BBC - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3131585.

stm

As I was writing, imagining the book as a modern, ambitious book, of course I had in mind
James Joyce - what James Joyce did to Dublin.
To sum it up what he did for me was this: he considered his city, as I consider Istanbul, to be
on the margins of Europe, not at the centre.
Of course if you lived in that corner of the world you would be obsessed with all the
anxieties of nationalism - your country is important, your city is important.
…

So many people came, but some of them missed the whole point.
Some of them got some of it, but most of the foreigners saw and paid attention to the
exotic rather than the random. They missed the texture.
They paid attention to monuments and looked for the exotic and the strange, and, in fact,
added a colour of their own, which sometimes is not there.
…

If you have a vision of a city as a main hero, characters, in a way, are also instruments for
you to see the city rather than their inner depths.
And the inner depths of the characters are also deduced from the city, as in Dostoevsky.
Then it's impossible to distinguish the character from the city, the city from the character.
You have all these perspectives moving around in the city and to imagine them in our mind's
eye gives a correct and precise image of the city.
…

http://www.signandsight.com/features/115.html

I'm not writing a political novel to make propaganda for some cause. I want to describe the condition
of people's souls in a city. The city is called Kars and it is situated in the outermost north-easterly
edge of Turkey, but it is a microcosm which to some extent stands for Turkey as a whole.

In Kars you can quite literally feel the sadness that comes from being a part of Europe, and at the
same time the sparse, hard-fought very un-European life. My novel deals with the inner conflict of
Turks today, the contradictions between Islam and modernity, the longing to be part of Europe - and
the fear of it at the same time.

Well, on the one hand Turks have a legitimate need to defend their national dignity – and this
includes being recognised as part of the West and Europe. But then there's also the fear of losing
one's identity in the course of westernisation. The opponents of this process have always tried to
denounce westernisation as a poor imitation. But they are also able to ingnite every possible political
passion – from nationalism to Islamism.

You believe that these movements have a common emotional basis?

That these political movements flourish on the margin of Turkish society has to do with poverty and
the fact that these people feel poorly represented. Another factor, one often underestimated by the
West, is that the fall of the Ottoman Empire left behind such devastating sadness that it was long
impossible to come to terms with the experience. The reaction to this traumatic loss of empire was to
retreat into oneself. Faced with the challenge of Western thinking, people tend to focus on themselves
and chant like a Sufi: we are different, we will always be different and we are proud to be different.
This trauma of Turkish loss is completely absent from the German perception. We do not see the
Turks as the grieving heirs of a world empire.

No you see them – now I'm oversimplifying – as street sweepers and cleaning women. This ignores
the fact that from the 16th to the 19th centuries, all the cultural and material wealth of the Middle East
was flowing towards Istanbul. Turkey has a highly-educated secular elite.

And your family is one the wealthiest and well-known in this class.

But I still don't really fit into the scheme of things. I chose art over the positivist-rationalist life of an
engineer that my family intended for me. I wanted to be a painter at first, then I opted for an
architecture degree. And with writing I've finally found my calling.

Istanbul Expressed
https://www.orhanpamuk.net/popuppage.aspx?id=73&lng=eng

Pamuk has said in interviews that he wanted to invent a language that reflects the texture of life in
Istanbul, its maze of ancient streets, its 3,000-year history, a city divided by the Bosphorus, half in
Europe, half in Asia. Straggling over seven hills on its European side, it is connected to Asia by a
twentieth-century bridge. Certainly, as Galip wanders, we get a colorful, all-encompassing, sometimes
surreal picture of the city, right down to its movie-star role-playing prostitutes and its pigeons. The
city also reflects life's dailiness, its careful balance of imposed form and chaos, a necessary framing
element for this story, but not the whole story.

It is human, Pamuk seems to suggest, to struggle with mysteries such as "foreign" influences (versus
Turkish character, for example), to look inside yourself, to wonder what you are, to long to be truly
yourself. But that can also be fatally limiting. One of the most remarkable stories in the book is told
by Galip (pretending to be Jelal) to a BBC film crew, for a program about Turkish politics— only
Galip's story is about a nineteenth-century prince who tries to become more fully himself by getting
rid of people, books, furniture, anything that might make him want to be someone else. Boredom
sets in, but he never stops trying to clear his head of alien matter. He envies the "stones in the desert
for just being themselves," until he dies, alone except for his scribe, in a virtually empty room painted
white.

In other words, the capacity to imitate is an essential part of our beings. We're naturally open to
influence, change and new experience. Indeed, we need these things just as plants need water. To
resist newness is to reject the stuff of life.

Pamuk describes our yearning for this newness, for life, for something other, as a void inside us,
symbolized by an air shaft in the old building where Galip and Jelal grew up. This void need not
necessarily be filled with sadness, an emotion we usually associate with inner emptiness; it may also
be a space where something heroic blossoms, amid the ordinariness of life, like Galip's finally fulfilled
wish to be a writer. In fact, when Galip tells the story of the prince, he feels triumphant. In creating,
he thinks, he has finally become himself. He is complete— a testament, as Pamuk's books usually are,
to the power of art.

A Walker in the City

By Christopher De Bellaigue

https://www.orhanpamuk.net/popup.aspx?id=31&lng=eng
As a Turk, a painter and -- eventually -- a writer, the journey Pamuk depicts in ''Istanbul'' lies
between what many outsiders, in his sardonic observation, ''like to call East and West,'' but which he
terms past and present. The past is represented by the Ottoman Empire, a vast many-limbed polyglot
whose heart once beat in Istanbul, its dazzling capital. But the empire no longer exists, and its
surviving memorials -- the imperial mansions and expanses of woodland, the marble fountains and
clapboard waterside villas -- are being devoured by developers, fire and neglect. The present is the
Turkish Republic, Ataturk's secular, Western-oriented, homogenizing nation state, which has its seat
in a big Anatolian village. Istanbul is no longer a city of consequence, let alone a world capital. It is
an insular little place sinking in its own ruins, ''so poor and confused that it can never again dream of
rising to its former heights of wealth, power and culture.''

Pamuk is himself a product of the Ataturk revolution. Born in 1952 into a quarrelsome, irreligious
family, surrounded by ''positivist men who loved mathematics,'' he grew up, as he tells us, in a
family-owned apartment building in the upmarket Nisantasi district, free to read Freud and Sartre and
Faulkner, drink alcohol and have a love affair (beautifully evoked in Maureen Freely's fine translation)
with a schoolgirl. As a young painter, he saw his city through the pictorial and written accounts left by
visiting Europeans, and also through four republic-era Turkish writers who have been, ''at one point
in their lives, dazzled by the brilliance of Western (and particularly French) art and literature.''
Naturally, the reader pauses to reflect on Pamuk's own debt to the West -- on the architectonic
precision of his novels, on their assured leaps from Proustian introspection to a narrative sorcery that
recalls Borges and García Márquez. If, as Pamuk writes, ''there is no Ottoman painting that can easily
accommodate our visual tastes,'' it is because ''we'' have been schooled to see things in a different,
Western way. He is drawn to the 18th-century painter Antoine-Ignace Melling because Melling ''saw
the city like an Istanbullu but painted it like a cleareyed Westerner.''

Ka, the protagonist of ''Snow,'' Pamuk's most recent novel (and his first to be set outside Istanbul),
feels a Turkish secularist's distaste for religion, but suffers too from an aching spiritual emptiness.
Pamuk's achievement in ''Istanbul'' is to show the human damage done by Ataturk's revolution
without succumbing to the benighted nostalgia of many Turkish Islamists. He is appalled that many
secular Turks (including, presumably, Pamuk himself) must ''grapple with the most basic questions of
existence -- love, compassion, religion, the meaning of life, jealousy, hatred -- in trembling confusion
and painful solitude'' but he offers no solution. Mapping his own complexities, he turns to the streets
of his hometown, to the ''last traces of a great culture and a great civilization that we were unfit or
unprepared to inherit, in our frenzy to turn Istanbul into a pale, poor, second-class imitation of a
Western city.'' One of Pamuk's qualities is his constant striving to be worthy of that inheritance; all his
novels, and particularly ''My Name Is Red,'' testify to the author's self-education in the Persian and
Islamic origins of Ottoman culture -- an education that had no place in the progressive curriculum of
his private high school.

For many secular Turks, that word ''imitation'' has a disagreeable resonance. Naturally, they bridle at
suggestions that their pursuit of a European identity is mimicry. Pamuk is an exception, a secular
Turk who has too much integrity to seek authenticity in so contrived a national mission -- which he
finds exemplified in his parents' house, where the piano is untouched and the porcelain is for show
and the Art Nouveau screen has nothing to hide. Again, he turns for meaning to Istanbul's decrepit
outlying neighborhoods, and to the photographer Ara Guler, whose images illustrate Istanbul and
who shares Pamuk's fascination with decay and snow. Above all, Pamuk identifies with his four
''lonely, melancholic'' Turkish writers, who use European tools to evoke a peculiarly Turkish sense of
loss.

''Istanbul'' is full of byways that lead the reader into Pamuk's fiction -- sometimes with a jolting
literalness. The quarrels between young Orhan and Sevket mirror the rivalry of two siblings, also
called Orhan and Sevket, in ''My Name Is Red.'' In ''Istanbul,'' the young Pamuk recalls reading that
Flaubert once imagined writing a novel about a Westerner and an Easterner who ''come to resemble
each other, finally changing places''; this happens to be the plot of Pamuk's ''White Castle.'' But it is
''Black Book,'' the story of a quest that begins (and ends) in a family-owned apartment building in
Nisantasi, that flickers most vividly across the pages of ''Istanbul.'' There is so much of Pamuk in the
novel's solitary flâneur, Galip, and also in Galip's missing cousin, Jelal -- a collector, like Pamuk, of
semihistorical trivia about Istanbul and forgotten curiosities of Turkish history.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/travel/orhan-pamuks-istanbul.html

The autobiography, published in 2001, brought Mr. Pamuk’s life story

up to his decision to become a writer in 1973 and captured a very
different time in the city’s history. “The city was poor, it wasn’t
Europe, and I wanted to be a writer, and I wondered, ‘Can I be happy
and live in this city and realize my ambition?’ These were the
dilemmas I was facing,” he told me. “When I published it the younger
generation told me, ‘Our Istanbul is not that black and white, we are
happier here.’ They didn’t want to know about the melancholy, my
kind of dirty history of the city.”