"Life can't be that bad," I think sometimes.
"No matter what happens, the man in the end can go and walk the Bosphorus."
Orhan Pamuk narrates his childhood and youth. The narration starts from the moment the writer experiences himself as "I," he talks about his family, searches for the source of happiness and misery in the Istanbul Straits and in the wonderful waters of the Bosporus, and turns to the writers and painters - Turks and Non-Turks, West and East - who contributed to his and his city's self-awareness.
Through a bit of police fiction, we are tracking the formation of the psychic world of Pamuk and finding, through its penetrating eyes, the alleys of Istanbul in the 1950s, its cobblestone avenues, fire-ravaged wooden mansions, the disappearance of another world and civilization and the difficulties of emerging a new one within the ruins of the first.
A portrait of the legendary city - self-portrait also of the author - and of the hujujun, the sadness, the melancholy, the tristesse, the most powerful and permanent feeling "transmitted to each other by the people of Istanbul and Istanbul itself" and lives in the ruins of a lost empire.
The narrative, in this enriched edition, with 200 additional photographs, converses with photographic material from the author's personal archive and photographs of major photographers, first taken by Aras Guler.
