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Summary
Summary
From the universally acclaimed author of "Snow" and "My Name Is Red" comes his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize. A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and the strange allure of collecting, this is Pamuk's greatest achievement to date.
Author Notes
Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul, Turkey on June 7, 1952. After graduating from Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at the Istanbul Technical University. After three years, he decided to become a writer and graduated from the Institute of Journalism at the University of Istanbul in 1976.
In 1982, he published his first novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons, which received both the Orhan Kemal and Milliyet literary prizes. His novel, My Name Is Red, won the French Prix Du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the 2002 Italian Grinzane Cavour, and the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He has received numerous Turkish and international literary awards for his works including the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. His recent work includes A Strangeness in My Mind.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Nobel laureate Pamuk's latest is a soaring, detailed and laborious mausoleum of love. During Istanbul's tumultuous 1970s, Kemal Bey, 30-year-old son of an upper-class family, walks readers through a lengthy catalogue of trivial objects, which, though seeming mundane, hold memories of his life's most intimate, irretrievable moments. The main focus of Kemal's peculiar collection of earrings, ticket stubs and drinking glasses is beloved Fusun, his onetime paramour and longtime unrequited love. An 18-year-old virginal beauty, modest shopgirl and "poor distant relation," Fusun enters Kemal's successful life just as he is engaged to Sibel, a "very special, very charming, very lovely girl." Though levelheaded Sibel provides Kemal compassionate relief from their social strata's rising tensions, it is the fleeting moments with fiery, childlike Fusun that grant conflicted Kemal his "deepest peace." The poignant truth behind Kemal's obsession is that his "museum" provides a closeness with Fusun he'll never regain. Though its incantatory middle suffers from too many indistinguishable quotidian encounters, this is a masterful work. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Three decades of tumultuous Turkish politics (with secularism and militarism being two difficult strains in Turkish governmental life at the time) and social eruptions as European modernism grinds against traditional Muslim mores (focused, namely, on the issue of the preservation of female virginity until marriage) serve not merely as a passive backdrop but as an integral feature of this highly creative, diligently developed new novel by Nobel winner Pamuk. In 1975 in Istanbul, a 30-year-old businessman of good standing finds himself straddling an increasingly unworkable predicament: engaged to a young woman who is his social equal while obsessively in love with a much younger woman, who, while a distant relative, is not on a par with him socially. This compelling narrative, then, is the first-person remembrance of the troubled man's descent into despair; he seeks, by telling his story, to share a detailed reconstruction of the path of obsessive behavior, which came to include collecting over the years all manner of artifacts that were possessions of the young woman, even down to cigarette butts, which he eventually gathered in one place he called a museum of innocence. Fiction about obsession can often grow tiresome, but not so this novel, because Pamuk offers new views of the emotions and conflicts that, by definition, flow and roil through the mind of the obsessive. Read, next, Bruce Chatwin's elegant novel about collecting, Utz (1989).--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ORHAN PAMUK favors short chapters that lead the reader from one entry to the next, turning back to correct or amend. He is directorial in "The Museum of Innocence," his enchanting new novel of first love painfully sustained over a lifetime. In 83 chapters, a privileged Istanbul resident named Kemal tells of his obsession with Fusun, a beautiful shopgirl. The story of this ill-fated passion is preceded by a map of the city. Pamuk's earlier readers may recall the broad sweep of the Bosporus, the mosques and market streets, the Pamuk Apartments in Nisantasi, from his historical and autobiographical book of wonders, "Istanbul: Memories and the City." Kemal renders all views - the abandoned apartment of his transporting sexual encounters with Fusun, the years of twisting his life out of shape to honor his enduring passion. He writes from Istanbul, not America where he studied, not Paris where upper-crust Turks were acquiring their gloss of "free and modern." The city is on exhibit: the romantic touch of decaying wooden houses, the sturdy apartments of the nouveaux riches, postcard views of the shimmering Golden Horn, Soviet tankers on the Bosporus and a Frenchified restaurant once in favor. Kemal often reminds us that he writes from memory. The lovers meet in the Merhamet Apartments, in a flat abandoned by his mother. He dates his first clandestine meetings with Fusun to the spring of 1975. Or was it earlier, a family outing? (Fusun is a distant cousin.) He understands documentation as a serious pursuit in his life-absorbing love affair, "having become - with the passage of time - the anthropologist of my own experience." At that time Pamuk's fledgling curator was to marry the lovely Sibel, a fashionable young woman with enlightened views, so enlightened she had gone the limit with Kemal. Virginity becomes a leitmotif - who will, who will not break the code of no sex before marriage, honored in Turkey back then. Kemal's engaging memories largely scorn his social circle, though he notes that "two members of this large crowd took to politics in a serious way; one would be tortured by the police in the aftermath of the 1971 coup, and remain in prison until the 1974 amnesty; and it is likely that both of them dismissed the rest of us as 'irresponsible, spoiled and bourgeois.'" Preparation for the engagement party looms for many chapters while Kemal's enchantment with the beautiful Fusun blossoms. The shopgirl is 18 years old. Kemal is 30, and makes what he will of their passion - the novel we are reading. He begins to collect mementos of the affair: a hair clip, a cup Fusun touched, an earring. Much later, during their long (and explicitly unphysical) reconnection, he stows away Fusun's cigarette stubs, a saltshaker from her dinner table, a quince grater from her kitchen. "Anyone remotely interested in the politics of civilization," Kemal declares early on, in a mock scholarly discourse on collecting, "will be aware that museums are the repositories of those things from which Western civilization derives its wealth of knowledge, allowing it to rule the world, and likewise when the true collector, on whose efforts these museums depend, gathers together his first objects, he almost never asks himself what will be the ultimate fate of his hoard." When the engagement party finally arrives, a dressy affair for friends and extended family at the Istanbul Hilton, Fusun turns up as a guest - and so does Orhan Pamuk, who often plays a significant role in his own fiction. For once looking ahead, Kemal instructs the reader: "Those interested in Orhan Bey's own description of how he felt while dancing with Fusun should look at the last chapter, entitled 'Happiness.'" Pamuk has long been interested in doubles, in characters who reflect himself. In "The Museum of Innocence" he strikes this note again - and what's more, Kemal strikes it too. "She resembled me," he remarks of Fusun when he first encounters her selling rip-offs of Parisian fashion. And again: "Had I been a girl, had I been 12 years younger, this is what my body would be like." Now, in telling their story, he must thoroughly possess her, become this shopgirl, as in Flaubert's famous line - Madame Bovary, c'est moi. It's the writer's claim as an artist, not his understudy's. Part of the delight in "The Museum of Innocence" is in scouting out the serious games, yet giving oneself over to the charms of Pamuk's storytelling. He often makes use of genre, turns the expected response to his purpose. His 1998 book "My Name Is Red" may be claimed as a historical novel with an embedded mystery, and yet again as a political story - the miniatures of Eastern book art headed toward obsolescence, facing off with Western art, its perspective and freedom of invention. Such worldly engagement is of no concern to Kemal: "I have no desire to interrupt my story with descriptions of the street clashes between fervent nationalists and fervent Communists at that time, except to say what we were witnessing was an extension of the cold war." It's one of many denials that maintain his indifference to the political scene, and it's in keeping with his character. A feckless soul, an aging bachelor living with his mother, he is dealt a position in a family business he barely attends to. Meanwhile, during the years of their separation, the beautiful Fusun has married a would-be movie director. Night after night Kemal joins them at her family's dinner table, a threesome locked in a hopeless love story. It never occurs to the constant lover that Fusun may be ordinary - much like the adored girl in Nabokov's "Lolita." Kemal is chauffeured from his mother's house in Nisantasi to Cukurcuma, passively watching the nightly news with Fusun's family. Years flipping by, he tags along with the cinema crowd in Beyoglu, the beloved one aiming to be an actress. Kemal's dogged endurance may try our patience, though his dead-end accounting provides a bleak comedy: "According to my notes, during the 409 weeks that my story will now describe, I went there for supper 1,593 times." Maureen Freely's translation captures the novelist's playful performance as well as his serious collusion with Kemal. Her melding of tones follows Pamuk's agility, to redirect our vision to the gravity of his tale: "This is not simply a story of lovers, but of the entire realm, that is, of Istanbul." There's not much plot to "The Museum of Innocence"; and why should there be, if the artist is free? Still, Pamuk comes up with a cinematic ending, easy and swift as though churned out in a Turkish B-movie. But if, as Kemal recommends early in the novel, I turn to "Happiness," the last chapter, I discover there how he sought out "the esteemed Orhan Pamuk, who has narrated the story in my name, and with my approval." No trick, this is the writer's claim to his workroom, where the gallery of his dreams displays not ephemera devoted to delusion but close attention to the "beauty of ordinary life" that has almost eluded Kemal. What's on show in this museum is the responsibility to write free and modern. The real writer is never wholly innocent of searching out a word that, as Joseph Conrad put it in "Under Western Eyes," "if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the moral discovery which should be the object of every tale." On the last page of "The Museum of Innocence," Pamuk reveals the dates of composition: 2001-2, 2003-8. The hiatus may be explained by the fact that in 2003 he published "Istanbul," an autobiography overlaid with the history of his city. It tells of his mother's discarded apartment where, as a boy, he studied, painted, read and chose, perhaps in innocence, to make his way as a writer. There was a girl who posed for him in that studio, a model quite beautiful we may imagine, preserved in memory for this enchanting story. Maureen Howard's new book, "The Rags of Time," will be published this month, completing her cycle of novels based on the four seasons.
Guardian Review
This is a tricky time, one would think, for a literary novelist to offer up a 500-page story of a man's obsessive love for a younger woman. Fixation no longer reads as romantic, and the sexual politics of the subject would seem likely to dampen anything more wicked. Besides, in the age of speed-dating and hook-ups, does the notion of a lifelong, all-consuming amour fou still have any real currency? In The Museum of Innocence, his first novel since winning the Nobel prize, Orhan Pamuk strolls into this minefield with serene confidence, his own enterprise courting the same unease as that of his protagonist, Kemal Basmaci. Kemal, a wealthy Istanbulli playboy, spends a decade besieging his beautiful young cousin and then, after certain tragic events, devotes the rest of his life to creating a museum in her memory, stocking it with panties, nutcrackers, china dogs, 4,213 cigarette stubs and sundry other trifles recovered from their moments together. Adding to the fraughtness (and disquieting pleasure) of the endeavour is its setting in a society - upper-class Istanbul of the 1970s and 80s - poised uncomfortably between modern and traditional attitudes to love and sex, with eros half out of his cage, but honour and shame still coordinating the perception of private conduct. I doubt whether the subject of a woman's virginity has been so firmly at the forefront of a significant novel since Richardson's Clarissa The first part reads like a classic tale of reckless passion colliding with bourgeois convention. Kemal is happily engaged to Sibel, a suitable woman from his own class. Daringly, she has already - as Kemal puts it - "given me her virginity", though only because she trusts in his honour as her betrothed. But as the engagement party approaches, Kemal runs into his sweet, 18-year-old, declassee cousin, Fusun, working in a boutique, and the two become rapidly, catastrophically, infatuated with each other. Before long Fusun, too, has "deliberately elected to give her virginity" to Kemal (the deflowering is ominously juxtaposed with images of the Feast of the Sacrifice, with lambs being butchered on every corner of Istanbul), and she vows never to sleep with another man. Kemal, at this point merely a charming egotist, believes he can have his cake and eat it, even going so far as to persuade Fusun to attend his engagement party. The long party scene, set at the Istanbul Hilton, is a tour de force; a controlled detonation of explosive emotional materials that have been expertly laid and primed during the foregoing chapters. Like any grand act of destructive passion, it is both agonising and riveting to read, not only for the shattering impact on the three principal lives, but also for the way their drama ripples out through the lives of their families and friends. The large-scale social portraiture of The Museum of Innocence is beautifully assured; lightly satirical but also affectionate; a very tender evocation of Istanbul's moment of dolce vita (Mastroiani would have made a perfect Kemal). Pamuk, who writes himself in as one of the guests at the Hilton, clearly knows this world well, and personally I found it much more sharply drawn than that of the provincial intellectuals and Islamists of Snow In keeping with the many twists and surprises in this section, the party ends, not with the breaking-off of the engagement (this comes later), but with the hurt withdrawal of Fusun. Her disappearance awakens Kemal to the depth of his attachment to her, prompting an increasingly desperate quest to track her down in the hope of recovering his lost happiness. A wonderfully vivid portrait of Istanbul emerges in the process. At this juncture, as violent political upheavals begin to rock Istanbul, the book undergoes a radicalisation of its own, shifting gear from more or less conventional social comedy to something closer to the modernist era's case histories of psychological extremism. Italo Svevo's neurotic monomaniacs, in particular, come to mind as Kemal proceeds to drag himself through the increasingly painful stations of obsessive love. When he does find Fusun, she is married to an aspiring film-maker, both of them living with her parents in a poor quarter of the city. Convinced that he can win her back by drinking the cup of humiliation to its bitterest dregs, Kemal befriends the parents, offers to finance the husband's film, and spends the next nine years as an increasingly pathetic appendage to the family, eating at their table almost every night, abandoning his friends, mismanaging his business, and letting his former gilded existence fall steadily into ruin. Throughout this binge of self-abasement he drifts in and out of a state of morbid, precarious ecstasy, fuelled by the little personal objects - contents of his future museum - that he pilfers from the household and pores over in the solitude of his own room, licking and sucking them in an effort to recreate the precise look or gesture of his beloved that each piece has been selected to memorialise. Though the narrative remains compelling as it darkens from love story to study in florid pathology, it does become, in some ways, problematic. The compulsive pilfering, along with the museum itself, are certainly an inspired variation on the Proustian idea of recoverable time. But having established the conceit, Pamuk doesn't so much develop it as reiterate it. The pilfering gets worse, the sucking and licking and rubbing more frenzied, the vision for the museum increasingly grandiose, but after a while one begins to hope the idea might go somewhere new. It doesn't, really; or only to the extent that the last section, with its surprise notes of happiness, seems to want to recast pathology as romance after all; a questionable reversal. On the other hand, stasis, repetition, sheer duration have their own meaning in fiction, however challenging they may be to the reader. They can monumentalise a character, and they certainly do here. Kemal emerges from this book as a worthy descendant of the colossi of blighted love, with elements of Bluebeard, Miss Havisham, Humbert Humbert, even Citizen Kane in his make-up. And then too, a gesture or state of mind sustained long enough in a novel inevitably forces one to consider it as metaphor. In this respect Pamuk strikes a fine balance between suggestion and discretion. Periodically his hero reflects on the meaning of his own story. He discusses his fetishistic rituals in connection with Aristotle's distinction between the continuum of time and the individual moments by which we experience the present. He makes claims for himself as a cultural investigator: "I was driven by the very question that lay at the heart of what it meant to be a man or a woman in our part of the world." In his engagingly scrupulous, almost childlike manner (very well rendered by his translator, Maureen Freely), he even offers himself as bringer of enlightenment into the shadows of primeval shame: "With my museum I want to teach not just the Turkish people but all the people of the world to take pride in the lives they live." As the faintly crazed tone of that last remark suggests, he is not the most reliable of narrators. But even so these assertions indicate the general direction in which the metaphorical aspect of the book develops. And beyond Kemal's own self-analysis, a number of other interpretations offer themselves. You can read him as an antigen to the brutal model of masculinity prevailing in his own culture; a kind of saint of rejection and patience. Or, given the systematic way in which his pursuit of Fusun is mapped over the book's richly detailed portrayal of Istanbul, you can read his story as a love affair with a beautiful, enigmatic, wounded city. Yet this isn't in any way the kind of book that requires decoding or exegesis in order to be appreciated: these are merely an indication of the large resonance of its inventions. Before anything else, it is simply an enthralling, immensely enjoyable piece of storytelling. James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Cape. To order The Museum of Innocence for pounds 17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-pamukBOTW.1 The first part reads like a classic tale of reckless passion colliding with bourgeois convention. [Kemal Basmaci] is happily engaged to Sibel, a suitable woman from his own class. Daringly, she has already - as Kemal puts it - "given me her virginity", though only because she trusts in his honour as her betrothed. But as the engagement party approaches, Kemal runs into his sweet, 18-year-old, declassee cousin, Fusun, working in a boutique, and the two become rapidly, catastrophically, infatuated with each other. Before long Fusun, too, has "deliberately elected to give her virginity" to Kemal (the deflowering is ominously juxtaposed with images of the Feast of the Sacrifice, with lambs being butchered on every corner of Istanbul), and she vows never to sleep with another man. Kemal, at this point merely a charming egotist, believes he can have his cake and eat it, even going so far as to persuade Fusun to attend his engagement party. The long party scene, set at the Istanbul Hilton, is a tour de force; a controlled detonation of explosive emotional materials that have been expertly laid and primed during the foregoing chapters. Like any grand act of destructive passion, it is both agonising and riveting to read, not only for the shattering impact on the three principal lives, but also for the way their drama ripples out through the lives of their families and friends. The large-scale social portraiture of The Museum of Innocence is beautifully assured; lightly satirical but also affectionate; a very tender evocation of Istanbul's moment of dolce vita (Mastroiani would have made a perfect Kemal). [Orhan Pamuk], who writes himself in as one of the guests at the Hilton, clearly knows this world well, and personally I found it much more sharply drawn than that of the provincial intellectuals and Islamists of Snow As the faintly crazed tone of that last remark suggests, he is not the most reliable of narrators. But even so these assertions indicate the general direction in which the metaphorical aspect of the book develops. And beyond Kemal's own self-analysis, a number of other interpretations offer themselves. You can read him as an antigen to the brutal model of masculinity prevailing in his own culture; a kind of saint of rejection and patience. Or, given the systematic way in which his pursuit of Fusun is mapped over the book's richly detailed portrayal of Istanbul, you can read his story as a love affair with a beautiful, enigmatic, wounded city. Yet this isn't in any way the kind of book that requires decoding or exegesis in order to be appreciated: these are merely an indication of the large resonance of its inventions. Before anything else, it is simply an enthralling, immensely enjoyable piece of storytelling. - James Lasdun.
Kirkus Review
Curious and demanding new novel from Turkey's 2006 Nobel laureate, both closely akin to and somewhat less accomplished than its universally acclaimed predecessors (Snow, 2004, etc.). This is protagonist Kemal's impassioned tale of his obsessive love for a beautiful distant relative, Fsun, with whom he enjoys a rapturous sexual relationship as the day of Kemal's marriage to his blameless fiance Sibel draws nearer. When we meet him in 1975, Kemal is the 30-year-old scion of a prosperous Istanbul family. The Basmacis are privileged people who acquire objects of beauty and value, store them away, then forget them. Not so with Kemal, whose yearning for the elusive Fsun (she's responsive only sexually) outlasts the breaking of his engagement and the years of Fsun's marriage to Feridun. During that period, Kemal is a frequent visitor to their home, from which he steals something each time, adding objects to his "collection" of artifacts commemorating ecstasies shared with his former lover (hence the compelling title metaphor). The author examines Kemal's twisted devotion with impressive cunning and inventiveness; inevitably, we think of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert and his Lolita, but to Pamuk's credit, the comparison does not diminish this novel's eloquence or impact. Suggestions of a tradition-bound haute bourgeoisie unable to let go of passing traditions and values feel honestly earned, and the narrative consistently engages and surprises. It's also too long and sometimes seems more a willed production than a cry from the heart. A rather contrived climax is redeemed by a witty dnouement in which a new narrator makes an unexpected appearance. Another richly woven tale suffused with life and color from one of contemporary fiction's true master craftsmen. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
And they say women fall crazy in love. In this latest from Nobel Prize winner Pamuk, protagonist Kemal becomes so obsessed with a shop girl he meets while buying his fiancee a purse that he ends up throwing away his entire life. F san is in fact a distant relative Kemal hasn't seen for some time, and they launch a passionate affair on the very eve of Kemal's engagement party. This is 1970s Turkey, and new ideas from the West would seem to bless the affair. But of course Kemal never considers breaking his engagement, and in the end a deeply bruised F san vanishes. As Kemal's fiancee, Sibel, rightly observes, "It's because she was a poor, ambitious girl that you were able to start something so easily." Kemal is not so enlightened as he thinks. He's also a bit of a bore, having compulsively organized an entire "museum" of artifacts pertaining to F san that the author repeatedly references; readers may agree with Kemal that "visitors to my museum must by now be sick and tired of my heartache." Verdict This story is beautifully told, but at great length and in great detail; patient readers, be prepared. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/09.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 The Happiest Moment of My Life It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it. Had I known, had I cherished this gift, would everything have turned out differently? Yes, if I had recognized this instant of perfect happiness, I would have held it fast and never let it slip away. It took a few seconds, perhaps, for that luminous state to enfold me, suffusing me with the deepest peace, but it seemed to last hours, even years. In that moment, on the afternoon of Monday, May 26, 1975, at about a quarter to three, just as we felt ourselves to be beyond sin and guilt so too did the world seem to have been released from gravity and time. Kissing Fusun's shoulder, already moist from the heat of our lovemaking, I gently entered her from behind, and as I softly bit her ear, her earring must have come free and, for all we knew, hovered in midair before falling of its own accord. Our bliss was so profound that we went on kissing, heedless of the fall of the earring, whose shape I had not even noticed. Outside the sky was shimmering as it does only in Istanbul in the spring. In the streets people still in their winter clothes were perspiring, but inside shops and buildings, and under the linden and chestnut trees, it was still cool. We felt the same coolness rising from the musty mattress on which we were making love, the way children play, happily forgetting everything else. A breeze wafted in through the balcony window, tinged with the sea and linden leaves; it lifted the tulle curtains, and they billowed down again in slow motion, chilling our naked bodies. From the bed of the back bedroom of the second- floor apartment, we could see a group of boys playing football in the garden below, swearing furiously in the May heat, and as it dawned on us that we were enacting, word for word, exactly those indecencies, we stopped making love to look into each other's eyes and smile. But so great was our elation that the joke life had sent us from the back garden was forgotten as quickly as the earring. When we met the next day, Füsun told me she had lost one of her earrings. Actually, not long after she had left the preceding afternoon, I'd spotted it nestled in the blue sheets, her initial dangling at its tip, and I was about to put it aside when, by a strange compulsion, I slipped it into my pocket. So now I said, "I have it here, darling," as I reached into the right-hand pocket of my jacket hanging on the back of a chair. "Oh, it's gone!" For a moment, I glimpsed a bad omen, a hint of malign fate, but then I remembered that I'd put on a different jacket that morning, because of the warm weather. "It must be in the pocket of my other jacket." "Please bring it tomorrow. Don't forget," Fusun said, her eyes widening. "It is very dear to me." "All right." Fusun was eighteen, a poor distant relation, and before running into her a month ago, I had all but forgotten she existed. I was thirty and about to become engaged to Sibel, who, according to everyone, was the perfect match. 2 The Şanzelize Boutique The series of events and coincidences that were to change my entire life had begun a month before on April 27, 1975, when Sibel happened to spot a handbag designed by the famous Jenny Colon in a shop window as we were walking along Valikonağı Avenue, enjoying the cool spring evening. Our formal engagement was not far off; we were tipsy and in high spirits. We'd just been to Fuaye, a posh new restaurant in Nişantaşı; over supper with my parents, we had discussed at length the preparations for the engagement party, which was scheduled for the middle of June so that Nurcihan, Sibel's friend since her days at Notre Dame de Sion Lycée and then her years in Paris, could come from France to attend. Si Excerpted from The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
