A city and a mood take centre stage in Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, writes Michele Magwood for the Sunday Times
A Strangeness in My Mind
Orhan Pamuk (Faber & Faber)
***** (5 stars)
Melancholy is Orhan Pamuk’s ink, it colours his canvas and his writing and in Turkish there is even a name for it: hüzün. In A Strangeness in My Mind he turns his eye once again to his beloved Istanbul, not the Westernised, bourgeois side we saw in The Museum of Innocence, but the lowly working class scrabbling for a life in the city. And though the story is, as always, steeped in hüzün, it is poignant rather than sad, affectionate rather than despairing.
A Strangeness in My Mind is a great baggy saga of a book, a boiling, teeming tale spanning four decades. It is the story of Mevlut Karatas, amiable boza seller, a man heroic in his equableness and simple honour.
Boza is a fermented wheat drink that dates from the Ottoman era, traditionally sold by vendors walking the streets at night. It was once sold along with yoghurt, with customers dropping baskets down from their apartments to be filled by the vendor from the pans on their wooden yokes, but times are changing and now yoghurt is sold in glass cups in shops. Mevlut, who sells chicken and rice on the streets by day, insists on continuing his boza rounds at night, his plaintive call an echo of the past, a symbol of something lost and a time past. It is the one constant thing in his life, anchoring him to the streets and neighbourhoods amid tumultuous change in the city.
He arrives in Istanbul at the age of 12 from his village in Anatolia, following his father to the city to join him selling yoghurt and boza. They live in a one-roomed slum house with a dirt floor and a long drop. They are part of an extended clan, and Pamuk summons a vast chorus of voices to tell Mevlut’s story. He begins the saga in the middle, with our constant hero’s courtship and elopement with a village girl.
He spots Rayiha at a family wedding; exquisite and demure, she is just 13 years old. For three years Mevlut writes her chaste letters, encouraged by his cousin who delivers the letters to her. Having had only a glimpse of her face, and bound by strict conventions of decency, he doesn’t have much to go on. His ardency is comical. “Your eyes are like ensorcelled arrows that pierce my heart and take me captive,” reads one letter. She never replies, but cousin Suleyman is adamant that she, too, is in love with Mevlut, and helps them to run away.
It is only when they have boarded a train bound for Istanbul in the dead of night that Mevlut discovers he has eloped with an older, less attractive sister. He comes to realise that Suleyman, of course, wants the younger girl, and has tricked him. Mevlut being the man he is, he simply accepts his fate and he and Rayiha build a deeply loving marriage. This is the axle around which the story turns.
Backwards and forwards Pamuk moves, from Mevlut’s poor childhood to his old age, through his dead-end jobs as an ice-cream seller and car guard, his abandoned school days and brief flirtation with communism. We see him as a proud and gentle father, an honest citizen, an innocent optimist. At the same time we watch his relatives growing richer through corrupt deals, feel the frustration of women tethered to hearth and shabby home, and we witness the city ballooning. Not the tourist city of the Hagia Sophia and the Topkapi Palace: this is a city of skyscrapers and tenements, with buildings hastily thrown up and new bridges being built across the fabled Bosphorus.
The story bulges with encyclopedic detail, of food and politics, religion and customs. There are squabbles and blood feuds, matchmakings and scandals, crippling setbacks and cheering successes. It is a splendid, 600-page soap opera.
More playful and tender than Pamuk’s previous novels about Istanbul, A Strangeness in My Mind is undoubtedly his love letter to the city. In this tale of a hapless Everyman, Pamuk shows that even ordinary lives can be epic.
Follow Michele Magwood on Twitter @michelemagwood
Read: Michele Magwood Visits Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Cukurcuma, Turkey
Book details
- A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk
EAN: 9780571275984
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