Istanbul: Memories and the City Istanbul: Memories and the City Istanbul: Memories and the City ("İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir") is a largely autobiographical memoir by Orhan Pamuk that is deeply melancholic. It talks about the vast cultural change that has rocked Turkey – the unending battle between the modern and the receding past. It is also a eulogy to the lost joint family tradition. Most of all, it is a book about Bosphorus and Istanbul's history with the strait. It was translated into English by Maureen Freely in 2005. Pamuk wrote the book when he was on the verge of depression. In an interview he
Strait is the Gate gate of virtue is too narrow for two people, too narrow for love, and too narrow for two people in love. Alissa so deliriously desires that even though she loves Jerome, this love between them has become, in her mind, his impediment to virtue. She rejects him, time and time again, and yet this is the way in which she expresses love, because this is the only way he would enter the strait gate. What Alissa longs for, is not the strait gate itself, but the process of getting through the gate - it is the striving in “strive to