WHILE OTHER Turkish writers choose to live outside the country, Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk—except for short periods—still lives in Istanbul, Turkey, in the building where he was raised. It is not exactly a safe, secure life. He has already faced charges for making anti-Turkish remarks regarding the long-denied mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. He fled the country for more than a year until charges were dropped (due in part to pressure from high- profile writers that included Gabriel García Márquez). And since then, numerous other writers and journalists have been arrested by the increasingly authoritarian government.
Pamuk’s newest and ninth novel, A Strangeness in My Mind, took him six years to write and release, as he has struggled against conservative forces who call him a “Western stooge.” Like Istanbul: Memories and the City, a memoir by Pamuk, A Strangeness in My Mind is a double portrait of the main character, Mevlut Karataş, and the city of Istanbul. It is a postmodern fairy tale, a mesmerizing odyssey, a coming-of-age urban fable.
Mevlut is a street vendor who sells a fermented wheat drink, boza, which became popular in the days of the Ottoman Empire. Through Mevlut’s prism we become acquainted with a city of 14 million—up an astounding 12 million people since Pamuk was born in 1952. Pamuk has described Mevlut “as a man of immense imagination ... he sees and feels things in the streets that no one else does.” He is a quietly observant Muslim, modest, shy, and with his own inner sense of holiness and of “strangeness.” Like Pamuk’s own character in Istanbul, Mevlut is a lonely dreamer, living outside of the mainstream, caught up in his own imaginary world, often being judged harshly by those around him.
Many years into selling boza, Mevlut is invited up into an apartment of drunken, secular Turks who view him as a backward simpleton. “Does your wife wear a headscarf?” they jeer. Hours later, he is robbed of all his money by two street thugs.
Yet in a time when violence and terrorism, buoyed by a brutish government, are everyday realities in Turkey, Pamuk has created a 21st century folktale (perhaps a gentle rebuke to the government) in which all contemporary problems still exist, but are, at times, superseded by Mevlut’s mystical, inherently religious, connection to life.
A Strangeness in My Mind is ebullience woven with melancholy. Against all odds, Mevlut finds happiness in a wife, Rayiha, whom he had been “tricked” into marrying by a dishonest cousin. Rayiha becomes his soul mate, support system, lover, and mother to his children. And at the end of the folk tale, Mevlut (still poor, still mistreated by relatives) is invited up to another apartment; this time, filled with kind-hearted boza customers: “He found that this was not a table of querulous drunks but a group of family and friends delighting in the festivities. He saw loving aunts, gregarious mothers ... He saw all this warmth in the orange light from the living room.”
Despite a high-spirited ending, one must remember that Pamuk chose the title of his newest novel from William Wordsworth’s poem “The Prelude”: “I had melancholy thoughts ... a strangeness in my mind / A feeling that I was not for that hour, / Nor for that place.” And as Pamuk works from his desk overlooking his beloved Bosphorus, one cannot help wonder and worry about what will happen next in the life of this unique Turkish writer.
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