Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul

Ostensibly an elegy for a city that, in many or most ways, does not exist anymore, Pamuk creates a grand memoir, as well as a byzantine and roundabout diagnosis and critique of the malaise that he senses is his city’s — and, by extension, perhaps also the malaise that has spread across the whole region. It would be shortsighted to only see Pamuk’s elegy as the song of a waning and increasingly irrelevant middle class (even if that is also true.) There is, in the powerful evocation of a once great and cosmopolitan city and civilization, a peculiar ambiguity: clearly, the old days were also the days of a different class structure. The present, where almost all of that has been swept away by what is the more or less direct consequences of globalization, is condemnable not because it does away with the old and the feudal, but because it does not offer anything to replace it — and it ruthlessly also does way with what was good about the old. The cosmopolitanism is replaced by globalization which does not really offer much else than color TV and fast food: in the wake of this, no wonder, perhaps, that the call from the minaret seems so much more alluring. Pamuk weeps for that loss — but, interestingly, he has never really left his city, and it does not seem as if he would want to do so voluntarily.

No wonder that the writer of the book was awarded a rather prestigious literary prize.