A STRANGENESS IN MY MIND Orhan Pamuk
This appeared in today's The Indian Express
This appeared in today's The Indian Express
In a scene from Orhan
Pamuk’s 2008 novel, The Museum of
Innocence, the narrator, in his Istanbul home on winter nights, hears a
boza seller ringing his bell as he passes the door and is overcome by an urge for
the vendor’s beverage, a fermented grain drink popular from the time of the
Ottomans. In Pamuk’s new novel, A
Strangeness in My Mind, it’s the boza seller who takes centrestage.
A Strangeness in My Mind – the title is from Wordsworth’s The Prelude -- is the saga of Mevlut
Karatas, who accompanies his father to Istanbul from the provinces and spends
the rest of his life there, coming to realise that his vocation lies in selling
boza to the city’s thirsty and sometimes nostalgic residents. In this way, the
book is yet another representation of Istanbul by Pamuk, this time describing
not the privileged of the city, as with The
Museum of Innocence, but its underclass, those who migrate in search of a
better life and find work as itinerant pedlars, waiters, maids, cooks,
mechanics and the like. The unemployed, the underskilled, and the poorly
educated, as sociologist Elijah Anderson has described them.
Another way in which A Strangeness in My Mind complements The Museum of Innocence is that at the
heart of both is a long-lived love story. Mevlut’s wooing of, and subsequent
relationship with, his wife Rahiya provide some of the book’s most touching as
well as light-hearted moments, from the case of mistaken identity with which
their wedlock commences to the deepening of ties over the years.
Pamuk has elsewhere
written of his admiration for Stendhal, of the latter’s brand of psychological
realism, and in this novel, that influence is in full flower. He carries a Stendhalian
mirror down Istanbul’s roads, allowing it to reflect the milieu, morals and
manners of Mevlut, his family and his friends. In keeping with the mischievous
modernist manner of his other works, Pamuk also makes this novel polyphonic: the
third person saga of Mevlut is shot
through with first-person voices from others in his ken. (One of these
characters even alludes puckishly to the writer’s own predicament: “I could
write a book about all the men I’ve known, and then I would also end up on
trial for insulting Turkishness.”)
The somewhat naïve
and always sincere Mevlut’s “strangeness” is referred to time and again.“Mevlut
wasn’t sure whether the strangeness was in his mind or in the world,” we’re
told at the beginning, and then again, referring to the perfect match between
Mevlut and Istanbul: “In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what
makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in our mind
inside its teeming multitudes.” For over
four decades, from student to husband to father, and during various
occupations, he finds satisfaction as a seller of the emblematic boza on
Istanbul’s streets, with his cry “reminding us of centuries past, and the good
old days that have come and gone”.
Overall, there’s an even-toned
quality to the narration, in Ekin Oklap’s English translation. Personal
triumphs and tragedies (births, deaths, employment, unemployment, friendships,
fallings-out, reunions) are rendered in the same register as urban progress and
setbacks (earthquakes, military coups, elections, slum razing, expansion), with
the whole bracketed by an index of characters, chronology and family tree. In
addition, because of the span of time covered, many sections inevitably contain
more summary than incident. At times, all of this can flatten the novel’s
landscape.
One of its
considerable strengths, though, is the way it makes the universal aspects of
rural-urban migration spring to life. One member of a family leaves home for a
better life; others from his immediate family follow; shantytowns with informal,
collaborative networks of people spring up on the outskirts, and, in time, integrate
into the city’s fabric: to these bare bones, Pamuk adds flesh and blood, and
heart. (Migrant workers, casual bribery, overcrowded footpaths, land grabs, electricity
thefts, bloodshed over beliefs, packs of stray dogs, run-down movie theatres: change
some details and locations, and Pamuk could well be writing about an Indian
city.)
At one point years
after he’s come to Istanbul, Mevlut reflects that “it was sad to see the old
face of the city as he had come to know it disappear before his eyes, erased by
new roads, demolitions, buildings, billboards, shops, tunnel and flyovers, but
it was also gratifying to feel that someone out there was working to improve
the city for his benefit.” These changes and more, and the reactions of those
affected by them, are precisely and compendiously captured here, creating an
affectionate, nostalgic portrait of inner-city Istanbul by one who knows it
intimately.
