Orhan Pamuk, the great writer and Nobel Prize winner (the first does not guarantee the second, and vice versa) turns 57 on Sunday.
I discovered Pamuk 12 years ago when I took his novel The Black Book to Turkey. He came to Books & Books a few years later, and I drove down to hear him. Five years ago I bought his memoir Istanbul and read with astonishment - "I was born in the middle of the night on June 7, 1952" - because I was too.
I also packed a tie to Turkey, and on June 7 I put it on and took a taxi to the Pera Palas Hotel, the grand hostelry built for passengers who arrived to Istanbul on the Orient Express. (Legend has it that Agatha Christie wrote part of her famous novel there.) I went in to the elegant bar and toasted my 45th year with a glass of raki. Little did I know that, somewhere in the city, Turkey's greatest living writer was also celebrating his 45th birthday.
Years later, describing his hometown, Pamuk would write: "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."
Which of course makes Istanbul the ideal city in which to mark a middle-aged birthday.
