Every small town is alike, but every great city is great in its own way. Over decades and centuries, the inhabitants of a city, abetted by its writers and artists, decide or discover that its essence resides in a single mood, a distinct emotional tone. Cities become metaphors: New York means nervous energy, just as Los Angeles means sensual ease. But as Orhan Pamuk shows in “Istanbul: Memories and the City” (Alfred A. Knopf, 384 pages, $26.95), a city’s master mood does not have to be ebullient, and its metaphor is not always a source of civic pride.

For Mr. Pamuk, the only living Turkish writer with an international reputation, the essence of Istanbul is melancholy, resignation, failure – a complex of feelings that can only be described by a Turkish word, huzun. “On cold winter mornings,” Mr. Pamuk writes, “when the sun suddenly falls on the Bosphorus and that faint vapor begins to rise from the surface, the huzun is so dense you can almost touch it, almost see it spread like a film over its people and its landscapes.”

“Istanbul” combines elements of memoir, travel writing, history, and literary criticism, but ultimately it is a meditation on huzun, “a cultural concept conveying worldly failure, listlessness, and spiritual suffering.” Wherever he turns in Istanbul, Mr. Pamuk finds the gentle wounds of huzun. It is there in the blackened, falling down houses of the poor and in the vacuous philistinism of the rich, in the thwarted lives of native writers and in the condescension of Western visitors like Flaubert and Gautier. Above all, it rises like a steam from Istanbul’s ruins. For Istanbul’s huzun, Mr. Pamuk is at pains to make clear, is not some kind of timeless curse; rather, it is a historical condition, the stigma of a once-imperial city whose greatness has been torn away by the roots.

What separates Istanbul from Third World megalopolises like New Delhi and Sao Paolo is not affluence – it is a city of immense, teeming poverty – but the memory of affluence. “In Istanbul,” Mr. Pamuk explains, “the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible. … The people of Istanbul simply carry on with their lives amid the ruins. Many western writers and travelers find this charming. But for the city’s more sensitive and attuned residents, these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to its former heights of wealth, power, and culture.”

Mr. Pamuk does not fill in the background of Istanbul’s history – this is a deeply inward memoir of the city, not a formal treatise or travelogue – and he assumes that the reader will know the broad outlines of its decline. The city first named Constantinople was the capital of three empires over the course of more than 1,500 years – the eastern Roman Empire, which became the Byzantine Empire, and after 1453 the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Only after World War I, with the parceling out of the Ottoman lands, did Turkey shrink to Anatolia and its capital move to Ankara, leaving Istanbul powerless for the first time in its history.

At the same time came the other major change that looms in the background of Mr. Pamuk’s book: the willed transformation of an Eastern, Islamic culture into a secular Western one, under the charismatic leadership of Kemal Ataturk. This double abandonment, of Istanbul’s power and its past, is what produced the huzundrenched city of Mr. Pamuk’s childhood. “The great drive to westernize,” he writes, “amounted mostly to the erasure of the past.”

Mr. Pamuk’s “Istanbul” is above all an attempt to recover that past, despite the absence of so much evidence: buildings demolished or allowed to burn down, books gone out of print and only to be found in second-hand stalls. One of Mr. Pamuk’s best chapters deals with the eccentric “Istanbul Encyclopedia,” a one-man production by the writer Resat Ekram Kocu; as though symbolically, he only made it to the letter “G” before giving up.

Indeed, one of Mr. Pamuk’s recurring themes is that, in a sense, the evidence of Istanbul’s past never existed in the first place. The modern Istanbullu in search of old pictures or descriptions has to turn to the records of Western visitors, since the Ottomans themselves produced no realistic engravings, no journalism or fiction. This is one important element in the infinitely complex Turkish response to the West – a combination of envy and resentment, emulation and humiliation – that Mr. Pamuk explores with masterful insight.

Perhaps it is to supply this historical gap that Mr. Pamuk, borrowing a technique from W.G. Sebald, liberally scatters photographs through his text. That so many of these uncaptioned black-and-white images speak of decay and vacancy – a crumbling building, a Greek neighborhood destroyed by rioters – is entirely in keeping with Mr. Pamuk’s aesthetic, what he calls “the melancholy of the ruins.” “To see the city in black and white,” he says, “is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world.”

But “Istanbul” is not just the story of the city; or, rather, Mr. Pamuk can only tell the story of the city by telling his own story, and vice versa. Mr. Pamuk’s recollections of his childhood are not as eye-opening as the rest of the book: The glamorous, quarreling parents, the army of relatives, the first girlfriend, the discovery of his vocation, are moving but familiar stories. What justifies their inclusion is the unbreakable connection between Mr. Pamuk’s life and his city.

The author has not just lived in Istanbul his entire life; at age 52, he still lives in the same apartment building in which he was born. This sort of belonging, so rare among modern writers, is what made it possible for Mr. Pamuk to write his fascinating book: “Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul … their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but rootlessness. My imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.”