Review: A Strangeness in My Mind
A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk, 2015.
Translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap.
I’ve just finished reading Turkish Nobel-Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind.
This sprawling saga is set in late 20th century Istanbul, during a time of civic upheaval and unprecedented urban growth.
The narrator is, for the most part, Mevlut, whom we meet as a young boy living in a poor village in Central Anatolia. Mevlut travels to Istanbul in the 1960s to join his father as a street vendor.
The story is also told through the voices of the novel’s other protagonists, but it is Mevlut who experiences the strange sense of disembodiment that informs the title of the novel.
Another “character” is the city of Istanbul itself, which is transformed during Mevlut’s lifetime into a vast urban conglomerate of concrete apartment blocks that have resulted in the demolition of the historic city, and which conceal its geography and entomb its inhabitants in towering vertical residential edifices that will soon become perpendicular ghettos.
Unbridled greed and nepotism have resulted in this vertical megalopolis, where bribes and connections fast track all negotiations, and urban planning controls are resisted and overcome through cunning and, sometimes, treachery and violence.
But throughout this ugly urban transformation, Mevlut retains, for the most part, a heart-warming innocence and optimism.
A bit like this bookseller, Mevlut loves what he does: he is a boza seller, the purveyor of a traditional Turkish beverage derived from fermented wheat.
Towards the close of the novel, he is one of the last of the once ubiquitous street vendors still calling “booo-za” from the alleyways and lanes of the vast city, evoking in those who hear him a strange yearning for the past.
Again, like this bookseller, Mevlut finds himself endeavouring to sell a commodity that is becoming increasingly redundant, he with his fermented wheat beverage, competing with prepackaged drinks in generic takeaway stores, and me with my real books that compete with e-readers and the other distractions of the electronic age.
It is manifestly obvious that, even if the humble boza seller suddenly came into a fortune, he would continue selling his boza, balancing the vessels across his shoulders on a pole, running the gauntlet of the city’s stray dogs late at night, and still yearning for his long-dead young wife with whom he was tricked into marriage as a young man, and with whom he finds genuine, nourishing friendship and love.
This book is a love story, if epic in scale and seemingly focussed on the minutiae of life in an impersonal city.