Istanbul: Memories And the City @ books000001

Istanbul: Memories And the City

　　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 ayoung 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.

　　在鄂圖曼土耳其帝國瓦解之後，世界幾乎忘了曾經叱吒風雲的伊斯坦堡存在過的事實。這座帕慕克所生長的城市如今窮困潦倒，在它長達兩千年的歷史以來從未像現在這般遺世獨立。對帕慕克而言，伊斯坦堡一直是一座充滿帝國遺跡與銷聲黯然的城市。他自己的內心也一直與這段銷聲黯然的過往爭戰不休，終於體悟出能超越這段記憶的唯一方式，就是與這段輝煌過如今卻澹然的歷史和平共存下去。

作者簡介

奧罕．帕慕克（Orhan Pamuk, 1952.06.07-）

　　出生於伊斯坦堡，除了花三年的時間待在紐約之外，他在伊斯坦堡科技大學主修建築，以及在伊斯坦堡大學念新聞研究所。自一九七四年開始有規律的寫作起，至今從未間斷，而且得獎成績斐然，他的作品被評論為「當代小說中最新穎、最具原創性之作。」

　　如今，這本《伊斯坦堡：一座城市的記憶》更為帕慕克獲得二○○五年諾貝爾文學獎提名的殊榮，足見奧罕•帕慕克的才華不僅深獲讀者的青睞，更受到文壇最高榮譽──諾貝爾文學獎的矚目。