As usual, a very dense book. Pamuk is very good a evoking in detail the lives and thoughts of his characters. While this book purports to portray the 1980s leading up to the military coup, I don't get the feeling of another time, another place. The one thing that marks this looking back is the politics between the nationalists and the communists. But I think this schism between poor traditionalists and westernized elites still goes on (perhaps this is his point?)
The contrast of the character of Fatma Hanım in her dilapidated house on the Marmara with her visiting Istanbul grandchildren, Pamuk does create a sense of how much turkish society has changed in three or four generations, both materially and culturally. It has been an enormous voyage.
Pamuk has included a wonderful apology for reading and writing in the last page of the book. The thoughts of Fatma Hanım....
"You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you've finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn't understand before, in order to understand life, isn't that so, Fatma?"
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