A family saga through Istanbul

“A Strangeness in My Mind” by Orhan Pamuk (Knopf, 599 pages, $28.95)

Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2006, sets many of his books in and around Istanbul in his native Turkey. He even wrote a nonfiction book called “Istanbul.”

His latest novel, his 12th book, follows that tradition. Istanbul even seems to be one of the major characters in the book. And as we read, we get an ongoing history of the city, of the many changes that have taken place there and how those changes have affected people in its growing population.

The novel opens in 1982 with the story of Melvut Karatas, the book’s protagonist, running away with the daughter of Boynuegri Abdurrahman Effendi (called “Crooked-Necked”) to marry. However, Melvut thinks he is running away with Samiha, the youngest daughter (of three), but it turns out to be Rayiha, the second oldest. (The oldest, Vediha, is already married.) This event resounds through the narrative, with echoes of it and consequences from it emerging at different points.

An epigraph by Ibrahim Sinasi offers an explanation: “It is not customary for a younger daughter to be given away while her older sister remains unmarried.” A second epigraph says: “If you keep your daughter close, she will run away instead.”

It’s not clear who it was who fooled Melvut. But he doesn’t tell Rayiha she’s not the sister he’d seen at a wedding a year or so earlier and that he’d been writing letters to. Someone had directed the letters to Rayiha instead of Samiha. Whether out of politeness or shyness, he goes ahead and marries her, and they have a happy life together.

But before we get that far, Pamuk takes us back to Melvut’s boyood, to his moving in 1969 to Istanbul from his village to go to school and begin selling yogurt and boza on the street. His father and uncle had also sold yogurt and boza on the street.

Pamuk goes into great detail describing this work, bringing in a historical perspective when he can. One man explains: “Boza was the drink of choice under the Ottomans, when alcohol and wine were banned.”

Another character explains that a yogurt seller walks 30 kilometers every day carrying 30, maybe 40 kilos of his back. Boza is often served with chickpeas, and Pamuk (through Melvut) explains the psychology as well as the sociology of selling it. The profit margin is always slim, and the market changes as the neighborhood changes. It is affected by political changes, by new products being introduced, as when, at a later date, boza is sold in grocery stores in bottles.

The novel is a family saga. We follow Melvut and Rayiha and their two daugters; Melvut’s friend Ferhat, who gets involved with the Communists; Korkut, Vediha’s husband; Suleyman, who drives Melvut to pick up Rayiha so they can elope, though Melvut thinks it’s Samiha.

A chronology in the back of the book outlines the novel’s action, from 1954, when migrants from the villages in the district of Beysehir begin to arrive in Istanbul in significant numbers to find work and sell yogurt, to March 2012, when the Karatas and Aktas families move into their new apartments.

We get an up close look at how poor people struggle to find the means to live, all while pursuing joy and celebration however they can. We get glimpses of Muslims who, like followers of many religions, practice their faith in varying degrees of commitment.

Though fiction and set mostly in the 1990s, “A Strangeness in My Mind” is relevant to our times, offering a clearer understanding of the movement of people from small villages to large cities to pursue jobs and a means to live, and how such movement changes society and countries.

The title phrase comes from a poem by Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” which has it correspond with “melancholy thoughts.” It echoes throughout the book. Melvut reflects on how “the strangeness in his mind became part of the trap he had fallen into.”

Elsewhere, he thinks of Isantbul and decides that “what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.”

The phrase becomes a metaphor for one’s individual consciousness that is hidden from others. Melvut says to Rahiya: “There’s a strangeness in my mind. No matter what I do, I feel completely alone in the world.” And much later, he realizes that “walking around the city at night made him feel as if he were wandering around inside his own head.”

Pamuk’s specific story of Melvut and those around him and the changes they experience as Istanbul changes all draw on a universal search for connection and meaning in a world where we are always in some way strangers to one another.

Melvut realizes he finds joy and meaning in his work selling boza: “Joking with his customers, ringing their doorbells, walking up and down the endless sloping streets: these were the things he knew and loved.”

In a novel like this, we learn that the invisible people, such as boza sellers, have their own complex stories and feelings. And we can then connect those stories and feelings with our own. That alone makes “A Strangeness in My Mind,” long as it is, a valuable book.

This story was originally published March 19, 2016 at 9:19 PM with the headline "A family saga through Istanbul."