Borneo-Dayak CRAFTS
indonesia exporter of dayak tribe's handmade crafts & tribal arts

Amazon.com's special collection on Borneo-Dayak arts and crafts .....

This Istanbul: Memories and the City is one of Amazon.com's collection on Borneo Dayak's-related products. Brought on this site by Borneo-Dayak Crafts Indonesia.

Istanbul: Memories and the City

Today's shopping tips: "Be wise in purchasing ..... find best value one"

---

Manufacturer: Knopf
List Price: $26.95
Our Price: $14.75
You Save: $ 12.20 ( 45% )
(prices subject to change)
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

Average Customer Ratings:

A portrait, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost man of letters, author of the acclaimed novels Snow and My Name Is Red.

Blending reminiscence with history; family photographs with portraits of poets and pashas; art criticism, metaphysical musing, and, now and again, a fanciful tale, Orhan Pamuk invents an ingenious form to evoke his lifelong home, the city that forged his imagination. He begins with his childhood among the eccentric extended Pamuk family in the dusty, carpeted, and hermetically sealed apartment building they shared. In this place came his first intimations of the melancholy awareness that binds all residents of his city together: that of living in the seat of ruined imperial glories, in a country trying to become “modern” at the dizzying crossroads of East and West. This elegiac communal spirit overhangs Pamuk’s reflections as he introduces the writers and painters (among the latter, most particularly the German Antoine-Ignace Melling) through whose eyes he came to see Istanbul. Against a background of shattered monuments, neglected villas, ghostly backstreets, and, above all, the fabled waters of the Bosphorus, he presents the interplay of his budding sense of place with that of his predecessors. And he charts the evolution of a rich, sometimes macabre, imaginative life, which furnished a daydreaming boy refuge from family discord and inner turmoil, and which would continue to serve the famous writer he was to become. It was, and remains, a life fed by the changing microcosm of the apartment building and, even more, the beckoning kaleidoscope beyond its walls.

As much a portrait of the artist as a young man as it is an oneiric Joycean map of the city, Istanbul is a masterful evocation of its subject through the idiosyncrasies of direct experience as much as the power of myth--the dazzling book Pamuk was born to write.

DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 949.61803092
EAN: 9781400040957
ISBN: 1400040957
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: 2005-06-07
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: 2005-06-07
Studio: Knopf


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Snow
• My Name Is Red
• The Black Book
• Other Colors: Essays and a Story (Vintage International)
• The Bastard of Istanbul


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: For those who glory in rainy days
Comment: Yes, it got the Nobel Prize, and who am I to argue with that. But the book just didn't work for me. I had rather hoped for a slightly more objective glimpse of Istanbul from the eyes of someone who grew up there and knew it well. Unfortunately, this was Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, which may or may not have much correlation to the Istanbul others know. Orhan grew up in a very privileged home. He was spared from the poverty he saw all around him. His recollections are of an Istanbul that is melancholy, crumbling, and in decay. The mood was gray, the voice was gray, and the pictures were gray. Reading the book felt like being outside on an overcast day that threatens rain. Fine if you like that kind of weather, but I always find myself hoping the sun will peek through just once in a while. This didn't happen in Pamuk's Istanbul. Recommended to those who like rainy days.
Customer Rating:
Summary: After visiting Istambul
Comment: I have started to enyoy this masterpiece, since I visited Istambul. Suddenly Pamuk's memories has merged with mine.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction to Turkish history and culture
Comment: Istanbul: Memories and the City


Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, like Samuel Peyps' London, Proust's Paris, and Borges' Buenos Aires, is a collection of childhood memories informed by adult intellect. Born into a once prominent but lately downwardly- mobile family, Pamuk is preoccupied by the sense of lost glory that infuses Istanbul:
"The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy." It is this melancholy, or
`huzun' that infuses the city and his memories.
How to refer to the change in political control of the city from Greek to Ottoman is the subject of a fascinating chapter: "Conquest or Decline? The turkification of Istanbul." During the 500th anniversary ceremony in l953, the government downplayed the "Turkish' factor, partially because of Turkey's new membership in Nato. Out of fear of alienating the Greek population, the government chose to ignore the anniversary of the "Conquest of Constantinople."
But there were anti-Greek demonstrations and violence, leading Pamuk to conclude that "the government allowed mobs to rampage through the city, plundering the property of Greeks and other minorities. A number of churches were destroyed during the riots and a number of priests were murdered, so there are many echoes of the cruelties Western histories describe as the "fall" of Constantinople. In fact, both the Turkish and Greek states have been guilty of treating their respective minorities as hostages to geopolitics."
One of the attractive features of Pamuk's memoir is the generous use of archival, black and white photographs dating from the 1920's, thirties, and forties.
The original Turkish is ably translated Maureen Freely. I am now encouraged to read more of Pamuk's works available in English, "The Black Book," "My Name is Red," and "Snow," which he describes as his only political novel.



Customer Rating:
Summary: neo-nostalgia
Comment: I remember the Boston of my childhood, though I remember Marblehead (a small town to the north) much better because I actually lived there. The two places had certain sights, sounds, smells, and "feelings" that, for the most part, have vanished like a morning fog off the Atlantic. But anchoring all those sensory aspects of the places was history, a giant kaleidescope of shifting people, institutions and events that created the then present, that created the new present, and will create the next present. I can't imagine Boston or Marblehead without that history.

Orhan Pamuk chose to write his great love for his city in a strange form. He weaves himself and his personal history into the picture, but completely avoids any historical details. I wonder whom he wrote for ? If for that "western audience" he refers to so often, there is not enough history to make sense of why Istanbul became such a melancholic, declined, fallen, poor, neglected place (at least he says it was). Fires and accidents, rain and snow, the hiss of tires slipping on old cobblestone alleys in a city that once ruled a big part of the world. If he wrote for a Turkish audience, his style of describing his family and his personal behavior would probably turn them off, along with his emphasis on Turkish cultural poverty. Maybe he wanted to "send a message" to those who insist too much on "Turkishness", by mentioning the now-mostly-disappeared non-Muslim minorities quite often. Maybe, but I conclude that he wrote it for himself---full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes to come. Pamuk writes of western painters and travellers and their views of the city in the 19th century and how they influenced him. He also writes of Turkish authors and how they viewed the city, though I have never seen any of their work in translation (meaning I have no idea how they would resonate with me). I liked this gambit, though I knew nothing about those Turkish writers. What I liked best is how he describes the city itself, how he walked around it as a child and a youth, how he steeped himself in the decay of the old Ottoman heritage before all the old mansions burned, before concrete apartment blocks sprang up like toadstools to sweep away the sad wooden houses that had seen better days. I loved the chapter on smoke from the funnels of steamships in the Bosphorus, and above all I liked the dozens of black and white photos of bygone days that fill the pages. It's a world class essay of nostalgia, but done in a very new way.

It's an interesting way to describe a city and write the first part of an autobiography. It's not a travelogue. There's not a single map---as if all the readers would know the geography of Istanbul. This is not Istanbul for visitors, this is Istanbul for those who loved it (who could AFFORD to love it) back in the Fifties and Sixties, when it had not been inundated in a huge tide of immigrants or refugees from the countryside and abroad, when Turkey was a poor, slow country. I saw it, once, briefly then, when Pamuk was an eleven year old kid. The dynamic, vital, amazing city of 2008 bears little resemblance to that other Istanbul. I understand why he wrote the book; I know a little of what is lost. To know that, you couldn't find a better book than this.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Istanbul: Memories and the City
Comment: I have now read all of Orhan Pamuk books available. I have learned so much about another culture because of this brillian author.

---

NOTE: All online transactions are processed at Amazon.com's secure server, using the latest technology on internet's secure transactions.
| Borneo books | Borneo posters | Dayak books |

Bamboo-Bali Furnitures - fine bamboo bedroom furnitures
Bamboo-Bali Furnitures Indonesia offers the highest quality fine fine bamboo furnitures, mainly bedroom furnitures. Each of Bamboo Bali's bamboo bedroom furniture is made from carefully selected bamboo materials, and they are properly processed to meet overseas requirements.