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A Strangeness in My Mind
International Booker Prize
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2016 Shortlist: A Strangeness in My Mind
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I'm a big Pamuk fan and I liked this novel but I don't think it will make the shortlist, even my own. Another former IFFP winner - and there are others (Ferrante, Oe) who deserve it more, and it's a rather sprawling saga which isn't to everyone's taste. Certainly more of a IFFP/MBI book than one for the BTBA.My review
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From the title page, Orhan Pamuk makes his (apparent) intentions clear - a David Copperfield style Dickensian saga :
"Being the Adventures and Dreams of Mevlut Karataş, a Seller of Boza, and of His Friends, and Also a Portrait of Life in Istanbul Between 1969 and 2012 from Many Different Points of View"
Pamuk's title is taken from 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."
The book starts in the middle of the story, in June 1982, when Mevlut has gone back to Is childhood village to elope with Rahiya, the 16 year old sister-in-law of his cousin. Mevlut has only previously seen her once, 3 years earlier, at his cousin's wedding in Istanbul, but has been writing, unanswered but avidly devoured, love letters to her ever since. Mevlut helps Rahiya into the back of a van in which they will escape, but suddenly discovers that he has been writing to the wrong sister:
"As he was shutting the door on the girl, there was a flash of lightning, and for a moment, the sky, the mountains, the rocks, the trees - everything around him - lit up like a distant memory. For the first time, Mevlut got a proper look at the face of the woman he was to spend a lifetime with.
He would remember the utter strangeness of that moment for the rest of his life ... Mevlut recognised that the strange silence he was entering would stay with him for years to come."
The novel then takes us to another pivotal episode later in Mevlut's life, before returning to the start of his life and proceeding chronologically.
Mevlut's story involves a large cast of friends and, particularly, relatives and the cast could get confusing (particularly as his father and uncle married two sisters, and Mevlut himself then marries his cousin's sister in law) but Pamuk aids the read with a chronology, family tree and even a detailed index. And there is little narrative tension, not least as two key events are revealed in these first two chapters and a third ((view spoiler)) heavily flagged.
So Pamuk's purpose isn't so much the Dickensian saga that seems to be promised, but instead to continue the narrative quest cited by the Nobel committee: “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”
In an interesting departure for Pamuk, his novel focuses not on educated Westernised upper-middle class life in the centre of Istanbul but on the hand-to-mouth existence of the relatively uneducated and traditional workers in the shanty-towns on the city outskirts. The novel was translated into English not Maureen Freely (translator of Museum of Innocence and Snow) but, a new collaborator, Ekin Oklap. It is difficult to tell, as an non-Turkish speaker, what is from the original and what from the translator, but the prose did appear more prosaic than Pamuk's previous novels, albeit this perhaps befits the more humble nature of the characters and narrators involved.
Pamuk has also taken an interesting stylistic decision - the story is mainly told via a third-person narrator, but very much from Mevlut's perspective. But the text is interrupted frequently by the direct, first-person, interjections of the other characters, providing their own gloss and commentary on the story ("I will take the liberty to quickly interrupt here, as I actually live in the abovementioned village") . Pamuk has also called this “my first feminist book”, and the more developed characters in the supporting cast are certainly the women.
In one sense, this is a paean to the traditions of mid-20th Century old Istanbul, with Mevlut's persisting in selling boza in the streets, despite the increasing modernisation of the City. But Mevlut is himself a relative newcomer to Istanbul and his perspective is not overly sentimental:
"Lately however he'd begun to feel increasingly alienated from [the city]. Was it because of that unstoppable, unswelling flood, the millions of new people coming to Istanbul and bringing new houses, skyscrapers and shopping malls with them?
...
"Mevlut had experienced these changes in daily increments, not as a sudden shock, and so, unlike some others, he did not bemoan the transformation. Rather he tried to keep pace with these momentous changes."
Through Mevlut's life we see the the exodus from the Turkish countryside to Istanbul, the growth and modernisation of that city, the flight of various ethnic groups, the spiritual side of Turkey but also the rise of Islamic politics, the slow emergence of womens' rights, religious and political conflicts [Alevis vs Sunnis, Communists vs Nationalists], the Kurdish question and, particularly, the property-development boom, resulting gang wars and political corruption and the struggle for land rights.
Mevlut himself is a passive observer rather than active participant in these various developments - as his father says, overly optimistically, "No one will bother a poor boza seller and his son, anyway. We don't take sides.", or as Mevlut puts it more realistically: "Whenever their is politics involved, it somehow ends up being my fault"
And A Strangeness in My Mind is also very much a love story, of Mevlut's confused devotion to two sisters. Mevlut himself comes to see his strolling of the streets of Istanbul, selling his antiquated wares, as a way to explore his own mind, and somehow resolve the strangeness:
"When he shouted 'Boo-zaa' into half-lit streets, he wasn't just calling out to a pair of closed curtains that concealed families going about their lives, or to some bare, unplastered wall, or to the demonic dogs whose invisible presence he could sense on darkened street corners; he was also reaching into the world inside his mind."
Recommended.
As with A General Theory, didn't quite make my personal shortlist but that was more because I didn't think Pamuk exactly needed the publicity, it's not his best novel (c.f. Snow for example), and there were other more deserving books. It's definitely worth reading, so again not unhappy to see this on the list.
Mod
Jibran wrote: "Thanks for this, because it somewhat explains (to me) my lack of enthusiasm for Strangeness. The book has high ratings as of now (above 4.0 the last I checked) which is higher than Pamuk's earlier books, which had got me hooked root and branch. Four hundred pages in, it is safe to say that Strangeness is different in style, language, tropes, subject matter - everything. I appreciate variety in a good writer, and it was good to see him abandon the detective mode / setting of puzzles for once (murder mystery in My Name is Red, search for the missing wife in The Black Book, making a villain out of a number of candidates in Snow, blurring right under the reader's nose the identities of two 15th C characters, a Venetian and an Istanbulite, in The White Castle) but with Strangeness, imo, any average novelist with a decent command on language and firsthand knowledge of Istanbul's sociopolitical history could have come up with this storyline* and this cast of characters. I'm tempted to think it as a designedly translated-lit-made-easy sorta novel some literary readers have been complaining about. But I can see the appeal.
Will write more about various characters and warring factions, which Pamuk has very much simplified/made easy (for international readers?), than they actually were and have been in reality, such as identifying irreligious/secular with left-wing (making it a specialty of Alevis and Kurds) and religious+nationalist with right-wing (ethnic Turks)."
It's a very comfortable read. Not feeling very well, I started it at a particularly hard-to-please point where a lot of trash would have annoyed me by being badly written or packed with cliches I dislike, and a lot of the more 'serious' books were emotionally heavy or a bit too much work sentence by sentence. But this was/is perfect. I remembered what you said before about its being different from his earlier books, simpler, so I looked at My Name Is Red, and that just was marginally more challenging.
I can see how it might feel more what some would call 'middlebrow' than that - and than several of the books on the longlist - but it doesn't have various stylistic tics of Anglo-American 'middlebrow' novels, so I'm happy. Plus I like the way that these working class characters are worthy of a 600pp novel without being a rags to riches story or vice versa (as far as I can tell) - that's unusual among books I encounter.
It's a book for the curl-up-with-a-big-Victorian-novel mood but without the harder-to-like features of the Victorians (generalisations, dated attitudes from the narrator).
It makes sure it shows that Muslim men don't all have the same attitude to women - which sort of feels like it's something to show the European and North American markets, but it's also done naturally, not shoved into the story with a sledgehammer.
Now it's been mentioned, the political conflicts do feel a bit cartoony, they're not gone into in much detail - but Mevlut does try not to get too involved so the distance sort of works. It would be interesting to hear more if you have time.
A perennial thing with books set in unfamiliar cities: a map and a bit of info about different areas and their current status and reputations (to contrast what's in the book) would be great. Noticed it more than usual as Istanbul is completely unfamiliar, whilst some foreign cities I've become used to the names of different areas by repetition in different books.
Yes to all the points above. I was keeping my eyes open for any worn-out cliché in characterisation or in the elements of the plot that have a habit of creeping up in stories of poverty and war from developing countries, but Abdurrehman's character made it clear that the author has done well to avoid them. It would have been really disappointing if he hadn't. Beyond that the story is a very familiar one (to me), which is what that might be causing the fatigue.Politics with Pamuk is only to put characters and the story in context. Even in Snow, which is the most politically charged novel, the focus is on the personal dimension than the political one. It's very hard to ascertain his political biases (for or against), which is a good thing imo. I might be making a mistake of reinterpreting things in retrospect but it seems that he dealt with political divisions/matters with more nuance in the previous novels than he's done in this one. But it's nothing major, and as you noted, there isn't much political detail anyway, which is fine as long as the purpose is to show the social and political discrimination against the Alevis and Kurds. I just find it hard to justify group-based political leanings when in reality there is a great overlap.
As an example I'm thinking of Khaled Hosseini's novels, clearly written to educate Western fiction readers about near-contemporary Afghan society and politics. In "The Kite Runner" wealthy and educated businessmen/professionals are always Pashtun, poor and destitute servants always Hazaras, while other stock/stereotypical roles are givenassigned to other ethnic groups like Uzbeks and women, probably to keep things simple and easily understood. Of course, all stereotypes have an element of truth in them but they also have a substantial element of untruth which left unchecked might solidify into perception, a prejudice, and whatnot - something Muslims on the receiving end are quite familiar with.
Trevor wrote: "Lee reviewed this one on my blog today. He didn't think it did much."Excellently written review in that while he clearly didn't find it did much for him, if I hadn't already done so, I'd actually want to read the novel based on that review as it sounds great to me!
From the review (there's much more people, so please do click through the link)
"The reason he obsesses so much over such detail is that he wants to contain a world, not just capture one. ... Pamuk is a kind of maddened reconstructionist cartographer, desperate not only to map the psychogeographies and forgotten stretches of Istanbul (along with the well-known haunts) but to house everything in a glass box, that he might rest for a while, happy to have preserved his rendition of a nation"
Not sure if this was in Lee's mind, but of course capturing a world in a glass box is literally what Pamuk did with his previous book, The Museum of Innocence where the Museum actually exists. Had the privilege of seeing part of it on tour in London recently and the novel plus museum together is quite a stunning artistic achievement. Compared to that the less literal capturing in this book is less impressive, albeit I still rated it around 7th of the 13 books on the shortlist, above some that were also shortlisted.
by Orhan Pamuk
translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap
Turkey
Available in the U.K. from Faber and Faber
Available in the U.S. from Knopf
A Strangeness in My Mind is the story of boza seller Mevlut, the woman to whom he wrote three years’ worth of love letters, and their life in Istanbul. In the four decades between 1969 and 2012, Mevlut works a number of different jobs on the streets of Istanbul, from selling yoghurt and cooked rice to guarding a car park. He observes many different kinds of people thronging the streets, he watches most of the city get demolished and re-built, and he sees migrants from Anatolia making a fortune; at the same time, he witnesses all of the transformative moments, political clashes, and military coups that shape the country. He always wonders what it is that separates him from everyone else – the source of that strangeness in his mind. But he never stops selling boza during winter evenings and trying to understand who his beloved really is. What matters more in love: what we wish for, or what our fate has in store? Do our choices dictate whether we will be happy or not, or are these things determined by forces beyond our control? A Strangeness In My Mind explores these questions while portraying the tensions between urban life and family life, and the fury and helplessness of women inside their homes.
Through [Mevlut’s] eyes, Pamuk describes the main events in Turkish history over the last half century: political coups, strife between Turks and Kurds, earthquakes, even a Turk’s-eye view of 9/11. Mevlut remains on the edge of all this action; like a novelist, a peddler sees life from outside, at an angle. But that allows him to see it more vividly and poetically than most people. This makes “A Strangeness in My Mind” one of Pamuk’s most enjoyable novels and an ideal place to begin for readers who want to get to know him.
~Adam Kirsch in Washington Post
There are many things to praise in “A Strangeness in My Mind,” which I’ll get to in a moment. What first needs to be said about this amiable novel is that, like boza, its alcohol content is not very high. At nearly 600 pages, it has the stretch of an epic but not the impact of one. Like boza, it leaves a bit of film on your lip.
~Dwight Garner in The New York Times