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A Strangeness in My Mind
A Strangeness in My Mind
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A Strangeness in My Mind (Turkish: Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık) is a 2014 novel by Orhan Pamuk. It is the author's ninth novel. Knopf Doubleday published the English translation by Ekin Oklap in the U.S.,[1] while Faber & Faber published the English version in the UK.[2]

Key Information

The story takes place in Istanbul, documenting the changes that the city underwent from 1969 to 2012. The main character is Mevlut, who originates from central Anatolia and arrives as a 12-year-old boy; the course of the novel tracks his adolescence and adulthood.[3] Mevlut gets married in 1982, and finds a lack of success in making money.[4]

Elena Seymenliyska of The Daily Telegraph described the book as "a family saga that is as much an elegy to Istanbul as to its generations of adopted residents."[5] Publishers Weekly stated that "what really stands out is Pamuk's treatment of Istanbul's evolution into a noisy, corrupt, and modernized city."[1] Kirkus Reviews states that the author "celebrates the city’s vibrant traditional culture—and mourns its passing".[4]

The novel is almost 600 pages long. Dwight Garner of The New York Times wrote that the book has "the stretch of an epic but not the impact of one."[6]

Characters

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  • Mevlut Karatas – Mevlut was born in Konya Province in 1957 and moves to Istanbul at age 12,[7] during the summer of 1969.[5] Early in the novel he attends Atatürk Boys' Secondary School,[3] and he sells yogurt and boza.[1] Kirkus Reviews describes him as a "nice guy" type person.[4] One character describes Mevlut as "a bit of a weirdo, but he's got a heart of gold."[6]
  • Rayiha – Mevlut ends up marrying Rayiha even though, in the course of writing love letters to her, he thought he was writing to her younger sister; it turns out the younger sister is named Samiha, but he chooses to marry her anyway and they have a happy relationship.[3]
  • Süleyman – Mevlut's cousin, he tricks him into writing letters to Rayha instead of Samiha, because Süleyman wants Samiha.[4]
  • Korkut – Another cousin of Mevlut. Kirkus Reviews describes him as an "odious right-wing" person who "treats his wife like a servant".[4]
  • Mustafa – Mevlut's father[5]

Style

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According to Garner the author was able to write "alert, humane, nonwonky prose" as a result of researching varied topics.[6]

Seymenliyska stated that the novel uses the same voice regardless of which of the characters are speaking. Sometimes characters speak directly to the reader.[5] Dwight Garner wrote that the narrators "contradict one another as if they were talking heads in an early Spike Lee movie."[6]

According to Garner, the 2015 English version has humor that "flows freely" and was "lucidly translated".[6]

Reception

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Seymenliyska rated the story four of five stars.[5]

Garner stated that the author had done a good job with research, but while Garner "was not deeply, viscerally bored" with the novel he "mostly turned its pages with polite interest rather than real desire."[6]

Kirkus Reviews stated "Rich, complex, and pulsing with urban life: one of this gifted writer's best."[4] Kirkus named it as one of the "Best Fiction Books of 2015".[8]

The book was shortlisted for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award[9] and the 2016 International Booker Prize.[10]

References

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Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia
from Grokipedia
(Turkish: Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık) is a by Turkish author , first published in 2014. The work chronicles the life of Mevlut Karataş, a rural migrant who becomes a street vendor selling —a traditional fermented drink—in over four decades from the 1970s to the early 2010s. Through multiple narrators recounting Mevlut's experiences, the narrative explores his unrequited love, family dynamics, and inner reflections against the backdrop of 's political upheavals, economic shifts, and urban transformation. Pamuk's ninth , it was translated into English by Ekin Oklap and released by Knopf in the United States in October 2015. The book received critical acclaim for its portrayal of everyday Turkish life and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. It also won the Literary Award in the Foreign Literature category in 2017, recognizing its contribution to international literature.

Background and Publication History

Author's Context and Inspiration

, born on June 7, 1952, in to a secular upper-middle-class family, has maintained a lifelong connection to the city, residing primarily there throughout his adulthood and drawing recurrently from its evolving urban fabric in his writing. His observations of 's physical and social shifts, particularly from the late onward, informed the novel's genesis, as he noted the influx of rural migrants from who reshaped the city's periphery through informal settlements and street economies. Pamuk's childhood encounters with boza vendors—peddling a traditional fermented drink door-to-door—provided a foundational empirical touchstone, evoking the of such livelihoods amid accelerating , though he viewed these figures from the vantage of his affluent neighborhood rather than sharing their hardships directly. In the years following his , Pamuk shifted focus toward chronicling the inner lives of Istanbul's working-class migrants, conceiving the protagonist Mevlut as a composite drawn from real street vendors he interviewed, including some in their nineties, to capture authentic details of their routines and adaptations to modernization. This approach stemmed from a deliberate intent to foreground causal dynamics of urban migration—such as the economic pull of Istanbul's expansion since the , which drew millions from rural areas into vending and shanty dwellings—over abstracted or sentimental portrayals, emphasizing instead the vendors' agency within Turkey's market-driven transformations. Pamuk spent approximately six years developing the narrative, starting around 2008, partly during his teaching stints at , where reflections on ordinary resilience amid geopolitical and economic flux crystallized the work's emphasis on individual perception of collective change.

Original Release and Translations

Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık, the original Turkish title of the , was published by Yayınları on December 1, 2014. The 480-page book marked Orhan Pamuk's return to fiction after a six-year hiatus since his previous . The English translation, titled A Strangeness in My Mind, was rendered by Ekin Oklap and released by in the United States on October 20, 2015. Knopf Doubleday handled the publication, with the edition spanning 624 pages in . In the , Faber & Faber issued a edition on , 2015. Subsequent editions include a Vintage International from Knopf in 2016, and translations into numerous languages as part of Pamuk's broader oeuvre, which has been rendered into over 60 languages worldwide. Specific foreign editions, such as those in French (Cette chose étrange en moi) and other European languages, followed the English release, though detailed timelines for non-Western markets like or Persian remain less documented in primary publisher announcements.

Narrative Elements

Plot Overview

The centers on Mevlut Karataş, a young migrant from rural who arrives in in 1969 to join his uncle in the street trade of selling and other goods. Over the subsequent decades, Mevlut transitions to vending —a traditional fermented drink—at night, navigating the challenges of urban survival, family obligations, and entrepreneurial ventures with relatives amid 's expanding suburbs and economic shifts. Spanning approximately four decades from 1969 to 2012, the plot follows a loose chronological progression of Mevlut's milestones— including , , parenthood, and aging—interlaced with broader citywide developments such as influxes, construction booms, and political unrest that reshape daily existence for migrants. The narrative structure employs a approach, alternating third-person depictions of Mevlut's experiences with first-person interjections from a range of acquaintances, friends, and family members, alongside occasional letters and dialogues that illuminate interpersonal dynamics and the texture of ordinary life without strictly linear sequencing. This technique underscores causal links from initial rural-to-urban migration to entrenched urban entanglements, foregrounding the incremental adaptations required in a transforming .

Key Characters

Mevlut Karataş serves as the central , a rural migrant who arrives in as a boy in the and takes up street vending, initially assisting his father in selling and before establishing his own nocturnal routes through the city's neighborhoods. Over decades spanning from 1969 to 2012, Mevlut persists as an itinerant boza seller, characterized by his introspective demeanor and tendency toward solitary reflection amid urban flux. His "strangeness" emerges through persistent inner questioning and detachment, distinguishing him from more pragmatic figures in his milieu. Rayiha, Mevlut's wife, embodies the constrained roles of women in Anatolian migrant households, marrying him after a period of correspondence and arranged through family intermediaries. As a figure from a similar rural background, she navigates domestic life and child-rearing within Istanbul's expanding , reflecting the adaptive yet limited agency typical of such families during Turkey's . Mevlut's cousins Süleyman and , sons of his uncle, represent divergent paths of ambition among rural migrants: Süleyman pursues entrepreneurial ventures in construction and , leveraging family ties for , while channels energies into political engagement and ideological affiliations aligned with Islamist currents. Their trajectories highlight contrasts with Mevlut's steadfast vending, illustrating how networks facilitated varied integrations into Istanbul's socioeconomic strata. Ferhat, Mevlut's childhood friend from the village, operates as a bill collector and occasional collaborator in vending, providing a foil through his youthful leftist leanings that evolve into pragmatic . The ensemble extends to other vendors, relatives, and minor officials, drawn from the empirical realities of Istanbul's —migrants peddling wares, navigating municipal regulations, and forming alliances amid rapid demographic shifts from the 1970s onward.

Central Themes and Motifs

Istanbul's Urban and Social Evolution

In A Strangeness in My Mind, portrays Istanbul's transformation over four decades through the perambulations of protagonist Mevlüt Karataş, a vendor whose itinerant trade exposes the city's shift from informal, low-rise sprawl to commercialized verticality. This evolution mirrors Turkey's broader patterns, where rural Anatolians flooded urban centers starting in the 1960s, swelling Istanbul's population through successive waves that prioritized industrial and service-sector opportunities over agricultural stagnation. Mevlüt's observations of proliferating gecekondu—squatter homes hastily erected on peripheral hillsides—capture the initial phase of this influx, as migrants constructed rudimentary dwellings overnight to claim land amid mechanized farming's displacement of rural labor. These settlements, accommodating blue-collar arrivals in vast numbers, initially fostered self-built communities that integrated newcomers into the urban fabric via informal networks, though they strained infrastructure and engendered haphazard expansion. The novel lenses these dynamics through boza-selling, an enduring emblematic of adaptive street commerce that persisted amid modernization; vendors like Mevlüt hawked the fermented millet drink from carts, navigating alleyways where traditional trades coexisted with encroaching commerce, reflecting how such micro-enterprises absorbed migrants into Istanbul's underbelly before formalization. By the , Pamuk depicts accelerating state amnesties and economic policies under Turgut Özal's neoliberal turn, which legalized many gecekondu via mass title deeds, spurring their upgrade to multi-story apartments and enabling speculative development that replaced shanties with high-rises. This dismantled import-substitution barriers, unleashing booms and retail proliferation—evident in Mevlüt's encounters with burgeoning districts and fast-food outlets supplanting corner shops—while facilitating class ascent for some migrants through property ownership and small-business ventures. Yet the narrative underscores causal trade-offs: rapid concretization eroded hillside greenery and neighborhood cohesion, amplifying flood risks and seismic vulnerabilities in a city prone to quakes, without commensurate public services. Socially, Pamuk illustrates rural-urban frictions via Mevlüt's vantage, where Anatolian clashed with cosmopolitan flux, fostering tensions over cultural dilution—such as the fade of communal rituals amid individualism—yet also highlighting integration gains, like intergenerational mobility from to for upwardly striving families. These portrayals align with empirical trends of the era's , which boosted GDP via export-led growth and urban , drawing millions into Istanbul's labor pool and elevating living standards for many former villagers through homeownership amnesties, though at the expense of widened inequality and environmental strain from unchecked peripheral sprawl. The novel avoids romanticizing stasis, instead causally linking demographic pressures to infrastructural , where state-enabled titling converted informal holdings into capital assets, propelling economic incorporation but exacerbating divides between entrenched urbanites and arriviste enclaves.

Individual Psyche and Familial Dynamics

Mevlut Karataş, the novel's , embodies a persistent internal strangeness characterized by between his aspirations for wealth and and the persistent reality of his modest existence as a boza vendor. This motif, drawn from an epigraph by Wordsworth, manifests in his recurring feelings of isolation and self-doubt, as he reflects, "No matter what I do, I feel completely alone ," highlighting a tension rooted in personal agency rather than vague alienation. His nightly wanderings through serve as empirical exercises in , prompting of life's contingencies, , and unfulfilled potential, yet he navigates this dissonance with a Sufi-like , finding contentment in daily routines despite evident passivity. Familial relations amplify Mevlut's psyche through conflicts over , , and , illustrating causal chains in extended Anatolian families strained by urban economic pressures. His to Rayiha begins as a —intending to elope with her younger sister but tricked by cousins into wedding the elder—yet evolves into a stable partnership that underscores resilience in traditional bonds, with Mevlut accepting the outcome gratefully rather than resentfully. disputes emerge prominently, as relatives like cousins and Süleyman pursue materialistic ventures influenced by figures such as Hadji Hamit Vural, drawing the family into schemes that test loyalties and expose rifts between and . These dynamics reflect broader patterns in structures, where initial migrations from rural areas foster interdependence but breed tensions as differing ambitions—rooted in individual choices—erode collective harmony. Traditional offer pros such as emotional refuge and , positioning the as a akin to a for Mevlut, enabling survival amid personal setbacks through mutual support and shared traditions like boza-selling. However, these bonds carry cons, including stagnation and curtailed agency, as Mevlut's passivity and reluctance to assert perpetuate a cycle of modest outcomes, contrasting with relatives who embrace modern opportunism at the cost of familial unity. In Pamuk's portrayal, this interplay privileges human agency: while clans provide causal buffers against isolation, over-reliance fosters self-doubt, whereas unchecked risks deeper estrangement without the anchoring resilience of kin networks.

Interplay with Turkish Politics and History

The novel embeds Turkey's turbulent political transitions from the through the early into the daily struggles of its protagonists, particularly Mevlut Karataş, a rural migrant turned Istanbul street vendor, who navigates upheavals without overt ideological allegiance. The 1980 military coup on September 12, which ended years of left-right that had claimed over 5,000 lives since 1975, disrupts family ambitions like Mevlut's brief flirtation with political , yet ultimately fosters a period of enforced stability enabling under Turgut Özal's policies from 1983 onward. This shift prioritized export-led growth and deregulation, contrasting secular Kemalist reservations about market excesses with nationalist and emerging Islamist endorsements of opportunity-driven pragmatism, as characters adapt by entering informal vending amid rising urban commerce. In the 1990s, the narrative reflects the electoral ascent of Islamist parties like the , which formed a in before its ouster in amid military-secularist pressures, through relatives' opportunistic shifts toward religious conservatism amid economic volatility. Mevlut's exemplifies cross-ideological navigation, with some embracing Islamist networks for while others cling to secular traditions, avoiding blanket condemnations in favor of survival tactics like leveraging kinship ties during the decade's banking crises and inflation spikes exceeding 80% annually. These dynamics underscore causal links between political instability and rural exodus, as policies favoring urban industrialization pulled migrants despite , accelerating Istanbul's population from 4.7 million in 1980 to over 9 million by 2000. The 2000s AKP era, beginning with the party's victory, manifests in the novel via Istanbul's surge and suburban sprawl, which characters exploit through property and vending expansions, reflecting empirical gains like average annual GDP growth of 6.8% from to that halved rates from 30% to 15%. Islamist viewpoints portray this as inclusive empowerment for conservative migrants like Mevlut, enabling upward mobility via projects and EU-aligned reforms, while secular critics highlight creeping centralization, though the text prioritizes individual adaptations over partisan critique. Nationalist elements appear in family debates over urban transformation, balancing achievements in tripling to $10,500 by against uneven wealth distribution. Such policies causally amplified migration booms, with rural-urban inflows driven by job prospects in services and building, swelling squatter settlements into integrated neighborhoods.

Literary Style and Structure

Narrative Techniques

The novel employs a polyphonic structure, integrating multiple first-person narrators—such as friends and members recounting the Mevlut Karataş's life—into an overarching third-person framework, which Pamuk described as an attempt to "tear the narrative apart" by inserting contradictory voices that challenge a singular perspective. This technique simulates the fragmented, of traditions prevalent in Turkish culture, drawing on diverse dialects and viewpoints to evoke Istanbul's social multiplicity without relying on overt experimentation. By blending these inserted monologues with free indirect discourse, the narrative achieves proximity to individual consciousnesses, as in Flaubert's style indirect libre, allowing seamless shifts between external observation and internal thought to convey lived experience authentically. Incorporation of found documents, particularly love letters written by Mevlut over three years to Rayiha, serves as a narrative device to reveal personal emotions and pivotal events, interrupting the main flow to provide intimate, epistolary glimpses that underscore the unreliability of memory and the gaps in oral accounts. These elements mimic the discovery of archival materials in biographical reconstruction, enhancing the sense of pieced-together history from disparate sources rather than a linear authorial imposition. The chronology spans approximately 40 years from the to the , structured through deliberate leaps anchored to specific historical markers—like military coups and urban migrations—that delineate chapters and propel causal progression tied to broader societal shifts, avoiding contrived suspense in favor of a deliberate, accumulative . This framework, resembling a 19th-century realist in its Zola-like detail and Balzac-inspired scope, prioritizes the organic unfolding of events over fragmented postmodern disruption. In contrast to Pamuk's earlier works, such as (1998), which featured highly stylized, mini-narrative voices from objects and historical figures, A Strangeness in My Mind adopts a more accessible realism suited to its epic scale, incorporating working-class perspectives derived from direct while eschewing middle-class intermediaries or overt metafictional layers. This evolution facilitates a broader conveyance of historical through grounded, contradictory testimonies rather than abstract stylistic flourishes.

Use of Symbolism and Recurring Motifs

In Orhan Pamuk's A Strangeness in My Mind, emerges as a central motif embodying the tenacity of Ottoman-era traditions against the backdrop of Istanbul's post-1970s and overhaul, where the beverage's preparation and distribution—rooted in pre-Republican recipes involving fermented millet and evening calls—persist as a nocturnal despite declining demand from mass-produced alternatives. This temporal restriction to after-dark sales evokes a contemplative amid the city's bustle, causally tied to the of street-level , as vendors navigate regulatory crackdowns and economic migrations that displaced informal trades by the . The motif reinforces narrative realism by anchoring abstract persistence in verifiable cultural artifacts, such as boza's documented role in Turkish predating the . The recurrent motif of traversing Istanbul's streets, often nocturnally, symbolizes perceptual estrangement arising from the physical reconfiguration of neighborhoods—evident in the of wooden structures for high-rises between 1960 and 2000—fostering a causally grounded of urban without reliance on introspective abstraction. This "," drawn from the novel's epigraph to Wordsworth and manifested in disorienting shifts during routes, links individual navigation to empirical alterations like widened boulevards and unregulated sprawl, which fragmented communal landmarks and intensified migratory influxes from rural . Such walking patterns, akin to flânerie adapted to a non-Western , highlight alienation as a byproduct of modernity's spatial disruptions rather than innate subjectivity, with routes like those along the serving as tangible vectors for observing socioeconomic flux. Images of rain-slicked pavements, flickering urban lights, and thronging multitudes recur as sensory touchstones verifying Istanbul's climatic and demographic realities, from the Bosphorus' frequent downpours averaging 600 mm annually to the population surge from 3 million in 1970 to over 15 million by 2015, which amplified crowd densities in commercial districts. These elements provide a realist foundation for motifs of transience, as lights from emerging signage and headlights delineate encroaching —expanding from 20% household coverage in the to near-universal by the —against the isolating of masses, empirically observable in bottlenecks like ferries and bridges during peak hours. By embedding symbolism in such documented environmental constants, the prioritizes causal fidelity to the city's material evolution over interpretive ambiguity.

Reception and Impact

Initial Critical Response

Upon its English publication in October 2015, A Strangeness in My Mind garnered acclaim from Western critics for its immersive depiction of Istanbul's social and urban evolution from the 1970s to the , with reviewers characterizing it as a poignant "" to the city's layered history and everyday rhythms. The novel's , Mevlut Karataş, a vendor and rural migrant, was praised for embodying the tensions of tradition versus , with his introspective "strangeness" providing depth to explorations of familial loyalty, , and quiet disillusionment amid Turkey's political upheavals. Other assessments highlighted the work's choral structure of first-person voices, which wove personal anecdotes into a broader of cultural flux, evoking a melancholic heroism in Mevlut's intuitive navigation of change. Yet early s also registered criticisms of its 576-page length and repetitive motifs, such as recurring street scenes and introspections, which some found to dilute momentum and foster disengagement rather than sustained immersion. In , following the original Turkish release in 2014, responses were more divided, with admirers noting its masterful craftsmanship in capturing urban undercurrents while detractors argued it failed to fully meet expectations for narrative innovation or emotional resonance. This variance reflected differing emphases: Western outlets emphasized the novel's affectionate chronicle of Istanbul's essence, whereas domestic commentary often scrutinized its fidelity to the lived experiences of migrants and the .

Long-Term Analysis and Legacy

Since its publication in 2015, A Strangeness in My Mind has sustained scholarly interest in the context of postmodern Turkish identity, with researchers examining its portrayal of Istanbul's transformation as a microcosm of cultural hybridity and historical flux within Pamuk's broader oeuvre. Analyses, such as those exploring the novel's negotiation of history and literature, highlight how it diverges from Pamuk's earlier works by foregrounding individual narratives against national upheavals, including military coups and urbanization, without resolving tensions into cohesive ideologies. Similarly, ecocritical readings post-2020 interpret the text's depiction of environmental degradation in Istanbul's peripheries as reflective of broader anthropogenic impacts on urban ecosystems, linking Mevlut's itinerant life to ecological estrangement. The novel's influence extends to studies of migration and urban literature, where it serves as a reference point for realist depictions of rural-to-urban displacement in Turkish fiction from the 1960s onward. Scholars position it alongside works addressing migrants' "," emphasizing its ethnographic-like portrayal of (informal settlements) and street vending as emblematic of socioeconomic marginalization amid Istanbul's 1970s-1990s boom, which saw the city's population swell from approximately 3 million in 1970 to over 10 million by 2000. This has inspired comparative analyses in global , including flânerie (urban wandering) as a motif for navigating modernity's limits, though such engagements remain largely academic rather than transformative in non-Turkish migrant literatures. Despite this niche endurance, the novel lacks documented adaptations into , television, or other media formats as of 2025, with references confined to literary discussions or tangential nods in cultural essays on Istanbul's cinematic representations. Its legacy thus manifests primarily through sustained citation in peer-reviewed journals on and , underscoring Pamuk's role in elevating provincial voices within cosmopolitan narratives, albeit without achieving widespread breakthroughs beyond elite intellectual circles.

References

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