A Strangeness in My Mind

ORHAN PAMUK won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. His novel <i>My Name Is Red</i> won the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than sixty languages. He lives in Istanbul. <p>Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia Mevlut Karatas has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he’d hoped at the age of twelve he comes to Istanbul—the center of the world—and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father’s trade selling boza (a traditional mildly alcoholic Turkish drink) on the street hoping to become rich like the other villagers who have settled on the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut’s side. He spends three years writing love letters to a girl he saw just once at a wedding only to elope by mistake with her sister. And though he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have he stumbles toward middle age in a series of jobs leading nowhere. His sense of missing something leads him sometimes to the politics of his friends and intermittently to the teachings of a charismatic religious guide. But every evening without fail Mevlut still wanders the streets of Istanbul selling boza and wondering at the “strangeness” in his mind the sensation that makes him feel different from everyone else until fortune conspires once more to let him understand at last what it is he has always yearned for.<br><br>Told from different perspectives by a host of beguiling characters a Strangeness in My Mind is a modern epic of coming of age in a great city a brilliant tableau of life among the newcomers who have changed the face of Istanbul over the past fifty years. Here is a mesmerizing story of human longing sure to take its place among Pamuk’s finest achievements.</p>