Charlie Rose

pirharun  10/06/2011 06:13 AM Report

We use experienced english speaking drivers who specialize in the door-to-door transport of passengers and who know their way around Istanbul. Our driver will wait for you outside the customs and will then drive you directly to your hotel in a comfortable vehicle with AC. Our fleet of mini-vans and cars offer a comfortable, reliable and economical transport into or out of Istanbul www.privatetoursinistanbul.com you hire the vehicle for yourself and your group just like a private taxi we provide a simple but efficient private transfer operating 7/24 a week between Istanbul Airports (Ataturk Airport or Sabiha Gokcen Airport) and your hotel without any extra charge for the luggages.A convenient transfer service between Istanbul airports and thecity center The vehicle types will be catered to your group size, ranging from taxis and minibuses for smaller groups.

Absurd_Kurd  12/12/2010 05:51 AM Report

I read his novel The Museum of Innocence, and liked it a lot; most of the plots there were so similar to mine while living in Istanbul in 80s and half of 90s.

Istanbul finally got a writer who can tell its tale; I hope in the coming years, he may write more on Istanbul and the feelings that city invokes in one's spirit.

REMant  01/12/2010 01:48 PM Report

The first sentimental novels appeared in the mid-18th c tho Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is supposedly the first in English, however there are many antecedents and the term was in use already in the 16th c. Congreve had written one in 1692, with the typical theme of love vs duty, like the often cited Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, by Samuel Richardson dating from 1741. This so-called "Choice of Hercules" was standard fare in the 18th c and well into the 19th. It is what Austen, for example, is all about, and Gibbon, too. Novels quickly became the province of the fair sex, being almost all this sort of melodrama, just as the plays were, and the epitome of Victorianism. They are like fjords in Norway. Once you've seen one, you've seen them all. Over time tho' the message has been reversed so that Austen is now interpreted by ppl who don't know any better to have held love (sensibility) over virtue (sense) rather than the other way 'round. (I don't know that anyone believes Gibbon anymore either.) Gothic novels or romances of this period, however, excluded much of the sense, and are the connection between the middle ages and the 20th c. Austen makes fun of them in one of hers. However the line between sense and sensibility is not so easily drawn. Market society slowly eroded virtue and replaced it with "other-direction," but as virtue was lost sensibility became more sensible, until sentimentality was replaced by outright scepticism. There really are Polybian cycles of these things I think. The only place you find the old melodramatic themes anymore are in teenage B-movies, and that seems to be fading fast. I have always considered novels pretty superficial in any case, like most cinema. Pamuk's theme in Snow of the Westernization of Turkey is important, but I suspect it won the Nobel for somewhat the same reason Obama was awarded a prize for peace. I mean who would pay attention to the Norwegians otherwise?