Istanbul

Title: Istanbul – Memories and the City

Author: Orhan Pamuk

Publisher: Faber & Faber 2006 (First published: 2005)

ISBN: 978-0-571-21833-2

Pages: 333

Turkey’s greatest living novelist and Nobel Laureate in Literature 2006, Orhan Pamuk reminisces about his life from childhood to the moment when he decided to become a writer. Pamuk always lived in Istanbul and the permanence blends effortlessly to the life of the city as well, from its beginnings around the fourth century CE. The destiny of the people and the city is portrayed so commingled that it imparts a sense of melancholy, called huzun in Turkish, in its residents. The narrative of the writer’s childhood and adolescence is set in a stage of urban decadence which permeates Istanbul’s streets. The city went through very difficult times immediately after the end of World War I when the Ottoman empire was overthrown by the republic which embarked on a westernization drive not seen anywhere else in the world. People’s attire, artistic tastes and even the script in which Turkish was written was latinized by Ataturk who put Turkey firmly on the road to modernity. He transferred the capital from Istanbul to Ankara and the old city struggled hard to recover from the double blow of the fall of its aristocracy and loss of power. In a desperate bid to vie for a place in modern Europe’s contours, we read about the struggle the metropolis witnessed among its inhabitants between the old and the new. We also learn about the Bosphorus Strait which girdles the city and provides a backdrop for the thoughts and musings of Istanbullus in their wakeful moments.

Pamuk was born, brought up and is still living in Istanbul. He describes the joys and hidden nuances of living in an extended family as a child which he shared with the others in a 5-storey apartment all for themselves. Coming across dilapidated palaces and burnt down relics of the Ottoman Empire at every corner and wondering at the ephemeralness of a great empire was a day to day experience for the author on the cobbled stone pathways of the historic city. But quite unlike what the proverb says, familiarity does not beget contempt in the author’s mind. He demonstrates a dignified aloofness with lot of respect for the city’s past, and vividly narrates in poetic detail the childhood memories he possess. We get a first hand glimpse of the impressionability of young minds while reading that Pamuk still possess traces of his aversion to objects which terrified him as a child.

Pamuk captures the spirit of huzun, which permeates the city as well as its people. However, the term is not used in a disparaging sense, but rather as a thing to be proud of. This aspect of the city was first identified by Romantic painters in mid-1800s. This emotion permeates social life, arts and even Turkish cinema which was at that time the world’s second largest film industry after India’s. Turkish writers, most notably Yahya Kemal and Tanpinar who are also the author’s idols carried forward the spirit of melancholy in their literary offerings. This obsession with melancholy permeates other great writers as well, as the author quotes Ahmet Rasim on the facia as “the beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy”.

The book is adorned with a lot of photographs mostly taken by Ara Guler, which add a visual depth, or another dimension to the narrative. It portrays in a wistful canvas what the text attempts to do in description. The publishers should seriously consider including a pronunciation guide to Turkish names – of people and places. Ever since Ataturk changed the script, Turkey has developed a well thought out logic in representing the sounds with a tick above or a curve below, a letter. Without it, the readers feel like encountering the waiter in a French restaurant with the menu card. A glossary is also a good idea for a book of this sort. The author’s style is remarkable for its candidness which is of prime consideration in autobiographical sketches. Pamuk stops at his adolescence, with ample scope for another volume detailing his later life which was fruitful and reputable the world over.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Whose Bible Is It?

Title: Whose Bible Is It ? – A Short History of the Scriptures

Author: Jaroslav Pelikan

Publisher: Penguin, 2005 (First)

ISBN: 0-1430-3677-7

Pages: 251

No other book has exerted a greater influence on the actions of humanity over the ages than the Bible. Millions cherished it, followed it to the letter, practiced what it preached, died and killed for it. Though everyone would accept that it is the sacred book of Christians, we also find many portions of the collection of books which goes by the name of Bible are sacred to Judaism and Islam as well. It is this affiliation offered by these varied sects that have obtained the sobriquet, People of the Book, to them. This work is a fine effort to explain the origins of Bible, its growth, splits, compilations, the story of its spreading across the world and newer interpretations of it which continue to be of relevance to a great many people. Pelikan is amply fit for the task, as he is the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and is the author of many books, including the five-volume The Christian Tradition – A History of the Development of Doctrine. He has received many professional acclaims, counting also an honorary degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America to a total of more than forty honorary degrees. It is no wonder why such a book crossing the boundary of everyday religion should invariably come from a man who is a bridge between religions.

The book begins with an excellent review of how the books of the Bible came to be assembled as the canon or scripture. The history of the Scriptures is handled in fine, professional manner which is appealing to all classes of readers since it contains enough respect for the faithful and enough objectivity for the skeptic. The stories, or events, depending on which way you look at it, described in the Old Testament were handed down through generations by word of mouth. It came to be codified by the first or second centuries BCE. The Old Testament (also called Tanakh) is divided into three parts – the Torah which is the most sacred, consisting of the first five books and forms a canon within the canon, the Nevi’im, which is the deeds and teachings of the prophets of Israel, and the Kethuvim, the writings which were incorporated into the canon at a later date. Scholars differ on the date on which the book was assembled from its constituent parts, as the Greek word biblia means ‘little books’. Pelikan gives a surprisingly later date for the compilation of Old Testament as 90 or 100 CE, but with solid evidence to back the claim. This date is later than the making of some of the books of New Testament. But the author asserts that the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the rise of the Christian movement had goaded the Jewish rabbis to set their scriptures in a permanent way through a synagogue held at Jamnia.

Alexandria in Egypt was a great centre of cosmopolitan learning and commerce in the early centuries of common era. Lot of Jews lived there and thrived. Many of them lost contact with their mother tongue, Hebrew, in which the Old Testament is written. Partly to provide inspiration to this new generation and partly to spread the message among gentiles, the Bible was translated into Greek. Legends says that six scribes each from the twelve tribes of Israel were employed for the work, bringing the total to 72. Hence the Greek Bible came to be called Septuagint. In fact, the Christians made most use of this book, to carry on their own liturgical process at which the Jews were deliberately kept apart. The New Testament, written originally in Greek, was a logical sequence to the Septuagint.

A skeletal form of the New Testament was in use by 150 CE but there was no uniformity in the sequence or selection of books. It was written in Greek as Paul preached his ministry in Asia Minor, Greece and only later was attracted to Rome. Scholars like Athanasius of Caesaria and Jerome was successful in compiling the books of the New Testament in a canonical form by the end of the 4^th century. It may astonish us to learn that the books of the Old Testament was finalized and legitimized only a millennium later, at the Council of Trent in 1546. The rising power of Rome and its official language, Latin, was instrumental in bringing about a Latin translation of the Bible, known as vulgate, meaning vernacular. However, the Jews had seen the danger of translating their holy books by now, as the Septuagint, which was a Greek translation was expropriated by Christians. Therefore, the Jewish texts were not translated to Latin with ecclesiastical sanction.

The next big development came with the advent of printing. Gutenberg first published the Bible in 1454-55 in Latin. Revised editions soon appeared everywhere. Desiderius Erasmus’ work in 1505 came out with Greek and Latin authorized versions. The Protestant Reformation spearheaded by Martin Luther and Calvin sought to accord sanction only to the original text in Hebrew or Greek as they mounted a campaign of going back to the Originals. Primacy of place for reverence moved to the Book instead of idols as in Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. A subtle shift in learning of Hebrew and Greek was seen in Reformation clergy. This importance granted to Bible text resulted in a number of interpretations to it and consequent schisms. Bible was translated to several vernaculars in Europe by 16^th century, with the German translation by Martin Luther himself. The authorized King James version in English appeared in 1611.

The last two centuries saw phenomenal growth both in the number of copies and number of translations of the Bible. There is virtually no language, nor library on earth in which a copy of the Tanakh or New Testament is not available. However, the last century also witnessed the Holocaust, where Jews who share the Scriptures with Christians were singled out and killed in large numbers for the religious belief they possessed. In the end, all comes to the interpretation and reinterpretations of the books of the Bible which are giving new meanings and aptness to our everyday lives, as the author sums it up.

The book could have done better with an index on account of the lots of esoteric terms and ideas discussed. In its present form, it is very difficult to look up a word later. The language is scholarly, which means there is ample scope for simplification. Long sentences, reaching up to half a page can be seen. This is definitely not a disadvantage, as fine diction is the aspiration of any writer.

The book makes itself endearing to the readers on account of the fine thread of humour intricately woven into the structure of the narrative. It is no mean feat to be humorous while dealing with such a sensitive issue as Scriptures.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

About Time

Title: About Time

Author: Adam Frank

Publisher: OneWorld, 2012 (First)

ISBN: 978-1-85168-909-5

Pages: 337

First of all I need to say that this book is a bit tough. Books in the popular science genre should not be so difficult to grasp, otherwise people may find it easier to go after Nature or Science, the reputed scientific journals. Frank talks about time and its meaning to the society and to cosmology, the study of the universe. The weight of learned opinion now tilts to the notion that time itself began with the big bang in which the universe originated. This preempts any attempt to ask questions like what went before the bang. What the author asserts is that cosmic time and society’s concept of time are glued together and modified according to improving standards of material engagement. For example, an individual who lived in pre-historic times may find it meaningless and confusing to learn that an event is scheduled to begin at 10.23 am. The methods of time reckoning familiar to his society was based on the movement of the sun and a resolution of a few hours was enough to run the society in good order, but not now. Modern society engages vastly superior elements in time reckoning that a resolution of even seconds may appear to be too long, in some circumstances. The book gives a history of the progress in the idea of time over the ages and also a good description of the theories governing the origin and development of the universe.

All human societies, irrespective of the state of cultural progress they were in, had means of time reckoning that was amply suitable for their purposes. Though it may seem crude to us today, the contemporaries of such primitive methods didn’t feel constrained by any inadequacy of the device. Hunter-gatherers had a measure of time that encompassed the day and the seasons. When neolithic farming and agrarian societies entered the picture, accurate reading of the season in which farming activities like seeding and manuring were performed became very important. Curious it may seem, but these people had an idea of how the universe began and allusions to such immense events are still represented by the myths that had been passed on to modern times. By the time of classical Greece, rationalism made its first halting step into learned discourse. Hellenistic thinkers repudiated the need to invoke divinity into everyday life. Development of calendars to reckon time had its beginning in Mesopotamia where accurate measurements of celestial trajectories of planets was woven into the practice of religion itself. The first systematic attempt to bring out a unified calendar took place in 46 BCE when Julius Caesar modified the existing mechanism to make Julian calendar which forms the basis of the calendar we still use.

Society’s needs for accurate time keeping depends on its material engagement. Frank lucidly explains the development of clocks around 1300s that divided the day into equal parts. The original inventor of mechanical clocks is unknown, but its spread like wildfire ever since its first appearance in 1307 at Orvieto, Italy. Clock work was perfected in a few centuries. Harrison’s naval chronometer set standards in fixing the longitude coordinates at sea. As clocks proliferated, the need to set standards of time between cities became a burning issue. It was pure chaos before 1883 when the railway mediated effort succeeded in proclaiming time zones whereby cities falling within a 15 degree stretch of longitude had a common time. Imagine the trouble when each city had a unique time while the railway had another!

The 20^th century saw the marriage of space and time into a single entity and physics finally began to move away from common sense. Einstein’s theory of general relativity established conclusively that space and time does not stand out independently as Newton had thought and that they are merged in an integrated artefact, called spacetime. Likened often to a stretched rubber sheet, the surface of spacetime gets curved due to the presence of matter or energy which causes gravitation. Thus, instead of recognizing gravity as a force, Einstein showed it as only a quirk emerging out of the curvature of spacetime. Development of electronics and computers made the dependence of society more abstract through the ubiquitous silicon devices. Even though the modern communication devices free us from the fetters of space, we are more and more tied up to electronic time set by the schedulers and calendars of the devices.

The book presents a comprehensive discussion on the theories that purported to describe the universe and its origins. From steady state theory in which it was believed that the universe existed at all times, the Big Bang theory gained prominence as it could successfully explain some of the observed facts like cosmic microwave background radiation which other theories couldn’t. Coupled with the developments in particle physics, cosmology entered a new phase in the 1990s. The observation that the universe is expanding more rapidly threw an unexpected road block on big bang theory’s path. Eternal inflation came up as a way of accounting for this effect, but it threw up several problems in its wake on the quantum level. Concept of multiple universes or multiverse which postulates the simultaneous existence of several universes in which ours is only one. Though it may appear far fetched, it helps to explain away the problem of the existence of about 20 constants in the standard model of particle physics which seem to be finetuned for the existence of life. If multiple universes exist, we can always claim that we happen to be in one which is optimized for us! However, these are only hypotheses and have no basis on observation. It is doubtful that such concepts could ever be verified by experiment or observation. We must note here that one of the basic requirements of a scientific theory is that it should be falsifiable by tests.

Frank is a professor of astrophysics and his arguments on history and culture are borrowed from other authors. Readers are forced to note the very small number of authors he has relied on. Such references are thematic and excessive reliance on other sources make the reading a bit tedious and purposeless. Readability of the book waxes and wanes over the chapters. I’m sure the somewhat dull stuff with which he begins the book must have caused a sizeable loss of readers. However, the diction improves by simplifying as one moves on and even becomes enjoyable at some points in the middle.

The discussion on cosmological models is very comprehensive, but not original – not in the sense that it is plagiarized. The theories could be gleaned from any popular science book which is far more readable than this one. Throughout the book, the author maintain that cosmic time and cultural time are somehow braided together, but not amount of nitpicking has been effective enough to establish it conclusively. Arguments are numerous, but not convincing enough!

The book is recommended only for serious readers.

Rating: 2 Star