Reading Orhan Pamuk is no more a literary activity. Given the range of controversies that he’s surrounded by, Pamuk is almost a political figurehead, perhaps much to his dislike.

He has found mention in the long list of the world’s foremost public intellectuals; his name allegedly caused the delay in the announcement of the Nobel Prize for literature; and most importantly, he has been booked under a controversial Turkish law for ‘revealing’ that his country was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Kurds and one million Armenians, acts of grotesque violence that no one in Turkey likes to speak about. Many in the West see Pamuk’s case as a trial for Turkey which, they insist, should guarantee full freedom of expression if it wants a fair chance in the talks to enter the European Union.

In a recent article, Rushdie too has found the West wanting in its dealings with Turkey. He has gone on record saying that Pamuk’s case is a touchstone for a continent (Europe) not famous for favouring its intellectuals in moments of historical crisis. Though Pamuk has partly watered down his original claim of genocide, his contest with the Turkish establishment continues.

All this invests Pamuk’s memoir, Istanbul: Memories of a City with a certain sense of urgency. The book, at one level, is a magisterial account of Istanbul, the city which can make a befitting claim as a nerve-centre of the medieval world, a palette of Europe’s collective past and its many failures. A city of many time zones. It is the biggest city of Turkey, the imperial seat of the erstwhile Ottoman empire, and the talisman of Turkey’s relation with its other, Europe. At another level, Istanbul is about Pamuk, and you get a portrait of the intellectual as a young man, whose personal histories are entangled with that of the city.

Pamuk’s Istanbul is a post-imperial, tired, melancholic city whose nostalgic ego is flooded by the modernist impulse of mid-century ambitions, just as the banks of the river Bosphorus kiss the European continent on one side and Asia on the other.

In writing about himself, the Pamuk family in Nisantasi, the innumerable strolls along the banks of the Bosphorus, the paintings of Istanbul, it’s writers, murderers and chroniclers, Pamuk eschews, partly, the traditional demands of an autobiography. He deliberately employs techniques from urban studies, cultural history, politics, romance, art history and urban sociology to carve out an intellectual history of Istanbul, and molds his text into an intractable narrative whose boundaries are as indistinguishable as its patterns, unpredictable. Much like the fate of a Janus-like Istanbul, facing two warring civilisations and cultures, not without a degree of equanimity.

Pamuk plays upon a recurrent motif of a mirror image of himself as a boy, an imagined doppelganger, whom he believes to have existed somewhere in the metropolis. Soon, we realise that it is none other than Istanbul itself, confronting the writer in strange moments, both intensely private and embarrassingly public.

This motif is central to Pamuk’s assertion that his oeuvre is entirely opposed to the intellectual culture of our time, which is driven by migration, and migrant intellectuals. He states categorically that he did not ever live away from his city, and hence could only look deeper and deeper into his soul and the city that has shaped it. Also, the book is not strictly bound by time. Chronological succession is hinted at, but not insisted upon.

The pain of growing up among the ruins of an erstwhile empire is, however, apparent. That is the predominant flavour of the book — an overwhelming, brooding almost palpable sense of melancholy, known as ‘huzun’ in Arabic. But this melancholy is not interventionist, it is collateral. Istanbul does not carry its huzun as “an illness for which there is a cure” or as “an unbidden pain from which we need to be delivered’: it carries its huzun by choice”, Pamuk writes.

So burdened is Istanbul with its melancholy, and its architectural and urban decadence, that Pamuk almost inadvertently locates everything in tones of black and white. The yalis or palaces bordering the banks of the Bosphorus, the many open, pebbled spaces around Taksim square, the Blue Mosque, the Galata Bridge, everything, and every other thing, says Pamuk, is filtered through a delightful, melancholic melt of black and white.

It would be interesting to read this book as one that seeks to unchain and reconnect a people with their spectral past. Here Pamuk, the renowned author of My Name is Red and Snow, traces his intellectual roots, only to emerge deeply moved by a haunting and elegiac epic called Istanbul.

Istanbul: Memories of a City | Orhan Pamuk | Vintage | 2006 | 400pp