A Strangeness In My Mind — Orhan Pamuk

A Strangeness In My Mind is a novel Orhan Pamuk has worked on for six years It is the story of boza seller Mevlut the woman to whom he wrote three years worth of love letters and their life in Istanbul In the four decades between 1969 and 2012 Mevlut works a number of different jobs on the streets of Istanbul from selling yoghurt and cooked rice to guarding a car park He observes many different kinds of people thronging the streets he watches most of the city get demolished and re built and he sees migrants from Anatolia making a fortune at the same time he witnesses all of the transformative moments political clashes and military coups that shape the country He always wonders what it is that separates him from everyone else the source of that strangeness in his mind But he never stops selling boza during winter evenings and trying to understand who his beloved really is What matters more in love what we wish for or what our fate has in store Do our choices dictate whether we will be happy or not or are these things determined by forces beyond our control A Strangeness In My Mind tries to answer these questions while portraying the tensions between urban life and family life and the fury and helplessness of women inside their homes