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.

Notes from January's Not Fiction Book Discussion

We began our discussion of Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir with a question asked by book reviewer William Leith of the London Evening Standard: "Is this the most cheerful book I've ever read, or the saddest?" We all agreed that Bryson does a wonderful job of conveying the parallel currents of optimism and paranoia that defined the 1950s--the excitement of space travel and television and the fear of communist spies and nuclear war--and he also succeeds at evoking the hyperbolic enthusiasm of childhood and the nostalgia of adulthood.

We disagreed with critics who feel that Bryson is not much of a memoirist. We decided that some readers might not understand Bryson's purpose in writing this book--to recreate the feel of childhood in a particular time and place rather than to provide a psychological evaluation of himself and his family. Bryson confirmed his intentions in a September 2006 interview with Emma Brooks of the Guardian: "This is not a deeply analytical book. The points it makes are pretty obvious points. It is not a huge intellectual exercise. It's really just a book about what an interesting state childhood is and what an interesting and promising place the United States was 50 years ago and how I think it's kind of gone wrong. . . . I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family."

We all enjoyed reminiscing about our own childhoods, prompted by the humor and lyricism of passages such as this one: " . . . I knew more things in the first ten years of my life than I believe I have known at any time since. . . . I knew the cool feel of linoleum on bare skin and what everything smelled like at floor level. I knew pain the way you know it when it is fresh and interesting--the pain, for example, of a toasted marshmallow in your mouth when its interior is roughly the temperature and consistency of magma. I knew exactly how clouds drifted on a July afternoon, what rain tasted like, how ladybugs preened and caterpillars rippled, what it felt like to sit inside a bush. I knew how to appreciate a really good fart, whether mine or someone else's." However, just as Bryson's book strikes a balance between cheerful and sad, so we found ourselves drawn to reflect, just as Bryson does in his melancholy last lines, "What a wonderful world that would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won't see its like again, I'm afraid."

To view an animated VidLit clip of a passage from The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, click here!

If you have read Bryson's memoir or simply want to reminisce about your childhood, we hope you will add your comments here. What passages of the book were humorous to you? What memories of your childhood did the book bring back for you?