Signandsight refers to Willi Winklers article (in German) in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (German daily) on the start of Orhan Pamuk's German tour in Hamburg.
"A language in which the word for 'agency' (müdürlügü) is hardly less poetical than that for nightingale (bülbül), is a treasury for a poet. Masterfully and at breakneck speed, the poet Pamuk reads a monstrous sentence comprising (moderator Hubert Spiegel counted) 155 lines, interrupted only once by applause from the roughly 20 percent of the audience who understood Turkish. Then Michael Krüger read the same passage in German with his striking voice, and the Turkish singsong proved to be an endless string of poetical scenes which for Pamuk all make up his home town of Istanbul, the city of his childhood in the fifties, the city where he grew up, the city of the 'sick man on the Bosporus' as the waning Ottoman Empire was known to Europe at the end of the 19th century."
I read "Istanbul. Memories of a City" a few months ago and enjoyed it very much, especially the parts when he reasons with his mother. Right now I'm reading "The New Life" which I got as an Easter present.
There's a great review of Pamuk's "The Black Book" by Richard Marcus.
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