Pamuk has two enduring loves: books and Istanbul. Often they converge as his journeys through his hometown come to resemble excursions through memory itself. Like Proust, Pamuk has spent decades of his life — 15,300 days, he calculates — in the same room in his beloved birthplace, alone with his books and thoughts. Yet his window is always open to catch the sound of the sandwich vendors in the street, the men in the teahouse, the metallic whine of the ferries as they dock “at any of the little wooden tire-ringed landing stations .” Turkish writers pride themselves on their long sentences, and Pamuk’s most virtuoso catalogs, some stretching across hundreds of words, take in all the barbershops, the horse-drawn carriages, the winter afternoons and rainy backpassages of old Istanbul until he seems a Turkish Whitman, ready to contain all contrarieties.
