![]() ![]() ![]() Istanbul is a travel book written by a man born one year earlier than I who, apart from three years spent teaching at Columbia University in New York, has spent his whole life in his native Istanbul. There lies a certain further appropriateness. Istanbul is described by the Orhan Pamuk website as “a poetical work that is hard to classify, combining the author’s early memoirs up to the age of 22, and an essay about the city of Istanbul, illustrated with photographs from his own album, and pictures by western painters and Turkish photographers”.īoth for me, and for my benefactors, Jim and Therese, Istanbul is, first and foremost, a travel book. Pamuk has won many awards for his writing, including the 2006 Nobel prize for literature. Indeed, that was exactly how I managed to gain my first glimpses of Mexico. ![]() I am also in the habit of taking a look at places through the eyes of persons whose snapshots are separated by half a century. Orhan Pamuk, on the other hand, was born in 1952. The early part of Irfan Orga’s Portrait of a Turkish Family had taken place behind the Blue Mosque in that city. ![]() It was not surprising then when Jim and Therese, those avid travellers, veterans of ship wreck, parents of children educated in American schools, came up with a book on Istanbul as the perfect present for me. I have managed to acquire the anomalous space of a travel freak who almost never leaves his place of residence, except to catch the train to work. ![]()
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