Just like Boza, the wheat-fermented Reptile Breeding Incandescent Lamps drink that Mevlut carries on his shoulders every night, the first sip is enough to create that sense of enchantment with which a great writer can entice the reader.It is also a timeline for modern Istanbul, a city of a multiple identities that faces both East and West along the shimmering waters of the Bosphorus snaking into the Sea of Marmara. And sometimes, the lights from the nearby hills would disappear in the mist, and from within the thickening fog, Mevlut would hear the sounds of dogs barking.Geeta Doctor is a freelance writer based in Chennai.” (All the words in caps are in the text) This is a fair warning to the reader not to expect a quick trawl.Though he may fancy himself very much a “Turkish” writer in many of his works, Pamuk has been strongly influenced by the European tradition.”In his latest book, A Strangeness in My Mind: A Novel, Pamuk lays the burden of his intense engagement with Istanbul on the back of a Mevlut, an Anatolian street vendor who toils his way through the streets of this most Byzantine of cities through an entire lifetime.

There are many characters who walk in parts and who disappear for long periods only to reappear later.As members of the Swedish Academy observed in their citation: “In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, (Pamuk) has discovered new symbols for the clash of interlacing cultures. They may identify themselves with a crooked neck, or a pair of beautiful shining eyes — like the woman Samiha, with whom Mevlut falls in love by a series of accidental mishaps, while eloping with her older sister Rayiha. He tells his story in small tight episodes and stops his narrative at a peak moment just so that the listener may come back for more. Mevlut is everyman. The novel loops back and forth in arabesques like the meticulously painted tiles on the blue domes of the fabled mosques of the old city built by Istanbul’s famous architect Sinan.

This, of course, begs the question whether being Turkish is also being European — a step-child, perhaps, of the French and German writers, not to mention the Russians without their Judeo Christian guilt Pamuk is as long-winded as one of those itinerant storytellers who enthral their customers at a bazaar over a glass of cinnamon flavoured tea. Some of them are trapped in the existential contradictions that Jean Paul Sartre labelled “Being and Nothingness”; others seek the sanctity of the devout in Islamic dogma.Istanbul! The very sound of it is intoxicating. It reminds us that Pamuk was trained originally as an architect, though he gave it up to pursue some inner demon that had propelled him towards being a writer. In a note at the beginning, the writer explains that this is “a Portrait of Life in Istanbul between 1969 and 2012 from Many Different Points of View. Just like its women with their bright helmets of dyed blonde hair defiantly blowing in the cold winds of change, Istanbul cannot decide on whether to smother itself in the headscarves of convention.