A Strangeness in My Mind: A novel by Orhan Pamuk

This novel tells the story of one man, Mevlut, his journey from adolescence to middle age, his family, and the physical, social and political changes that took place in Turkey, especially Istanbul, between 1969 and 2012. In telling the story of this one man’s life, Pamuk tells a larger story that ultimately transcends geographical and cultural borders and is about the experience of being human in a rapidly changing world. Mevlut is an Everyman who doesn’t exhibit strong character traits other than a general good-naturedness and an ability to get along with just about everyone, and that makes him a likable protagonist as well as a vehicle for portraying the personalities of other characters.

This is a long novel but not a difficult one. The narrative, told in the third person but also in part by the characters who address the reader, is fairly straightforward and generally chronological. The novel begins, however, with a central incident of the story, when Melvut is twenty-five years old and about to elope with a girl he fell in love with and had been writing love letters to for three years. After introducing us to the main character in that way, the author retells the story starting with Mevlut’s move to Istanbul with his father at the age of twelve.

Mevlut, like his father, is a street vendor, a seller of boza, a slightly fermented drink popular in Turkey and the region, which becomes, in the course of the book, a symbol of traditional Turkish life and values. The story follows Mevlut through his school career and dreams of the future through his military service, marriage and a host of jobs and complicated family interactions. Mevlut’s character is revealed early on in the story when, while eloping, he realizes that the girl he is about to marry is not the one he fell in love with. He has been duped and doesn’t know whether his bride or her younger sister, the girl he thought he was marrying, were in on the trick. He is too considerate to even broach the question with his betrothed and, in fact, she becomes the true love of his life.

Pamuk is a master storyteller. He brings the city of Istanbul to life with characters that we get to feel we know. While Mevlut feels a strangeness in his mind as he walks the streets of his city and seeks to discover its essence as well as his own, through the course of this grand, mesmerizing novel, the characters and and setting become more familiar and less strange to us.