goytisolo in the palimpsest city

The NYT Sunday mag has a fascinating profile of Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo:

Considered by many to be Spain's greatest living writer, Goytisolo is in some ways an anachronistic figure in today's cultural landscape. His ideas can seem deeply unfashionable. For him, writing is a political act, and it is the West, not the Islamic world, that is waging a crusade. He is a homosexual who finds gay identity politics unappealing and who lived for 40 years with a French woman he considers his only love. "I don't like ghettos," he informed me. "For me, sexuality is something fluid. I am against all we's." The words most commonly used to describe his writing are "transgressive," "subversive," "iconoclastic."

The piece focuses on Goytisolo's life in Marrakesh and his involvement in Spanish and global debates, and his deep interest in Islamic and Middle Eastern cultures, particularly the strains of syncretic, popular religious practice that (used to) flourish in North Africa and Anatolia.

As the article mentions in passing, Goytisolo's passion for the region also encompasses Turkey and the Turkish language. He's the author of one of my favourite pieces on Istanbul, a little essay called 'The Palimpsest City.' Here's an excerpt, or two, or three, copied from pages that have literally fallen loose from the binding of the book that holds them:

1.
On my first visit to Istanbul, some 20 years ago, what most caught my attention and immediately attracted me was the prodigious impression or air of animal strength: a savage, omnivorous, uncontrollable vitality overwhelming the traveller as soon as he steps foot there; the chaotic frenzy of the ant-hill--ants subject to the engimatic determinations of destiny--which I have only found in one other metropolis that is both imperial and third-world: the bastard, migrant New York of black and Puerto Rican ghettos which are gradually spilling over and staining the white polity, a gentle contamination.

2.
I am in the Eminönü neighbourhood where I usually linger in order to contemplate the fascinating spectacle of the crowd in motion: a cityscape as familiar to me now as Turkish, no longer that language which struck the alert ear of Borges as a softer form of German and now a fortress patiently scaled and conquered.

3.
I am in one of the most beautiful places that I know, and rather than describe the panorama from the Karaköy Bridge--the graceful lines of the Ottoman mosques, the golden rays of dusk on the tower of Galata, the boats manoeuvring to moor and depart the quaysides on either shore--my attention focuses on the face of a wild, rustic devourer of sandwiches swaggering piratically towards me on the arm of a friend. My snapshot has caught his inquisitive glance and roughly-sketched smile as he looked at me, flattered.

Karaköy Bridge and Eminönü, from a Galata rooftop: