Story of a street vendor

Orhan Pamuk is one of today's best-known novelists who writes in Turkish. He is also a screenwriter, academic, and Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, USA.  His earlier books "The Black Book", "Museum of Innocence" (reviewed in The Daily Star, September 24, 2011), "My Name is Red", "Snow" and "Silent House" have earned him the respect and a following of readers worldwide; for his unique style of storytelling, with narratives from modern and historical times covering the lives of the powerful and the man on the street, the cultural and social evolution of modern Turkey, and his unabashed empathy for the underdogs. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, and the award citation mentions that Pamuk has "in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures". In an interview following the announcement, Professor Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, states that Orhan Pamuk "renewed the contemporary novel in a remarkable way" and crowed with admiration for Pamuk's ability to use his city of birth, Istanbul, as the anchor on his journey to become one of the finest writers of his time. 

Translated from Turkish, by Ekin Oklap, "A Strangeness in My Mind" is the story of a street vendor named Mevlut and the loves of his life. He come to Istanbul as a young boy, then enrolled in school but sells yogurt and boza (a traditional Turkish drink) on the street in the evening and night accompanied by his father. Pamuk himself characterizes the novel as "the adventures and dreams of Mevlut Karatas, a seller of Boza, and his friends, and also a portrait of life in Istanbul between 1969 and 2012 from many different points of view". Included with the Table of Contents is a family tree of two brothers, Hasan and Mustafa and their children. Mustafa is two years younger than Hasan, and came to Istanbul from their village home in 1963 and six years later brings his son Mevlut to the city. There are many plots and themes but to me, in the ultimate analysis, it is a beautiful love story that has some similarities with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" (reviewed in The Daily Star, December 22, 2014). Mevlut falls in love with a girl, named Samiha, and writes letters to her. In the novel he says, "I saw this girl at the wedding. I fell in love with her eyes. I wrote her letter for three years." But the go-between delivered all the letters to her elder sister Rayiha; Mevlut unknowingly married Rayiha and developed a deep love for his wife. He becomes a dedicated husband and father, and forgets about the sister he really loved. Unfortunately, Mevlut became a widower after 20 years of marriage, and soon Samiha loses her husband, and family members encourage them to tie the knot with each other.  But he still longs for his deceased wife, and it appears that he loves them both, one he has lived with and the other who once lived in his dreams!

The title of the book comes from William Wordsworth's "The Prelude" where he wrote in Residence in Cambridge, 
I had melancholy in my thoughts …
A strangeness in my mind,
A feeling that I was not for that hour,
Nor for that place.

This passage from Wordsworth captures the state of mind that Mevlut carried after he gains some experience, and a little knowledge of the larger world and the social structure of Istanbul. The strangeness in his mind emanates from the changes taking place in his surroundings as the city keeps growing and displacing older residents of humble origins. His cousins and relatives from the village migrated to Istanbul over time and made their fortunes, but Mevlut finds himself struggling in different jobs.  Pamuk very subtly alludes to Mevlut's wandering in the following passage,

"Some nights the city seemed transformed into a more mysterious, menacing place, and Mevlut couldn't make out whether he felt this way because … these streets had become imbued with signs and symbols he didn't recognize."

It appears that his luck bails him out, twice. First, after waiting for three years, while writing letters to Samiha, the girl he first saw, he embraces Rayiha, even though some pity him.  "The man wrote to the younger sister, but got married to the older one instead."  He had eloped and even though he realizes that he has married the elder sister Rayiha, he leaves no stone unturned to make her happy and leads the life of a hardworking family man.  Admitted, once in a while, his frustration comes out. After his wife Rayiha dies, during an altercation between Suleyman, his cousin and him, Mevlut accuses Suleyman of giving the letter to Rayiha to get married to her.  He rails,"they won't let anyone marry the third daughter until the second one's settled. You wanted Samiha yourself." 

Mevlut finds that his income from selling boza decreases as tastes change and boza is increasingly marketed in pre-packed containers, and he takes a second job during the day. He tries in his own mind to reconcile the different world he habitates: the inner world where he tries to find peace and harmony with the reality of rapid growth and failed dreams.  He does find happiness in his nocturnal routine of walking and connecting with the city that he spent most of his life in. Pamuk writes, "Walking fueled his imagination and reminded him that there was another realm within our world, hidden away" a feeling influenced by a religious sect and its magazine, "Righteous Path". Here Pamuk draws on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's"Confessions" where he wrote, "I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs".

His luck turns again, after his wife passes away suddenly in 1995 and following a massive earthquake in 1999 which devastates the city, particularly the section that housed the poor urban workers.  He and his relatives land a good deal for apartments in a high-rise, as happens in most growing cities including Bangladesh.  Mevlut and his extended family are given allotments in the same building. 

Some of the most endearing moments of this novel are buried in the little anecdotes and snippets that touch on Mevlut lifelong journey of love. In one of his letters he compared Samiha's eyes to a daffodil. Pamuk reminds the reader that daffodils had traditionally been used to represent the eye in Ottoman literature.  He had also likened her eyes to "bandits cutting across the path". The last sentence, notwithstanding its simplicity, proclaims boldly, "I have loved Rayiha more than anything in this world". 

The reviewer is a frequent contributor to this section.