Central to many Istanbul residents’ character is the concept of hüzün (melancholy). Pamuk sees the slow collapse of the once powerful empire hanging like a pall over the city and its citizens. The author, born in 1952 into a rapidly fading bourgeois family in Istanbul, spins a masterful tale, moving from his fractured extended family, all living in a communal apartment building, out into the city and encompassing the entire Ottoman Empire. Turkish novelist Pamuk ( Snow) presents a breathtaking portrait of a city, an elegy for a dead civilization and a meditation on life’s complicated intimacies. “What I am trying to explain,” he writes in this delightful, profound, marvelously original book, “is the huzun of an entire city: of Istanbul.” “It is the failure to experience huzun,” Pamuk says, “that leads him to feel it.” According to Pamuk, moreover, huzun is not a singular preoccupation but a communal emotion, not the melancholy of an individual but the black mood shared by millions. Huzun is therefore a sought-after state, and it is the absence, not the presence, of huzun that causes the sufferer distress. ORHAN PAMUK: ISTANBUL & THE CONCEPT OF HUZUN Octoat 7:54 pm | Posted in History, Islam, Literary, Middle East | Leave a commentĪccording to Orhan Pamuk, the melancholy of Istanbul is huzun, a Turkish word whose Arabic root (it appears five times in the Koran) denotes a feeling of deep spiritual loss but also a hopeful way of looking at life, “a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.” For the Sufis, huzun is the spiritual anguish one feels at not being close enough to God for Saint John of the Cross, this anguish causes the sufferer to plummet so far down that his soul will, as a result, soar to its divine desire.

Pamuk orhan istanbul