Afinal, a minha memória não se equivocou. Sabia que, algures, encontraria um livro emprestado por uma amiga que, em tempos, tinha vivido em Istambul. Em jeito de desafio turístico, ela sugeriu-me esta leitura de memórias da cidade de Istambul, escrita por Orhan Pamuk, Nobel da Literatura em 2006.
Pois, após uma visita recente a Istambul pus-me avidamente a procurar o livro Istanbul, Memories and the City entre os escombros de pilhas literárias, para confrontar memórias (claro está que não equiparo o grau de memória) ou simplesmente para "matar" saudades de uma cidade que tanto me encantara. E encontrei-o!
Sublinho para já esta passagem onde o autor cruza a essência experiencial de uma vida real/emocional com o acto da escrita, advindo daí uma causa para que este livro tenha acontecido: A MEMÓRIA de uma cidade.
"Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul - these are all writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, culture, countries, continents, even civilisations. Their imagination were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through rootlessness; mine, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate: I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.
Flaubert, who visited Istanbul a hundred and two years before my birth, was struck by the variety of life in its teeming streets; in one of his letters he predicted that in a century's time it would be the capital of the world. The reverse came true; after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed. The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been its two-thousand-year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I've spent my life either battling with this melancholy, or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own."
Meraba. Simit, simit!
ResponderEliminarNow, for me, Istanbul also means you, it also means us. Great times!