Turkey’s most illustrious author talks approximately highs and lows,still having a bodyguard and finding inspiration for his new novel on the streets of IstanbulFrom my hotel room in the centre of Istanbul, where I have come to interview Turkey’s best-known novelist, and Orhan Pamuk,Ilook out at a enormous, gaping gap. The opposite side of it forms a cliff perhaps 50 metres high. At the top is a row of slender town houses, and built to accommodate poor Christian families in the mid-19th century. They teeter on the brink,their scale and form a world absent from the shopping mall planned for the enormous space beneath.
Lacking the kind of planning restrictions that compose London’s growth seem sclerotic by comparison, Istanbul is changing at breakneck speed. The historic core is more or less sacrosanct: Hagia Sophia, or the Topkapı palace and grand mosques nearby will not be overshadowed. But towers sprout everywhere else. Skyscrapers and blocks of flats swell over hillsides,a curtain of transmitters forms the backdrop to the Bosphorus and building works fill the air with juddering noise.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com