A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk review – an encyclopedia of Istanbul

This sprawling story of a street vendor’s romance is above all a love letter to the Turkish city in all its faded, messy, dusty glory

The invention of Turkey in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his fellow officers entailed an imaginative severing from its Ottoman roots. Though the Ottoman rulers had begun to become westernised, the new nation presented itself in opposition to the Ottoman past in policies, dress, writing, manners and speech, and Atatürk himself sought in neglected local traditions a different history from the one the Ottoman rulers had long chosen. The literature that grew from this other past was decidedly modern, and its inspiration came from 19th-century and early 20th-century Europe, especially from France. Baudelaire, Balzac and Zola were found in the libraries of most young Turks.

Though several of Orhan Pamuk’s novels stubbornly hark back to that condemned past (The White Castle, My Name is Red) or look at contemporary tragedies with a borderless eye (Snow), the principal character of much of his most important fiction is the city of Istanbul itself, where Pamuk was born in 1952. His first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, and later The Black Book, tell the story of Istanbul through the lives of affluent westernised characters. Now, in A Strangeness in My Mind, translated by Ekin Oklap, Pamuk has taken up the same story but this time through the eyes of a street vendor, Mevlut, who trades in yoghurt, rice and peas, and boza, the emblematic Turkish drink of fermented wheat. The reader follows Mevlut through the sprawling plot, which winds its way in and out of the poorer neighbourhoods and the ancient alleys and passages of Istanbul. Though at times it reads as a cross between a history manual and private memoir, A Strangeness in My Mind is above all a love letter to the city in all its faded, messy, dusty glory.

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