism in which ambient music and drift seem to have superseded the word, Pamuk speaks for the hope that globalism can be made richer and more sustaining through uncompromising literary intelligence.

Whether he’s writing wistfully about André Gide as the hero of Turkish intellectuals (though Gide himself wrote scathingly about Turkey ), or recalling how he used to collect Coca- Cola cans as a boy, from the trash cans of expat Americans, Pamuk is taking the world we thought we knew and making it fresh and alive. A rooted cosmopolitan, he has become one of the essential and enduring writers that both East and West can gratefully claim as their own " From  NYT review by Pico Iyer. 

i read these Charles Eliot Norton lectures several times, most recently when I had the grant to write at Dorland Arts colony for three months, as inspiration, but not for a novel, for a memoir. 

I am reminded that I heard Orhan Pamuk read from his new novel in the Arts and Lectures Series in SF this Spring.   He interviewed street vendors for years and tells the story of Istanbul from the viewpoint of ostensibly, one of them!