The result is a gallery of Pamuks : here is the author of the haunted , half-lit inquiry into melancholy and neglect , " Istanbul : Memories and the City , " with further glimpses of the " forest of secret stairways " that is his home ; here is the man who so loves books that he wrote a whole novel , " The New Life , " about a character whose life is turned around by a book , with essays on the writers who possess him .