"'Istanbul': A Walker in the City
By CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE
Published: June 12, 2005
NEAR the end of ''Istanbul,'' a dissolute and errant architecture student called Orhan Pamuk sits in the family apartment with his mother -- his father is out with his mistress and his older brother, Sevket, is studying in the United States -- while she lays out with appalling precision how his passion, which is to paint, will lead him either to the bottle or to the asylum. ''Everyone knows that van Gogh and Gauguin were cracked,'' she says, and goes on: ''You'll be plagued by complexes, anxieties and resentments till the day you die.'' Seized by guilt but revolted by the bourgeois life his well-born mother has mapped out for him, Pamuk steps out into Istanbul's ''consoling streets,'' but not before experiencing a dramatic conversion. In a parting shot to his mother -- and also to the reader, for these are the book's final words -- he says: ''I don't want to be an artist. . . . I'm going to be a writer.'' "
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