Istanbul was published in 2005, three years into the mildly Islamist government of the AK party of Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an, which was beginning to push back the effects of Atatürk's positivist revolution of the 1920s and 1930s. 'From a very young age,' Istanbul begins, 'I've suspected that there was more to my world than I could see: Somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double.' Then there was the sense, which runs through all Pamuk's writing, that identities may be provisional. Galip the solitary flâneur contained much of Pamuk himself, as did the usurped Jelal – a collector, like Pamuk, of forgotten curiosities from Istanbul's history. When I read it I realised it was an undeclared companion to all his novels, but particularly to The Black Book.

And I felt sorry for Emel.Ī few years later, after I had moved to Istanbul, Pamuk wrote a memoir about his childhood and young adulthood, called Istanbul. I found myself longing to be in this ailing and rutted city I was reading about with such difficulty. To someone sitting in Ankara, the purpose-built capital of the modern Turkish republic, all this was news. Even the Bosphorus, arguably the world's most dignified stretch of water, was a source of horror in The Black Book, its waters receding to disclose shipwrecked galleons and soft‑drink bottles while the passengers of passing buses stuffed up the window cracks against 'the stink of flesh and mud', and stared at 'the flames that rise from the fearsome black chasm gaping below'. Pamuk's story of a man called Galip, whose pursuit of his errant wife leads him to take the identity and persona of another man, Jelal, was more disturbed than anything I had experienced in the city – and funnier. We were reading Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book, set miles away, in Istanbul. The novel's first sentences seemed to have been constructed back-to-front, but, after much effort on the part of Emel, I perceived what the author wanted me to: a leaden, wintry light over a sleeping woman, the nape of her neck bowed in slightly freakish declivity this amid noises from the street outside, the salep-seller's jugs scraping against the pavement, the whistle of a minibus superintendent. I was learning Turkish with Emel Hanim, a kind and patient teacher from the language institute up the road, and the first book I rashly suggested we read turned out to be one of the hardest in the language.

I n 1996, I was a young foreigner in the Turkish capital, Ankara.

Omar pamuk istanbul