The key, he said, is to understand the concept of huzun. In this case, he has found Maureen Freely, bilingual (having grown up in Istanbul) and a distinguished writer in her own right: she has done a wonderful job, which does not read at all like a translation, and, having managed a good part of the book myself, somewhat painfully, in the original, my admiration for what she has done is boundless. In the recently published first volume of memoirs, Istanbul: Memories and the City, Orhan Pamuk describes how a 1950’s child hood among Europe -yearning cosmopolitans in the crumbling ruins of the Ottoman Empire helped to shape him as a writer. Pamuk writes a very intricate Turkish, and has not always been well served by his translators. Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk has opened a museum displaying artifacts in parallel with his novel Museum of Innocence, which tells a love story lasting three. This present book, by the well-established Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, is a good idea: childhood and late-adolescent autobiography woven into a picture of Istanbul, at the time, and earlier. You live until you are thirty, said Graham Greene, and after that it is all memory. Along with Balzac’s Paris and Dickens’s London, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul now ranks as one of the most illustrious author-trademarked cities in literary history.
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