Word: istanbul
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...thick haze of melancholy floats above every page of the works of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, settling amidst the words like fog over the Bosphorus. In his 2005 memoir “Istanbul,” Pamuk intersperses evocative personal reflections on the neglected city with monochrome images of rainy streets and crumbling minarets; his prose, with its concern for the visual over the intellectual, assumes the nostalgic intimacy of a forgotten postcard. The sadness of his characters merges inseparably with the troubled political and cultural landscape of Turkey: though both characters and nation stand on the brink of happiness...
...handbag for his fiancée and is immediately smitten with an 18-year-old shopgirl named Füsun, who happens to be a distant relative of his. Their affair—initially, a casual one—takes on a special gravity; despite its European affectations, 1970s Istanbul remains deeply wary of women who have sex before marriage. The two eventually do consummate their relationship, however, and the first few chapters of the book are devoted to surprisingly graphic descriptions of the body and the ecstasy they share...
...meant to. Kemal preserves moments in his memory as meticulously as the objects in his museum, cataloguing them in careful and loving detail. Pamuk himself completed this novel over a period of six years, spending at least 10 hours each day alone writing in a flat overlooking old Istanbul, and the sense of that isolation drifts throughout his painstaking dissection of heartbreak. More than any other novelist today, Pamuk has laid claim to the dispassionate prose style and layered, self-reflective inheritance of Proust. At one point, he follows a numbered list of the ways in which Turkish girls...
With that mindset wilts one potentially massive critique: Pamuk never writes his way out of Istanbul; the physical and mental geography mapped out in “Museum” is old hat. Lost loves and newspaper columnists, tea houses and Turkish-brand sodas recur in all his books, and the emphasis on B-movies and the world of cinema in particular strongly echoes the more metaphysical treatment afforded them in his novel “The New Life.” These themes could easily grow as worn as the belongings of Füsun’s that...
...Geological Survey (USGS), there's a more than 99% chance that a quake of magnitude 6.7 or higher will hit California over the next 30 years and a nearly 50% chance that a magnitude 7.5 or higher quake will hit the state over the same period. Tokyo, Tehran, Istanbul, Seattle, St. Louis - all are major cities built on land that has experienced massive quakes in the past and almost certainly will in the future...