In his latest chronicle of the city of his birth, Orhan Pamuk takes as his subject the “life and daydreams” of Mevlut Karatas, streetfood vendor and Istanbulite everyman. The novel relates Mevlut’s flirtation with politics, botched elopement, marriage and fatherhood against the backdrop of the emergence of modern Turkey. Despite decades of social upheaval and rapacious expansion, Pamuk’s Istanbul remains haunted by its own “eternal past”; indeed, Mevlut himself personifies this divided consciousness, drifting amiably between old world and new, traditional and secular values.
Pamuk’s novel is as sprawling as the suburbs it inhabits, and in many ways as unassuming as its hero, yet there is subtlety here too. Mevlut’s abiding love is the night-time selling of boza, an Ottoman drink associated with the melancholy beauty of the boza-seller’s call. Mildly alcoholic yet acceptable to Muslims, boza comes to exemplify the dreamy equivocations that unite Mevlut’s Istanbul with Pamuk’s.
A Strangeness in My Mind is published by Faber (£20). Click here to buy it for £16
