translated by Ekin Oklap
In his 2005 memoir, Istanbul, the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk describes being more interested in the imaginary world as a child than in the real one. He’d daydream about a body double, also named Orhan, who lived “somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours …” Alone in his grandmother’s opulent living room in the afternoons, he’d look out through the window at the ships passing through the Bosporus and conceive of the room as the captain’s station of a giant ship that he was steering through a storm.
The first time he watched a movie—an adaptation of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea—he was too little to read the subtitles, but he still made up a story of his own connecting the scenes. “Even later,” he wrote, “when I could read a book perfectly well, what mattered most was not to ‘understand’ it, but to supplement the meaning with the right fantasies.”
