Echoes of ‘Exiled’ Nabokov and Pamuk in Murmures à Beyoğlu: Istanbul as a Border Chronotrope

What is it about?

Murmures à Beyoğlu by David Boratav (Paris, 1971), winner of the Prix Gironde Nouvelles Écritures (2009), is a transcultural and postmodern novel, influenced by the writings of Nabokov and Pamuk, namely The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Lolita (1955), and Istanbul (2003). Therefore this paper attempts to summarise certain strands to the omnipresence of the work and personality of Nabokov and Pamuk that modulates Boratav’s first novel, which I interpret as a noteworthy homage to the former. Moreover, I would like to go even further and state that thanks to their influence, Boratav’s work takes on a unique dimension and should be ranked alongside that of the masters for its highly original and complex portrait of Istanbul. This subtle tribute to both writers results in a highly original book where the main character’s wanderings, marked with a paradigmatic in-between-ness, portray an Istanbul I define as a ‘border chronotrope’.

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