Travel: Istanbul is famous for the Ottoman grandeur of the Sultanahmet district, where from dust and bustle the city's great monuments rise up to shape the familiar skyline: Topkapi Palace and Aya Sofya, Sülemaniye and the Blue Mosque.
But north of the old city, across the Golden Horn, Istanbul becomes more European. The districts here were developed after the sultans' mid-19th-century move from Topkapi to the newly-built Dolmabahçe Palace. This move reflected the declining empire's attempt to refashion itself in a more western mould, and it altered Istanbul's centre of gravity in ways that have persisted. The city's European consulates and international schools remain scattered along the old-world elegance of Istiklal Street, which runs through Beyoglu as far as Taksim, which in turn leads north to Nisantasi, one of the city's wealthiest and most western districts.
I have known Istanbul and these areas for seven years now. My partner is from Istanbul. We have lived in the city and will marry there later this year.
By any definition, I am a blow-in. But Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's foremost author, has lived in these neighbourhoods all his life. His writing about them provides a dramatic illustration of his view that Istanbul has succumbed to profound sadness in its uncomfortable limbo between a glorious Ottoman past and a longed-for European future.
Pamuk is perhaps best known for his most recent novels - My Name is Red, which won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2003, and last year's Snow. His international breakthrough came with The Black Book, however, very much an Istanbul book, in which the author's declared objective was to give literary expression to his city as Joyce did for Dublin.
Pamuk's new book, his first of non- fiction to be translated into English, sees him writing about Istanbul once again.
Istanbul is autobiographical in part, telling the story of Pamuk's early life, up as far as his decision in his early 20s to forego architecture and painting and to become a writer. We see Pamuk growing up in a large, extended and quietly unhappy family as it steadily runs down its once-great wealth. But for all its elements of personal memoir, Pamuk's book is much less about his life than about the city in which he lives. He offers a seductive evocation of a century and a half in Istanbul's cultural history. Nothing is hurried or forced, and the city eases into focus with Pamuk's repeated digressions from stories of his childhood and teenage journeys around the city.
Pamuk's Istanbul shines with "dark elegance"; it is beautiful but desperate. He spends much of the book articulating a deep-seated listlessness he says has characterised the city and its people since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. To the visitor today, Beyoglu's European grandeur is distinctly faded. But it was always thus, says Pamuk. The turn towards the West - first by the sultans and then by the republic that succeeded them - has always been bound up in the Istanbul consciousness with a profound sense of sorrow at the passing of imperial greatness.
In the book's early chapters Pamuk insists repeatedly on the city's melancholy, before reaching instead for a Turkish word, hüzün, which he says better captures the ambiguous mix of heartache and pride that Istanbul inspires in its residents. Pamuk describes hüzün as a sort of collective world-weariness in the face of beauty and loss. This feeling pervades the book as Pamuk walks us through Istanbul's impoverished sidestreets and up onto its hills to watch derelict Ottoman mansions burn on the banks of the Bosphorus.
He contrasts the responses the city has elicited over the centuries from western visitors (notably Melling, Gautier, Nerval and Flaubert) and from Istanbul's own authors, poets and historians. Pamuk is deeply indebted to the generation of writers that preceded him in Istanbul. Four in particular, he says, conjured the images of Istanbul that continue to shape its residents' complicated understanding of their city: memoirist Abdülhak Sinasi Hisar, poet Yahya Kemal, novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar and popular historian Resat Ekrem Koçu. These men remade Istanbul, Pamuk says, by finding ways of writing about it that neither lapsed into nostalgia for the Ottoman era nor succumbed to the nationalism of the new republic.
In his short book Pamuk manages to array for us a richly detailed history of the city and of those before him who have written about it, painted it, photographed it. The research that underpins Istanbul is meticulous and flawlessly handled - the breadth of reference and allusion is matched by the flowing ease with which Pamuk combines it with his personal responses to the city.
The least successful elements of the book are the autobiographical. Pamuk is effective when writing about Istanbul because of the directness with which he teases out the complexities of his feelings about the city. The postmodern tics that on occasion mar his novels are absent here. With the autobiographical material, however, these tics recur - for example, in repeated musings about whether the city is home to another Orhan, his twin or double, or in the tired motif, familiar from his fiction, of the new or second life - here an "other world" opened first by childhood daydreaming, later by his painting and writing. It is a pity these devices consume so much of his autobiographical energy, because the story of his family's decline deserves more room to breathe than it is given.
But we can be thankful that Istanbul and its writers seem to rein in Pamuk's excesses and draw the best out of him when he turns to write about the city. With rigour and flair, he has crafted here an honest and loving book which will rank among his finest works and among the finest books to have been written about Istanbul. It should be read, and then the city visited.
Aengus Collins is a writer and critic
Istanbul By Orhan Pamuk Translated by Maureen Freely Faber and Faber, 348pp. £16.99