A Strangeness In My Mind (Turkish 2015, English 2015) By Orhan Pamuk

As I sit down to write this I’m surprised to realize that A Strangeness in My Mind will be the first book by Orhan Pamuk that I’ve reviewed on my book blog (maybe I read them before I started the blog?). I’m surprised because Pamuk, who was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, is one of, if not arguably “the” best living writer in the world. 

It’s also strange because I’ve read eight other of his works that have been translated into English -- Istanbul, Memories and the City; The White Castle; Other Colors; The Museum of Innocence; The Black Book; The New Life; and two more that are already literary classics, Snow (set in eastern Turkey) and My Name Is Red (set in Constantinople) – and loved them all.

Pamuk as an author is synonymous with Istanbul, just as Dickens is with London. When one reads his books, particularly Memories and the City, one discovers not just the characters in the novel, but also the heart and soul of the city. The unusual role Istanbul plays in world history is the ever present background in all his works – intersected as it is by the Bosphorus, the city straddles Asia & Europe, Muslim & Christian; modern and old.

In A Strangeness in My Mind, a teenager named Mevlut leaves his country village to live in big city Istanbul where his father spends the winter selling boza as a roving street vendor. Mevlut will learn this trade from his father and use it as a primary or fallback occupation the rest of his life. Narrating as Mevlut walks the streets shouting out “boza” is how Pamuk overviews 40 years of Turkish history (the book ends in 2014).

Readers who pick up this book expecting to understand the Middle East in just 600 pages, will be sorely disappointed. Those who expect an action packed thriller will also be disappointed. Mevlut’s is an ordinary life. At times you will scorn him believing him to be just stumbling through. By the time you finish the book however you will understand him perhaps better than he understands himself. You will also like him immensely.

The plot of the book centers on love letters that he sent to a woman who he once saw at a wedding. Actually, all he could really see were her eyes, because she was veiled. He didn’t even know her name. His cousin Suleyman told him the name of the woman he saw was Rayiha, so that’s who he addressed his letters to. But in reality, Suleyman lied, Rayiha was the woman’s older sister. Tradition dictated that Samiha could not be wed until her older sister was married. Suleyman wanted Samiha for himself.  How this plays out through their lives structures the entire book. And no, I’m not giving any spoilers on that front.

There is much to like hidden away in this story.  For the most part these jewels relate to a series of jobs that Mevlut goes through in life:  electrical inspector (they could teach Chicagoans a thing or two about shake-downs); a restaurant manager; a community center manager, a parking lot attendant, and of course a street vendor. Also surfacing from time to time is the rich-cousin/poor cousin dynamic.

The book includes two generations of sisters marrying brothers as main characters, a fascinating subplot that offers Pamuk a chance to track the slowly changing role of women in Turkish society. And Suleyman will eventually marry a lounge singer (not unlike the story in the Palace of Desire, the second of the classic Cairo-trilogy written by Naguib Mahfouz) bringing another women’s subplot into the book. 

The popularity of boza, a traditional fermented drink which skirts the Islamic ban on alcohol is an underlying theme, subtly playing the Islamic-Secular political divide in the country.

The urban sprawl development of Istanbul as poor villagers moved to it swelling the population to 13 million is detailed throughout, and should be recognizable to anyone living in a big city. It’s told as an influx of people settle in neighborhoods based on the village they came from, develop their own community organizations, travel “home” to the village for special occasions, become politically active as a way to break into employment in the civil sector, and occupy property without proper deeds. The final chapters zero in on a gentrification story that is familiar to every city in the world (and the book even includes a discussion of “bachelor housing” that urban tradition known in the west as SRO hotels). 

I strongly recommend this book, though it is not my favorite Pamuk novel, that would be My Name is Red. My sole reservation about this book I think is the translator, not the author. There are multiple instances where a paragraph is written in a way to make it culturally recognizable to an American, forgetting that American culture is not what the book is about. Pamuk has never used this translator before, and one would hope that he does not do so again.