Unlike the “thousands of people” he’s met on the streets of Istanbul who chase after the illusions of modernity and ineffable measures of success, and who “invariably believed that behind every drama and in every battle there was always someone else pulling the strings,” Mevlut intuitively understands that the world, though too complicated to be comprehended in its totality, is nonetheless made up of simple, knowable objects and events. For Mevlut, all of life can be arrived at through boza - and this would seem to be the essence of his wisdom. Old things we’ve inherited from our ancestors can be holy, too.” Nor is boza only religious, but political as well: When the modern rise of the religious Islamic party threatens to bring about a ban on alcohol, Mevlut’s first thought is that it would make people appreciate the importance of boza and improve his failing business. “Just because something isn’t strictly Islamic,” he argues with a friend, “doesn’t mean it can’t be holy. Yet he is also a believer - in God, seemingly, but mostly in boza. Mevlut already understands that the drink is anachronistic, that he is a “living relic of the past that had now fallen out of fashion,” a vendor of nostalgia. Boza, we learn, was “the drink of choice under the Ottomans,” but lost prominence in the 1920s, when the Turkish republic was founded and wine and liquor were made legal. His second love is wandering Istanbul at night selling a fermented-wheat beverage called boza. Fortunately, Pamuk’s story line doesn’t stop on this moralistic high note but pushes on, evolving into a complex psychological drama as the repercussions of the initial “trick” work their way through decades of Mevlut’s life, and providing a boost of plot whenever the novel needs it. Though realizing his mistake in time, honorable Mevlut sees the marriage through and finds a truer love than the blind passion he’d first pursued. In the meantime, we learn about Mevlut’s two great loves, both introduced in their own short opening chapters.Ĭhapter 1 gives us Rayiha, whom he marries in a plot straight out of a Shakespearean comedy: a cousin’s wedding, youthful love at first sight, a bit of trickery by which Mevlut is led to elope, not with the woman of his dreams, but with her less attractive sister. He struggles to understand himself, the “strangeness” in his mind, a cloudy anxiety that only partly clears by the book’s end. His cousin Suleyman thinks him an inexplicable simpleton his communist friend Ferhat says “he’s a bit of a weirdo, but he’s got a heart of gold” his sister-in-law calls him “cute as a little boy” - yet these and other infantilizing comments serve only to show how poorly others understand Mevlut’s inner complexity. If he were an archetype, he would be the wise fool. In Pamuk’s gallery of Turkish Everymen - including Ka in “Snow,” Kemal in “The Museum of Innocence” and Black in “My Name Is Red” - Mevlut stands out as the most sentimental, purest of heart and humblest of aspiration.
Mymind review windows#
The conflict between tradition and modernity in Turkish culture is the major subject of Pamuk’s career (his citation for the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature reads, “Who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”), and his protagonists do double duty as both products of, and windows onto, their historical moments. Its hero is Mevlut, and like other Pamuk characters, he is caught between worlds.
“Have no fear,” it seems to say, “we’ll merely be synthesizing over 40 years of modern history from one of the most culturally tumultuous cities in the world, while also following a large cast of characters crossing lines of class, politics, religion and gender, all of which will collect around a lowly street vendor’s ‘adventures and dreams.’ What could be breezier?” In fact, the truth of “A Strangeness in My Mind” lies somewhere between Pamuk’s playfulness and my knottier version - for this is a book that champions simplicity even as it wrestles with the complexity of an ever-changing city, and attempts to manage as plainly as possible a necessarily sprawling tale. Though otherwise accurate, the subtitle to Orhan Pamuk’s new novel - “Being the Adventures and Dreams of Mevlut Karatas, a Seller of Boza, and of His Friends, and Also a Portrait of Life in Istanbul Between 19 From Many Different Points of View” - makes the book’s complicated ambitions appear simple, if not quaint.
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