Imagine you’re broke (if you aren’t already), and you’ve just shown up to your successful cousin’s wedding. You’re without a gift, but even worse, you’re without a date. Old relatives are walking by and pinching your cheek asking when they’ll be able to come to your wedding.
You’ve just opened a bottle of vodka and are drinking from under the table as you watch family endow the newlyweds with lavish gifts. Then it happens: a moment so powerful, your life changes irreparably. Someone is looking your way. They make direct contact with you; with eyes that inspire such transformative romance, you spend the following years waxing poetic and sending love letters.
This is precisely what happened to the hapless protagonist, Mevlut, in Orhan Pamuk’s newest novel A Strangeness in My Mind.
Mevlut is a classic Pamuk protagonist, helplessly unaware, frustratingly stubborn, almost detestable, but eerily familiar, as if somehow at any moment you could lose focus and become the Mevlut of your own story. Unbeknownst to him, Mevlut finds himself as the groundzero for a massive tug-of-war much larger than his life, much larger than Istanbul, even larger than Turkey itself.
The story is centered around Mevlut’s move to Istanbul from a rural, more conservative Turkish village. Mevlut is a struggling street vendor, trying to catch the wave of new capital and European currency flowing in the streets. He’s attempting to make a living plying a trade that is on the brink of non-existence. But, it is what his father taught him to do, and he never finished school so he’s compelled to continue doing the one thing that he knows well.
Istanbul becomes the subtle protagonist as it begins to throb with life around Mevlut. Streets once empty are filled with chatter. Women walk without veils and bars serve Raki, a strong, Turkish liquor. Mevlut doesn’t despise the new Istanbul, but he’s rather like our moms and dads trying to use an iPhone—he gets frustrated seeing the things he’s comfortable with being replaced by new things that operate in new ways.
The neighborhoods of Istanbul are segregated in profound complexities. In so many moments, these mixed communities explode with violence between nationalists and communists, east and west, north and south, Islamist and secularist, and Turks and Kurds. But Istanbul, in all of its ambition and old-world mystique, will overcome all challenges and remain smack dab in the middle of the world.
Photograph of Orhan Pamuk by Jerry Bauer
Speaking from experience, I can tell you that A Strangeness in My Mind is an adrenaline rush for news junkies. The novel covers a vast period of Istanbul’s history, from adolescence to maturity. It won’t skip over hardship, car bombs, thugs, and systemic corruption in order to romanticize the city. Rather, it provides an unheard history attuned to a Western audience.
As a personal note, I began reading A Strangeness in My Mind, ironically, over turkey during thanksgiving. Irony aside, the climate is no laughing matter, and the political situation involving Erdogan’s contested election and the subsequent attack on Russian aircraft, then the assassination of the most powerful Kurdish lobbyist cannot be correctly understood via western media sources. A Strangeness in My Mind is a conduit to understanding Turkey, Pamuk’s guiding hand will provide an eager reader with a powerful emotional connection to the myriad of communities coexisting there.
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