Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk's mastery in narrating the lives of middle-class Istanbulites, the cultural signifiers of modern Turkish life from 1970 to the 1990s, and hüzün (melancholy) is already well established, but something changes with his ninth novel, A Strangeness in my Mind (SMM), where he tells the story of a symbiotic relationship between a street vendor named Mevlut and Istanbul, set in a state of strangeness very different from the orthodox middle-class experience of hüzün in Pamuk's earlier writings. This strangeness, unlike hüzün, is fashioned by Mevlut's working-class experience in an economically transforming city and constructed spatio-temporally, in relation to urbanization in Istanbul.

In his novels, Pamuk so often distills the melancholy that comes with rapid and sometimes forced change. He tells the modern Turkish generation's memory of the Turkey that once was, while affectionately narrating a collective identity crisis mostly identified with the complexities of modernization from the Ottoman to the modern Turkish era. His characters, most of them middle-class and oblivious to the political and ideological ethos around them, reveal a silent wish for a world he so often calls alem in Turkish, where one could preserve a city and the past one loves, or, in the absence of it, protect memories. After all, in order to preserve his own memories, Pamuk erected a pink “Museum of Innocence” in the Beyoglu district, among palaces, mosques, and the grey Istanbul skyline. The last three novels of Pamuk, and especially SMM, however, replace a more conventional reading of melancholy with a more accentuated nexus between capitalism, tradition, and strangeness. SMM in particular relates strangeness, not hüzün, to modernity and capitalism.

Whereas past scholarship on Pamuk's work has explored hüzün in the context of aesthetics and modernity,Footnote ¹ and mostly from a middle-class perspective, SMM shows a discourse on strangeness in relation to the evolution of Turkish capitalism. This crucial concept of melancholy, also a part of Pamuk's memoir Istanbul, has so far been linked to Islam, as Ian Almond argues,Footnote ² or to creative economy, as Verena Laschanger notes,Footnote ³ or to disorientation, as Esra Almas suggests,Footnote ⁴ but in none of these analyses do we see capitalistic transformation in post-1970s Istanbul discussed in relation to melancholy. Esra Akcan argues in the “Melancholies of Istanbul” that in Istanbul “Pamuk uses melancholy in two distinct senses, which in turn allows him to unite it with hüzün. One of them is the more common association of melancholy with the feeling of loss. The second, less explicit one, is connected to the city's landscape (manzara).”Footnote ⁵ This sense of loss and the aesthetics of a transforming city, however, cannot be studied in isolation or independently of the unprecedented economic changes that acted as a catalyst in the land enclosures, the proliferation of gecekondu (shanty town), and urban sprawl in Istanbul. Similarly, Almas points out that the city is a locus of melancholy in Pamuk's work.Footnote ⁶ But this approach, too, defines melancholy merely as an aesthetic response to urban space under the pressures of modernism.

Mevlut's relationship to Istanbul, on the other hand, is not defined by melancholy but by strangeness. This strangeness, unlike melancholy, is fashioned by the alienating effects of late capitalism in Istanbul that render Mevlut a stranger in the city. The narrator indeed notes after a major transformation of the urban landscape that “buildings inevitably reminded him that he was still a stranger there.”Footnote ⁷ The evolution of modern-day Istanbul into a city of towers and skylines is also connected to land enclosures and land appropriation, starting, as we see in the novel, in the 1960s. This is where, in SMM, unlike in The Museum of Innocence or The Red-Haired Woman, the economic transformation of Turkey is more than a backdrop. It defines Mevlut's strangeness, manifested in his self-styled oblivion to the new economic trends around him, a poor and uneducated street vendor of Anatolian roots, living a seemingly bohemian life, as defined by his semi-conscious detachment from a bourgeois life. Strangeness, then, and not hüzün, represents Mevlut's relationship to modernity and tradition for two reasons: Mevlut's relationship to modernity as an Anatolian migrant remains liminal and he feels a sense of strangeness in the city as a result of his economic alienation from it.

The ethos in which Mevlut's strangeness is formulated is different from The Museum of Innocence and The Red-Haired Woman. In Pamuk's late novels, and in SMM in particular, Istanbul is usually on the brink of capitalist transformation and colossal aesthetic degeneration. The bourgeois protagonists in these novels—Kemal in The Museum of Innocence, Cem in The Red-Haired Woman, and Mevlut—witness Turkey's economic metamorphosis, yet deliberately distance themselves from bourgeois urges and materialism. For instance, in The Museum of Innocence, even though Kemal belongs to a factory-owning bourgeois family, he escapes from the profit-generating soda-making business and instead makes objects into museum items, severing the ties of these objects from consumers. Kemal lacks interest in his family business, and has a middle-class attitude towards pragmatic household objects that have real value for Füsun's family. This dismissal of object value is a result of Kemal's voyeuristic tendencies and obsession with Füsun. In SMM, however, Mevlut is a working-class man and is the only one in his family to remain a member of the working class, unable to reconcile his desire to sell boza in a new and hyper capitalistic Istanbul.

In The Red-Haired Woman, Pamuk chronicles the link between well digging, water sources, and capital investment. The incentive for digging a well in the novel is to find water for a textile-dying factory in Öngoren. Cem, the protagonist, inspired by his apprenticeship digging wells, studies geology and becomes a construction mogul, but wallows in guilt and can only find happiness by collecting artwork and stories about fathers and sons. In SMM, Pamuk gives us a picaro-like hero,Footnote ⁸ Mevlut, who defies the emerging neo-liberal, capitalistic system in Turkey and insists on selling boza on the streets, an outdated fermented drink at odds with the new economy, aesthetics, and urban design of modern-day Istanbul. Of these, the boza-seller Mevlut is truly the most significant departure from the middle-class Turkish characters in Pamuk's oeuvre. While Mevlut's forty-three years of wandering the streets of Istanbul and his strangeness read familiar because he, like Galip, Ka, Kemal, and Cem, inhabits his own universe that the author calls alem Footnote ⁹—a state of being at odds with the materialistic world around him—the novel departs from the rest by linking primitive accumulation, land enclosures, and modernization in Istanbul with the notion of strangeness.

The narrator says that Mevlut “liked to imagine that Istanbul was being built while he lived in it and to dream of how much cleaner, more beautiful, and more modern it would be in the future.”Footnote ¹⁰ Later on in the novel, the narrator points out Mevlut's dislike for the word nostalgia: “There were plans to limit Istiklal to foot traffic (leading to endless roadwork that had littered the whole street with potholes), except for a single tramline described in the newspaper as ‘nostalgic’ (a word Mevlut didn't like).”Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, the migrant Mevlut doesn't have melancholic responses to Istanbul's modernizing landscape or an aesthetic judgment of its overall transformation. As a response to rapid change, Mevlut, in his liminal space between modernity and tradition, develops a sense of strangeness, rather than an acute sense of hüzün about the future, past, or present. Unlike Kemal in The Museum of Innocence, who travels to Füsun's house with a private driver during the coup and post-coup Istanbul, Mevlut's life gets interrupted during the military coup. The narrator describes the impact of the 1971 coup on business, “All this was bad news for street vendors. … Even after thousands had been locked up and tortured, things still didn't go back to normal for street sellers and anyone working on the black market.”Footnote ¹² In this sense, the strangeness felt by Mevlut arises from a general susceptibility to a volatile and unstable economic system that primarily affects the non-industrial workforce and controls the spatial activity of street vendors like himself. The novel gives us instances when Mevlut links happiness to selling boza. His final defiance, “I want to sell boza until the day the world ends,”Footnote ¹³ shows both a recognition of his love for the street life of Istanbul and his place in the city. This seemingly quixotic attitude is partly his resistance to a forced alienation from the work he does, and partly his persistence at being able to occupy the liminal space (traditional and modern) that is rapidly disappearing in Istanbul.

Mevlut's history overlaps with the history of modern Istanbul, especially during the emerging capitalist development and urbanization of the city. In this way, the evolution of Mevlut's strangeness is interconnected with the economic growth of Istanbul between 1960 and 2014, the height of capitalist market integration and land enclosures and land appropriation in Istanbul. But the transforming Istanbul leaves Mevlut stuck in a stagnant economic status, in a liminal state between modernity and tradition, town and city, Anatolian migrant and wannabe Istanbulite with big dreams. Fashioned by his working-class, migrant identity, Mevlut's strangeness separates him from Pamuk's bourgeois Istanbulite characters like Kemal and Cem. The optimism of a migrant merges with an existentialist state Pamuk called strangeness, deviating from Pamuk's earlier discourses of hüzün, and yet creating a new space for questioning the perpetual evolution of Istanbul into a postmodern city, perhaps with a future that only strange minds can inhabit and appreciate.