Pallavi Narayan, Pamuk’s Istanbul: The Self and The City (London: Routledge, 2022)

Abstract

There is a proliferation of books on Orhan Pamuk, and over the past ten years or so – in the wake of his Nobel Prize win – a growing movement within Turkey to concentrate on writers who have not enjoyed anywhere near the same level of international prestige (Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, Sevgi Soysal, Sait Faik, Tezer Özlü, to name but a handful). Nevertheless, Pallavi Narayan’s monograph chooses Pamuk and the urban as its central theme, and to some extent succeeds in finding something new to say about the Nobel laureate, even if some approaches are left unadopted.