I happened to be reading it today on the Toronto subway, and suddenly wondered if anyone could ever write such a book about this city. There is the practical objection that we have no buildings over 200 years old, but two centuries, and more than two million people, offers enough material for someone to evoke its spirit. All that’s needed is Pamuk’s skill at sneaking up on his readers while appearing simply to be writing an offbeat tourist guide.
Except …
Pamuk comes from Istanbul. His family has been there for generations, and he lives today in an apartment building built at his grandfather’s behest. Those old mosques, and the few surviving Ottoman-era houses are his heritage. But there are very few people who can claim to have come from Toronto for three or four generations back, let alone ten or twelve. We here are trying still to arrive, and even the ones born locally lack Pamuk’s combined sense of belonging and ownership.
From the subway today, I headed to various places for my daily errands, and I couldn’t escape the sense that everyone I met was still coming to Toronto. I had lunch with a Greek, received a minor medical treatment later on from a woman from Romania, and a meal at a local pasta house that was served to me by second-generation Italians who had grown up with an inflection to their accents. I entered the building I call home at the same time as a young man who brought his family from Georgia – the republic, not the U.S. state. And I couldn’t escape the feeling, in the wake of absorbing Pamuk’s prose, that none of us was quite here yet. We weren’t even sure if we’d stay, or go somewhere with less oppressively torrid summers and less unspeakably miserable winters. Or back to that mythic place called ‘home’.
I suspect that’s why no-one has emulated Istanbul. Pamuk keeps finding his home city on every well-strolled street and corner. He could leave, but why would he? Istanbul is where he is from: it defines him, and he revels in this. But while Toronto has several good novelists living here (Margaret Atwood, Barbara Gowdy and, not far off, Michael Ondaatje), I wonder if any of them have found the city yet. Gowdy perhaps, having been born and raised in a Toronto suburb, but even she often fudges the identity of the place in which most of her stories are set. It is best known to Torontonians as the place that doubles for Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit or New York in TV series and movies. It can be manipulated that easily. Until someone discovers it, it cannot be Toronto, and Toronto alone.
Where do we find Toronto, then? One obvious place is the intersection of King and Jarvis Streets, where the remnants of the oldest parts of the city still stand. But almost nobody takes the St. Lawrence Hall (my favourite building in the city) or the old retail structures close to it seriously. The nearby St. James Cathedral is an early 20th Century replacement for a predecessor or two, and worse, it represents the stuffy, uptight Anglicanism that preserved Toronto ostensible virtue for a hundred and fifty years. In fact, all around the city there are structures that were citadels of staunch Christian righteousness: the area I live in could not have a bar or a liquor store until about five years ago because the last champion of localised prohibition wouldn’t do the respectable thing, and die. We cannot love our churches, any more than Turks wanted to preserve the Sufi tekkes they were so keen to pull down ninety years ago.
I can see this piece is embodying the issue I’m trying to address. Should I now recite the ethnic neighbourhoods (not ghettoes, mercifully) that are the city’s pride? Maybe – but have the people living or working in these actually come here? The supermarket manager or waiter with a PhD in geology or history is a reality across Canada, but especially in Toronto, and many other people around him, from Asia and Europe, like him but with lesser skills, are also still trying to arrive in Toronto.
I haven’t, I know, and I’ve lived here for 36 years.
Perhaps this constant striving to arrive (and to leave, or acquire a home in Florida or Arizona as soon as we think we might have) is the energy, the tide, that is Toronto’s Bosphorus?