GoodReads Rating: 3.70/5
“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.”
So begins the new novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize, from the universally acclaimed author of
Snow and
My Name Is Red.
It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal, scion of one of the
city’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel,
daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a
beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins
violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and
the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie—a world, as he lovingly
describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip,
restaurant rituals, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with
the melancholy of decay—until finally he breaks off his engagement to
Sibel. But his resolve comes too late.
For eight years Kemal will find excuses to visit another Istanbul,
that of the impoverished backstreets where Füsun, her heart now
hardened, lives with her parents, and where Kemal discovers the
consolations of middle-class life at a dinner table in front of the
television. His obsessive love will also take him to the demimonde of
Istanbul film circles (where he promises to make Füsun a star), a scene
of seedy bars, run-down cheap hotels, and small men with big dreams
doomed to bitter failure. In his feckless pursuit, Kemal becomes a
compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress and
his afflicted heart’s reactions: anger and impatience, remorse and
humiliation, deluded hopes of recovery, and daydreams that transform
Istanbul into a cityscape of signs and specters of his beloved, from
whom now he can extract only meaningful glances and stolen kisses in
cars, movie houses, and shadowy corners of parks. A last change to
realize his dream will come to an awful end before Kemal discovers that
all he finally can possess, certainly and eternally, is the museum he
has created of his collection, this map of a society’s manners and
mores, and of one man’s broken heart.
A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and of the mysterious allure of collecting,
The Museum of Innocence
also plumbs the depths of an Istanbul half Western and half
traditional—its emergent modernity, its vast cultural history. This is
Orhan Pamuk’s greatest achievement.
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