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Summary
Summary
From the Nobel Prize winner and best-selling author of Snow and My Name Is Red : a soaring, panoramic new novel--his first since The Museum of Innocence-- telling the unforgettable tale of an Istanbul street vendor and the love of his life.
Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karataş has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he'd hoped, at the age of twelve he comes to Istanbul--"the center of the world"--and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father's trade, selling boza (a traditional mildly alcoholic Turkish drink) on the street, and hoping to become rich, like other villagers who have settled the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut's side. As he watches his relations settle down and make their fortunes, he spends three years writing love letters to a girl he saw just once at a wedding, only to elope by mistake with her sister. And though he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have, he stumbles toward middle age in a series of jobs leading nowhere. His sense of missing something leads him sometimes to the politics of his friends and intermittently to the teachings of a charismatic religious guide. But every evening, without fail, Mevlut still wanders the streets of Istanbul, selling boza and wondering at the "strangeness" in his mind, the sensation that makes him feel different from everyone else, until fortune conspires once more to let him understand at last what it is he has always yearned for.
Told from different perspectives by a host of beguiling characters, A Strangeness in My Mind is a modern epic of coming of age in a great city, a brilliant tableau of life among the newcomers who have changed the face of Istanbul over the past fifty years. Here is a mesmerizing story of human longing, sure to take its place among Pamuk's finest achievements.
Author Notes
Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul, Turkey on June 7, 1952. After graduating from Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at the Istanbul Technical University. After three years, he decided to become a writer and graduated from the Institute of Journalism at the University of Istanbul in 1976.
In 1982, he published his first novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons, which received both the Orhan Kemal and Milliyet literary prizes. His novel, My Name Is Red, won the French Prix Du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the 2002 Italian Grinzane Cavour, and the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He has received numerous Turkish and international literary awards for his works including the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. His recent work includes A Strangeness in My Mind.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This mesmerizing ninth novel from Nobel laureate Pamuk (Silent House) is a sweeping epic chronicling Istanbul's metamorphosis from 1969 to 2012, as seen through the eyes of humble rural Anatolian migrant workers who come to the increasingly teeming metropolis in search of new opportunities in love and commerce. Though relayed through different points of view, the fable-like story's chief protagonist is the ruminative Mevlut Karatas, son of a cantankerous peddler of yogurt and boza (a thick, fermented wheat drink), who carries on his father's trade despite its fading popularity. The book includes a dip into Mevlut's childhood in Central Anatolia and his move to Istanbul with his father when he is 12. He later meets the beautiful Samiha at a wedding and is tricked by his cousin into eloping with Samiha's less attractive older sister, Rayiha. Mevlut and Rayiha have a happy marriage nonetheless and raise two daughters as he tries to gain a foothold in business. Mevlut's progression from naïve, perpetually searching wanderer to a more fulfilled and wizened soul, despite his mostly unsuccessful attempts at getting a leg up financially, is laid bare. His walkabouts and skirmishes with his family are engrossing, but what really stands out is Pamuk's treatment of Istanbul's evolution into a noisy, corrupt, and modernized city. This is a thoroughly immersive journey through the arteries of Pamuk's culturally rich yet politically volatile and class- and gender-divided homeland. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Nobel laureate Pamuk's (The Museum of Innocence, 2009) profound love for his city, Istanbul, is the life force in this intricately detailed and patterned fairy-tale-like novel that follows the footsteps and life of a humble, contemplative street vendor. Mevlut leaves his village at age 12, in 1969, to join his father in Istanbul, where he ekes out a living selling yogurt door to door. As Mevlut comes into his own and finds deep meaning in the traditions of street peddling, especially his magical nighttime route selling boza, a fermented beverage he comes to believe is holy, he develops a mystical connection to the rhythms and secrets of the city, which lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes. After catching a mere glimpse of the prettiest of three sisters (the eldest is married to his older cousin), Mevlut secretly courts her by writing poetic love letters, until, with a cousin's help, they elope. But there's a catch, a bit of treachery that infuses this many-voiced, multigenerational novel with subtle suspense. As his meditative hero walks the streets for five decades, balancing his wooden yoke on his shoulders, Pamuk, a deeply compassionate and poetic writer, illuminates dreadful and dazzling Istanbul's violent upheavals and ceaseless metamorphosis, women's struggles for freedom, and the strange vicissitudes of love. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Each new book by internationally revered Pamuk garners extensive media coverage and elevated reader interest.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THOUGH OTHERWISE ACCURATE, the subtitle to Orhan Pamuk's new novel - "Being the Adventures and Dreams of Mevlut Karatas, a Seller of Boza, and of His Friends, and Also a Portrait of Life in Istanbul Between 1969 and 2012 From Many Different Points of View" - makes the book's complicated ambitions appear simple, if not quaint. "Have no fear," it seems to say, "we'll merely be synthesizing over 40 years of modern history from one of the most culturally tumultuous cities in the world, while also following a large cast of characters crossing lines of class, politics, religion and gender, all of which will collect around a lowly street vendor's 'adventures and dreams.' What could be breezier?" In fact, the truth of "A Strangeness in My Mind" lies somewhere between Pamuk's playfulness and my knottier version - for this is a book that champions simplicity even as it wrestles with the complexity of an ever-changing city, and attempts to manage as plainly as possible a necessarily sprawling tale. Its hero is Mevlut, and like other Pamuk characters, he is caught between worlds. The conflict between tradition and modernity in Turkish culture is the major subject of Pamuk's career (his citation for the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature reads, "Who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures"), and his protagonists do double duty as both products of, and windows onto, their historical moments. In Pamuk's gallery of Turkish Everymen - including Ka in "Snow," Kemal in "The Museum of Innocence" and Black in "My Name Is Red" - Mevlut stands out as the most sentimental, purest of heart and humblest of aspiration. If he were an archetype, he would be the wise fool. His cousin Suleyman thinks him an inexplicable simpleton; his communist friend Ferhat says "he's a bit of a weirdo, but he's got a heart of gold"; his sister-in-law calls him "cute as a little boy" - yet these and other infantilizing comments serve only to show how poorly others understand Mevlut's inner complexity. He struggles to understand himself, the "strangeness" in his mind, a cloudy anxiety that only partly clears by the book's end. In the meantime, we learn about Mevlut's two great loves, both introduced in their own short opening chapters. Chapter 1 gives us Rayiha, whom he marries in a plot straight out of a Shakespearean comedy: a cousin's wedding, youthful love at first sight, a bit of trickery by which Mevlut is led to elope, not with the woman of his dreams, but with her less attractive sister. Though realizing his mistake in time, honorable Mevlut sees the marriage through and finds a truer love than the blind passion he'd first pursued. Fortunately, Pamuk's story line doesn't stop on this moralistic high note but pushes on, evolving into a complex psychological drama as the repercussions of the initial "trick" work their way through decades of Mevlut's life, and providing a boost of plot whenever the novel needs it. His second love is wandering Istanbul at night selling a fermented-wheat beverage called boza. Boza, we learn, was "the drink of choice under the Ottomans," but lost prominence in the 1920s, when the Turkish republic was founded and wine and liquor were made legal. Mevlut already understands that the drink is anachronistic, that he is a "living relic of the past that had now fallen out of fashion," a vendor of nostalgia. Yet he is also a believer - in God, seemingly, but mostly in boza. "Just because something isn't strictly Islamic," he argues with a friend, "doesn't mean it can't be holy. Old things we've inherited from our ancestors can be holy, too." Nor is boza only religious, but political as well: When the modern rise of the religious Islamic party threatens to bring about a ban on alcohol, Mevlut's first thought is that it would make people appreciate the importance of boza and improve his failing business. For Mevlut, all of life can be arrived at through boza - and this would seem to be the essence of his wisdom. Unlike the "thousands of people" he's met on the streets of Istanbul who chase after the illusions of modernity and ineffable measures of success, and who "invariably believed that behind every drama and in every battle there was always someone else pulling the strings," Mevlut intuitively understands that the world, though too complicated to be comprehended in its totality, is nonetheless made up of simple, knowable objects and events. Whether or not this is useful wisdom, for Pamuk the vision of life as a complex web of knowable things provides a terrifically interesting way to write a book. As we leave those introductory chapters and jump back to Mevlut's childhood, and as the next 550 pages proceed in "David Copperfield" fashion - through his education, his various jobs, his military service, a long stretch of chronic masturbation and eventually his love affair and marriage and the ensuing plot - Pamuk finds opportunities everywhere to expand out from Mevlut into the web of associations that compose his reality. Most delightful are first-person monologues by the characters themselves, who interrupt the novel's primary third-person narrative to offer their own two cents. These asides are as ontologically slippery as it gets, for while the book's main narrative is in past tense, the characters speak from back in the present tense of the past-tense action, cheekily pleading, "Don't write that down either, because it's just not true" or "I can sense that you've been talking about me all the way from this table in the village coffeehouse where I am dozing in front of the television." It's very funny, while also allowing into Mevlut's tale the colorful voices and contending perspectives of the world around him. But Mevlut's Istanbul is more than just people, and Pamuk also pulls into his novel the physical history of the city. Beyond a fateful account of boza, we are given whole epics of real estate, chronicles of construction projects, a "History of Electric Consumption" and much else. In these moments, "A Strangeness in My Mind" becomes a tremendous concatenation of voices and places and politics and culture, gathered around a melancholy hero and a winding psychological plot. None of which is to say the novel is encyclopedic or exhaustive. It's not Joycean, Wallacean or Pynchonian in ambition. The lives of characters and the history of the city come to us as side views from Mevlut's story, forays that imply a larger world but never stray too far into it, or too far away from Mevlut's melancholic disposition. That disposition is so relentlessly modest, and Pamuk's rendering so unerringly genteel, that at times the book's congeniality feels heavy-handed. There's no horror in these pages, only history; no madness, only "strangeness." The satire does not bite enough to be satire, the tragedy does not bite enough to be tragedy; basically, no biting occurs. (The recurrence of Mevlut's fear that street dogs will bite him is not an exception, but a case in point.) What occurs instead are virtuosic craft, intellectual richness, emotional subtlety and a feeling of freedom that comes from a narrative that finds its most meaningful moments in the side streets of storytelling. 'Just because something isn't strictly Islamic doesn't mean it can't be holy.' MARTIN RIKER'S fiction and criticism have appeared in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The London Review of Books. He teaches at Washington University.
Kirkus Review
Nobel laureate Pamuk (The Museum of Innocence, 2009, etc.) sets a good-natured Everyman wandering through Istanbul's changing social and political landscape. Tricked by his scheming cousin Sleyman into writing impassioned love letters for three years to Rayiha, Mevlut finds himself eloping with the older sister of the girl whose dark eyes intoxicated him at a relative's wedding. (Sleyman gave him the wrong name because he wanted the beautiful youngest for himself.) This being Turkey in 1982, and Mevlut being easygoing in the extreme, rejecting a woman who has compromised herself by agreeing to run away with him is unthinkable. The young couple prove to be well-matched and quite happy, although Mevlut doesn't make much money. His checkered day jobs in food services, selling rice with chickpeas from his own cart and ineffectually managing a cafe among them, give the author a chance to expatiate on Istanbul's endemic corruption, both municipal and personal. Pamuk celebrates the city's vibrant traditional cultureand mourns its passingin wonderfully atmospheric passages on Mevlut's nightly adventures selling boza, a fermented wheat beverage he carries through the streets of Istanbul and delivers directly to the apartments of those who call to him from their windows. Although various characters from time to time break into the third-person narration to address the reader, this is the only postmodern flourish. If anything, Pamuk recalls the great Victorian novelists as he ranges confidently from near-documentary passages on real estate machinations and the privatization of electrical service to pensive meditations on the gap between people's public posturing and private beliefs. The oppression of women is quietly but angrily depicted as endemic; even nice-guy Mevlut assumes his right to dictate Rayiha's behavior (with ultimately disastrous consequences), while his odious right-wing cousin Korkut treats his wife like a servant. As Pamuk follows his believably flawed protagonist and a teeming cast of supporting players across five decades, Turkey's turbulent politics provide a thrumming undercurrent of unease. Rich, complex, and pulsing with urban life: one of this gifted writer's best. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Portraying Istanbul over a period of five decades, Pamuk's (Silent House) latest novel introduces listeners to Mevlut, a street vendor of boza (a mildly alcoholic Turkish drink) and yogurt. As a protagonist, Mevlut is more an observer than an active participant; the novel opens with his realization that he eloped with the wrong woman (he glimpsed a beautiful girl at his cousin's wedding and wrote her letters for years, but when he has her on the train to Istanbul he discovers that he was tricked into taking the "less attractive" sister). He doesn't abandon her, however, so perhaps this is enough to make him a hero, although his disappointment with the match seems to set the tone for much of his not-entirely-rewarding life (money is always a challenge, and his effort at opening a business is not particularly successful, among other misfortunes). The novel is told in a fragmented style, sometimes switching perspectives as often as from paragraph to paragraph, and, along with the frequent shifts in time periods, this can be difficult to follow in audio. Narrator John Lee's English accent lends the reading a feeling of British imperialism at times, and the pace is slow enough to convince listeners that half a century really has passed. VERDICT Most evocative in its portrayal of a changing Istanbul, this audiobook may have more traction in libraries where dedication to international literary fiction is strong. ["The novel's central concerns are human nature, communication, and interpersonal relationships, and this great writer explores these themes with a universal warmth, wit, and intelligence": LJ 9/15/15 starred review of the Knopf hc.]- Victoria Caplinger, NoveList, Durham, NC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.