February Not Fiction Book Discussion

For our February Not Fiction Book Discussion, we are reading Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk, who won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, tells us in his first chapter, "Here we come to the heart of the matter: I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood. . . . My imagination . . . requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am." Thus his book is a memoir of a city as much as it is a memoir of a self, offering readers a lushly detailed cultural, social, political, and religious history of Istanbul as well as a startlingly honest portrait of this artist as a young man. Pamuk has enriched his text with evocative photographs of his family and the city, enhancing his presentation of the sensibility of huzun, or melancholy, he feels he shares with all Istanbullus as a result of living in this lost empire. Our discussion should be rich as we explore Pamuk's literary allusions, compare and contrast his memoir with Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, discuss the idea of a shared cultural sensibility, and share favorite passages, so we hope you will join us, either Tuesday, February 5 at 7:00 p.m. in Meeting Room A of the Main Library on Calhoun Street or here on the blog.

To hear an interview with Orhan Pamuk and learn more about Istanbul, visit this link to Public Radio International's program The World, which recently featured a week of programming about this city titled Istanbul: A Past and Future City.