| I have visited Turkey, but not Istanbul. It's one of those | | | | is no other city on earth that has been named three |
| iconic places that keeps cropping up in travel plans, but | | | | times and where, on each occasion, that name has |
| then gets overlooked, possibly because its name fits | | | | passed into language as an expression of political, |
| so easily into my thoughts that I convince myself I | | | | strategic, religious and economic pre-eminence. It's a |
| have already been there. Having just read Orhan | | | | city that bridges continents, ideologies and faiths. |
| Pamuk's The Black Book, that illusion will be orders of | | | | Nowhere else on earth has a greater claim to the |
| magnitude stronger. Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 | | | | very quintessence of humanity than Istanbul. And yet |
| Nobel Prize for literature and this seems to have | | | | modern Istanbul is a Turkish city, and perhaps its most |
| spurned new translations of his work, new versions | | | | fascinating aspect is its potential to mirror |
| which hopefully can widen his readership in the | | | | contemporary debates on religion versus secularism, |
| English-speaking world. | | | | tradition versus modernity, imperial past versus global |
| The Black Book is a gigantic work. And, in the way | | | | present. |
| that I suspect most readers might understand the term, | | | | The Black Book has thirty-six chapters, each having its |
| there is no plot. Suffice it to say that Galip wakes up | | | | own title and prefacing quotation. The form, at least in |
| one morning and his wife has disappeared. He | | | | part, is its content, in that each chapter could be read |
| assumes she has gone off to seek out her first | | | | as if it were an article written by Celal or by Galip |
| husband, Celal, a well-known newspaper columnist. | | | | impersonating Celal. There is no linear narrative. We |
| Galip sets off to find Celal and, he assumes, his wife, | | | | experience what inspired the writer and there is no |
| but strangely the journalist has also disappeared. As a | | | | ordering of time or place. But we feel we are in that |
| means to help him track down the two missing people, | | | | city. We feel we are living its history, whatever that |
| Galip immerses himself in Celal's life, his writing and, | | | | might be. And we feel we are experiencing |
| gradually, his very identity. Effectively he becomes the | | | | contemporary debates on its and its people's identity. |
| person he is seeking. He re-reads his past work and | | | | The city is central to everything in the book, with its |
| discovers unknown things about his own, his wife's and | | | | multiple histories and allegiances mixed into the melting |
| her former husband's past. By then, however, we | | | | pot of its contemporary form. |
| cannot be sure if we are dealing with reminiscences of | | | | Throughout, Galip finds he gradually becomes his |
| Celal, Galip's interpretations of them, Galip's reworking | | | | quarry, Celal. He trades identities and roles, but never |
| of them, or, indeed, Galip's own words presented as if | | | | permanently, never for sure. In this way the characters |
| they were those of Celal. | | | | become the city, whose sense of place and multiplicity |
| But the plot in The Black Book is almost irrelevant. It's | | | | of identities pervade all, thus mirroring the apparent |
| not a book that one reads to discover what happens. | | | | confusion of its - and humanity's - complexity. But the |
| It's a book that's replete with flavour, experience and | | | | people eventually are always welcomed by some |
| history, and the reader feasts on vast helpings of all | | | | aspect of the city's - and humanity's - multi-faceted |
| three. | | | | nature. |
| Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul - let's face it, there | | | | |