Snippets from Dr. Benet's Book Review...

Dear friends,

This delightful series starting today, will be a fond recollection and celebration of each of the lovely books that our delegates had presented on our Books & Coffee Meets over the past three months, starting 31 July 2020.

The first Book review was by Dr. Benet!

Dr. Benet reviewed Orhan Pamuk’s memoir titled, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Just quoting his introductory words -

In recent times, circumstances have forced me to become a digital migrant, and I have joined the digital natives. So I’m happy. Today I would like to share with you some of the important things related to this book (shows the book).

Istanbul: Memories and the City

This is by Orhan Pamuk. This book I did read ten or twelve years ago. And recently I saw a piece of news which said, that, Hagia Sophia verdict seen as an attempt to ‘mask economic failure’

This book is a memoir – and you find the life story of the author that he writes it in Turkish. A great memoirist, whom I like a lot. It’s a beautiful book about memories.

When he talks about his childhood memories, he says, they are all in white & black.

It has nearly some forty black & white photographs and it reads like a history book, and then it reads like an autobiography, and then it reads like a journalist’s account of a city, and then it reads like a curator’s account of a city.

Orhan Pamuk is a very powerful writer!

This book was published in the year 2005, when the author was hardly 50 years.

A memoirist has a moral obligation to tell the truth. And that too, to tell the truth objectively.

Orhan Pamuk does it. The chapters make an interesting read.

Especially the chapter 11, that deals with four 20th century poets. These were very popular poets...

said Dr. Benet!

So here’s quoting from the chapter for us all -

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Four Lonely Melancholic Writers

From Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City

I knew little of these writers as a child. The one I knew best was the great fat poet, Yahya Kemal: I’d read a few of his poems, which were famous through the country. I knew another, the popular historian Reşat Ekrem Koçu, from the history supplements in newspapers —

I’d been very interested in the illustrations of Ottoman torture techniques that accompanied his articles. By the time I was ten, I knew all their names because their books were in my father’s library. But they still had no influence on my developing ideas about Istanbul.

When I was born, all four were in good health and living within a half-hour walk of where I lived. By the time I was ten, all but one were dead and I’d never seen any of them in person. I am not unaware of acting like a starstruck fan who takes details from the lives and films of his favorite stars and uses them to imagine coincidences and chance encounters.

But it is these four heroes, whom I will discuss from time to time in this book, whose poems, novels, stories, articles, memoirs, and encyclopedias opened my eyes to the soul of the city in which I live.

For these four melancholic writers drew their strength from the tensions between the past and the present, or between what Westerners like to call East and West; they are the ones who taught me how to reconcile my love for modern art and western literature with the culture of the city in which I live.