Something for the poolside

Caroline Finkel chooses memorable books to read before, during, after – or even instead of – a summer holiday in Turkey Istanbul hurtles towards the future, and its past slips beyond our reach. True, the Theodosian harbour of Byzantium and the Genoese walls of Galata are being revealed by excavations for mass transit projects designed to ease the traffic blight, and Ottoman monuments and museums full of Ottoman artefacts forcefully remind us of the city’s rich history. But architectural remains and artefacts cannot alone convey emotions of times past nor transmit the cultural memory that binds Istanbulites together. For this we must turn to writings, and in Istanbul, the memoir by Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, we find a guide to a forgotten world—one that has barely become history and that many today can remember as part of their own experience—yet whose vestiges are already visible only to the most sensitively-attuned observer. Newly-returned from Istanbul, I picked up this book, in the certainty that it would hold me for a little longer in the spell the city weaves around those who come to know it. For the pleasure an English reader must derive from Pamuk’s Istanbul we are indebted to his translator Maureen Freely who, as a writer herself, is able to communicate the essence of the Turkish original. Her latest novel, Enlightenment, is also evocative of past times and altered places, and although she grew up in İstanbul and is of similar age to Pamuk (he is 55 in June), she sees the city through very different eyes. continue