Orhan Pamuk's native Istanbul is defined by both a hazy sadness and the vitality of the Bosphorus water, he tells Arminta Wallace.
Great cities deserve great books, but they don't always get them. First of all, there must be - in situ, as it were - a great writer. Then the moment, too, must be right. For the Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk, that moment came when he decided to write about his native city of Istanbul - with his real-life self as the main character in the narrative. It's not the first time Istanbul has turned up in his work, of course. My Name is Red, which won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award in 2003, is set in the 16th-century city of the Sultans. In The White Castle, a Turkish savant looks at the city through the eyes of a Venetian slave. The Black Book is a glittering kaleidoscope of contemporary urban flotsam and jetsam. But these are fictions. In Istanbul: Memories of a City, Pamuk has combined memoir with observation, personal anecdote with essay and literary criticism. The result is a book crammed with odd facts (and even odder relatives); a book which, like the city itself, is one of a kind. A memoir, though. Not a novel.
Crammed into a tiny upstairs office at the headquarters of his English publisher, Faber & Faber, Pamuk is tall and gangly, all arms and legs and barely suppressed energy. His English is fluent and muscular but somehow, also, very Turkish. Perhaps what's Turkish is the way he frowns seriously at each question - wary, almost - but every now and again breaks into a huge grin or a deep, throaty chuckle. This happens when we discuss the Impac Prize. Well, he says, it was certainly a boost for his English and French publishers. Come again?
"You know, there are very few prizes for translated books," he says. "And sometimes they would say, 'Oh, Orhan, you need to win some prizes. The books are selling okay, but, you know . . .' "
This, it's beginning to dawn on me, is a Pamukian joke. He's on record somewhere as saying that he's fed up being asked what he did with all the Impac money.
"Yes. It added to my international reputation," he says, suddenly serious again. "My books were translated into another five or six languages because of that - it definitely gave me another push, and I'm very grateful."
Was he surprised by the win? "A bit. But then, since I knew that I was shortlisted . . ." - an enormous grin - "I like my book, you know?" The chuckles bubble over. "So I was not amazed or anything." More laughter. "A good decision," he declares, his eyes dancing. "A jury with good taste . . ."
Having won a major international literary prize, then, why did he decide to write a memoir? "Oh," he says. "I had two inclinations. I was writing many occasional articles about the town - so many, in fact, that I thought of putting them together in a book. But I was also thinking of writing about my childhood. Walter Benjamin says there are two kinds of city writing: those books written by people who come from outside, who tend to look for the exotic, and those written by the people who have lived in the city, which tend to be autobiographical. So I thought, why don't I go ahead and write a book that would be ambitious as autobiography, and also ambitious as a strange essay about the town? I thought that if I tried to do this, I would find something new. And this is my attempt."
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ASPECT of the book predictably caused quite a stir in Turkey, where the tabloid press seized on Pamuk's "revelations" about his family and built them into headline news. Compared to the chapter-and-verse memoirs now in vogue in the West, his mild criticism of his father's infidelities, his complaints about his brother's bossy behaviour and his description of a youthful love affair seem unremarkable in the context of what was obviously a happy childhood. Why all the fuss then? He shrugs. "My father was fun to be around, a very nice man and a tolerant father. Whatever I did, he would say, 'Oh, he's a genius'. Of course, it was hard to write about his adultery, because my mother is alive.
"And then - you know, I may have hurt some others as well. But I'm that sort of person. I know that some people will be offended, but I care about the book. As I was writing the book I expected that the tabloids would focus on that - but what can you do? I didn't want to self-censor on account of the tabloids. So I went ahead and wrote what I wanted to write."
Which was? "A philosophical statement about life," he says. "How we form ourselves, how our minds are constituted, what kind of influences go into it. The fragility and transparency of the Cartesian mind as it's being made."
Pamuk is not a man to understate his ambitions. But Istanbul: Memories of a City is a much more human book than this rather stern mission statement would suggest. In fact, it's a page-turner, the momentum sustained by his affectionate - if occasionally exasperated - portraits of his extended family, all of whom, at one point, lived in Pamuk Apartments, a purpose-built block courtesy of the fortune made by his grandfather in the 1930s (frittered away by the next generation).
By far the most important character in the book, however, is Istanbul itself. Pamuk spent his teenage years yearning to be a painter, and he casts a painterly eye on the gilded domes and exquisite vistas for which the city is justly famous. But as anyone who has spent time in Istanbul will know, the city's appeal lies in a kind of complex cocktail of history, architecture and sheer warts-and-all humanity. For Pamuk, the character of Istanbul hinges on an emotion he calls hüzün. The dictionary translates the word as "melancholy, sadness, grief" - but for Pamuk it is, rather, an end-of-empire desolation which is as much a part of the fabric of the city itself as the astonishing quality of light on water at sunset, or the streets of decaying wooden houses. The achievement of Istanbul: Memories of a City is that in analysing the "mysterious haze" that is hüzün, he has ensured that the book is suffused with it.
"I tried to capture it as a movie scholar might in a film," he says. "At the heart of the book lies this melancholy - both a rational pinning down of it, and as a lyrical, poetic voice also."
Which is not to say that the book is a gloomy read. It is, on the contrary, full of delightfully bizarre information and cameo roles by an assortment of weird and wonderful characters. It is also crammed with atmospheric black-and-white photographs. For those who find Pamuk's fiction puzzling, it explains a good deal about his formation as a writer; about the interest in architecture which informs the cool, cerebral structure of his novels, and the four Turkish writers who have been major influences on his work. And then there is the Bosphorus. There is water everywhere in Istanbul. Even for the casual visitor it is a joy; for the Istanbul resident, says Pamuk, it acts as a kind of spiritual antidote to hüzün.
"Behind the ruins of the Ottoman empire and this dark history, the Bosphorus is a source of vitality and inspiration. It clears your spirit. It revitalises and gives you strength. It was our family ritual to get into my uncle's American car in the 1950s and early 1960s to go to the Bosphorus, hang around there, have our photographs taken, buy some fish . . ." He stops abruptly. "What is it?" he asks. We listen. A dog is barking outside the window. But it sounds, he protests, as if it's coming from my tape recorder. We peer at the tape recorder in consternation. It does sound as if it's coming from the speaker. And dogs, as we both know, are very Istanbul.
Packs of them used to roam the city until they were officially "banished" to an uninhabited island - though many of them simply made their way home again. Mercifully, the barking stops before Bloomsbury is invaded by hüzün.
EAST AND WEST. That's the cliche which is so often trotted out about Istanbul: the city that straddles East and West. As Pamuk shrewdly points out, what this boils down to, in everyday life, is that Istanbullus feel like outsiders at least half the time.
For himself, as a writer, it's even more of a double bind. "Of course, in Turkey I'm seen as being on the 'Western' side, criticised by the nationalists, criticised by the communitarians as not belonging there. Even, sometimes, criticised for looking at my country through Western eyes - which is not true. In the Western media I'm portrayed as belonging to the East. So there's inevitable confusion." And a certain dislocation - which is, of course, a necessary ingredient for great writing.
What is he working on now? He beams. "I'm writing a major novel which will be 450, 500 pages. Up to now I've spent three years on it, and it will probably take another year and a half." Set in Istanbul between 1975 and today, it will, he says, be a chronicle of the city's high society and an obsessive love story. Sounds good, I say. "Yeah? We'll see . . ."