Customer Reviews

The Museum of Innocence

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Pamuk in 'The Black Book' asked if it was possible to just be yourself. Here we have over 500 pages of a man being not only himself - but only himself to the exclusion of the reality of the world. Thus, the author answered his earlier question (in depth).

Filled with years of tedium and few moments of action; the story slowly winds its way through Kemal's obsession with the beautiful Fusun. Those years pass as if the rest of his life has absolutely no meaning.

This is a narrative told in the first person by Kemal that presents word pictures of the characters, the neighborhoods and Istanbul itself. The tone captured the times and events and, in particular, the feelings of Kemal.

Only on looking back at the entire book, when the tedium is over, could I appreciate the telling of the lives of Fusun and Kemal, and of the others who were involved with them. Most lives are not 'exciting' to us when described and yet they are as exciting to those living them as ours are to us.

I kept turning the pages and imagining the 'museum' and how the story would eventually end. I'm not always able to predict the ending of a book, but this time I did - and it didn't affect the story. The best way to describe my feelings is that the whole was greater than the sum if its parts.

Orhan Pamuk's novels abound with a wealth of probing, social leitmotifs that are gracefully orchestrated into a Turkey perpetually wrestling with its hallowed traditions and a hollow modernization of Western import. In My Name is Red, the brilliantly written, Borgesian novel that won him the prestigious IMPAC Dublin award, he maps an arabesque, philosophical outtake on 16th century Turkey by focusing on its already tense relations with the ancient West. In Snow, another Byzantine masterwork of such poignant political urgency, Mr. Pamuk explores the dissidence aroused between Islamism and Westernism within a narrative steeped in the vagaries of a more recent era.

In The Museum of Innocence, Mr. Pamuk has yet again chosen to undertake a somewhat tendentious cultural issue: that of virginity's cherished sanctity among Turkish women living in an Istanbul metamorphosing with the changing trends. Kemal Basmac', the Byronic hero of this ornately beautiful and bittersweet piece, tells us that "virginity was still regarded as a treasure that young girls should protect until the day they married. Following the drive to Westernize and modernize, and (even more significantly) the haste to urbanize, it became common practice for girls to defer marriage until they were older, and the practical value of this treasure began to decline in certain parts of Istanbul."

In observance of Pamuk's investigations into an emerging modernity within his country's age-old cultural institution, this is an issue that no doubt rests strongly at the heart of the author's theater of wealthy, Europeanized Turks representing one extreme in the tragic realities of contemporary Turkey: the segregation of ostentatiously rich families residing in upscale neighborhoods, contrasted with the greater majority wallowing in squalor and destitution; the glaring absence of morals among the shallow and materialistic bourgeoisie; the pervading social disease of malicious gossip columnists and opulent parties designed to further flower wealth among the scant financial minority; and the unconscionable excesses of the Atatürk's secular revolution that divided society into sectors of religion and class, essentially pivoting around one's willingness to latch onto Western thought.

Kemal, a thirty-year old, unmarried scion of one of Istanbul's wealthiest families, promises marriage to Sibel, the daughter of another prominent clan; on one fateful day, as both wander around an upscale district of Istanbul fitted with modish boutiques and stylish restaurants, Kemal finds himself prey to a "black passion" with Füsun Keskin, a ravishingly beautiful shopgirl who also happens to be a distant relation. Early in the novel, Kemal and Sibel had just finished choreographing a lavish engagement party; meanwhile, Kemal secretly enters into a forbidden liaison with Füsun, violating not only his pact with his betrothed, but also transgressing the code of virginity--indeed, the very thing causes him to jettison his associations with the materialistic pretensions and the moral decay of the Istanbul elite.

When his lovelorn obsessions with Füsun become unbearable, he breaks off his engagement, but returns to her too late to resolve the anguish incurred during their affair. While there is something unnervingly selfish about this "intolerable obsession," particularly when Kemal continues to obsess about her in light of his father's death, his grim persistence is exactly what strikes him as endearing and comedic, his innocent digressions a whimsical analgesic against the incessant materialism, the "utter brainlessness," and the distorted social complexes of Turkish society. The dithering Kemal nurses a narcotic intoxication about Füsun, imagining specters of her character drifting around Istanbul, inadvertently envisioning rough and casual auguries of their sentimental reunion, and clothing himself in a dark mood that strains his relationships with the endemic glitterati.

Obstinately unrelenting, Kemal decides to pursue his love in an eight-year odyssey that transports him into an Istanbul diametrically opposite to the posh, upscale neighborhoods of his birth. Kemal visits Füsun's family in the shantytowns, the backwater districts where he finds comfort in the middle-class life of television dinners and casual, yet earnest discussions. Although discomposed by Füsun's marriage to an aspiring "fatso" of a film director, he remains vigilant through his subtle, unflagging courtship, eventually fostering a compulsive habit of religiously collecting objects and relics in a project later bearing fruit as a museum of sorts, squirreling away an eccentric stockpile consisting of 4,213 cigarette butts, 237 hair barrettes, 419 national lottery tickets, 1 saltshaker, and 1 quince grinder. As a comic aside, he's also precisely recorded the number of evenings he'd spent dining at the Keskins: 1,593 "happy nights" in a span of 409 weeks.

But Kemal isn't merely an ordinary pining lover shorn of depth or substance; in the span of the novel's five-hundred-some pages, he undergoes a heartening change of character, maturing gradually with the relics he lovingly collects from his exchanges with Füsun. The collection of objects he's amassed over those eight years vicariously illumine him on "the beauty of ordinary life," allowing to cherish these workaday museum pieces as "possessions in which to take pride." Kemal tells us that he becomes the "anthropologist" of his own experience, preserving "irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole." Although his romantic liaisons with Füsun are affected by some tragic kismet, it is he who ultimately finds meaning and fulfillment in a city that is ostensibly without sincerity or consequence.

Perhaps the construct of a well-off lead like Kemal offers something incongruent to readers anticipating the Turkish everyman, but societies like the Istanbul painted in this sumptuous novel seem to proffer little redemption to the plights of the commoner, the peasant. Instead, we have the debonair Kemal, who, though inordinately blessed with material and intellectual riches, is likewise gifted with the keen introspection to observe the cancers of a society without the annoying didactics that often come packaged with impoverished heroes.

Yet, the other cast members in this novel too provide a charming foil to Kemal's complexities, beginning with graciously loyal chauffeur, Çetin; to his dapper friend Zaim; to the warm Aunt Nesilbe; to the reticent Tarik Bey; and finally to the real life writer himself, Orhan Pamuk, who agrees to collaborate with Kemal in recording his life in a novel. As an afterthought, the writer's character tells us that Kemal "was one who relished every moment of life, ever open to the world and to other people and possessed of a childlike optimism." For a score that advances in such an atonal and discordant progression, this marginal footnote completes a rather beautiful coda to this breathtaking tale of love and loss.

When the late John Updike proclaimed Mr. Pamuk as Turkey's likely contender for the Nobel Prize, he was judicious in meriting an author who represents not only one of the finest ambassadors of Turkish literature, but also a major international artist with insights of the greatest literary power. With The Museum of Innocence, Mr. Pamuk has proven himself once again as a novelist of great virtuosity, skillfully intertwining elements of a beautiful and melancholy romance with his excoriating, though subtly rendered criticism of his country's social mores.

This is the first of Pamuk's novels that truly captivated me. Although others were good, this is the one that made me understand the way he is lauded as a novelist. Kemal, the main character, is indeed a jerk, but so much a product of his time, place, and class, that one gradually lets him off the hook. What is more impressive is the way his obsession with Fusun starts out as a self-indulgent rich boy fantasy, and then morphs into something more disturbing. And it does it so gradually, that one is hard pressed to decide just when he stops being simply in love/lust with a woman he cannot easily have (partly because he cannot easily have her), and when he starts becoming creepy and unhinged. Then quite gently he is rehabilitated into a quirky but not precisely mentally unstable older man, and we get some wonderful reflections on memory, nostalgia, and the evocative power of commonplace objects. I really felt that I was in the hands of a master as I read this book. Maybe other readers saw where the story was going, but I didn't, and I loved watching it unfold. Having spent time in Turkey in the 1970s, I can vouch for the fact that the classism and sexism of his story is a beautifully rendered reflection of the social tensions of the time. I appreciated how accurately Pamuk portrayed it and how lovingly he critiqued it. Though one suspects, based on the way he is himself inserted into the text in a rather self-congratulatory way, that he doesn't quite understand how bad it all was for those not walking around with wealthy male privilege. He's got Kemal's perspective down brilliantly; I'd love to see him try to really tell a story like this from inside the perspective of Fusun. I suspect he can't.

Orhan Pamuk's latest novel the Museum of Innocence is about a man's pathological lifelong obsession with a beautiful woman. Of course, we've all heard that one before. Variations of unfulfilled infatuations are, after all, the favorite staples of storytellers since time immemorial.

This is not to say that the Museum of Innocence is not original; it indeed is, but Pamuk's creativity seem to have started running around a circle. Akin to Woody Allen's fixation in his movies on New York, Pamuk has the view finder of his novels focused on his beloved Istanbul and apparently he has no intention of changing that. His general storylines have also begun to be repetitious. Wasn't the main character of the Black Book also searching for a lost woman? And so was the guy in the New Life. Pamuk's underlying inspiration seems to be the memory of a brief love affair he had during his youth with a woman who then vanished from his life. He told that story in Istanbul, his memoirs named after his favorite city, again. Will Pamuk be able to chart himself a new course before his readers are bored of his recurring storyline?

Criticism aside, the Museum of Innocence is an intriguing book, despite its intimidating heft--the Turkish original (Masumiyet Müzesi) is 580 plus pages, while the English translation is almost as long. Pamuk is a good storyteller and has created an engaging tale. An interesting twist he added to the perennial love story is that his is taking place simultaneously in 2 different time frames: one as the events happen and the other years later as the same events unfold within the imaginations of the visitors to the Museum of Innocence, a building housing the memorabilia, mostly junk, collected by the protagonist to immortalize his relationship with the woman he loved. Moreover, in this novel Pamuk's dense prose that characterized his previous works has improved for the better. Let us hope he will stick with it for the sake of the future visitors to his museum.

Let me preface my review by admitting that I am a huge sucker for well written romance stories, even ones that may lack the literary genius that define masterpieces. This potentially contributed to the mesmerizing experience I had from reading this book. That said, Orhan Pamuk is a great writer who demonstrates an uncanny ability to put out beautiful and poignant literatures, as evident in all his previous work. I had the pleasure to listen to his talk at the New Yorker Festival last year where he talked about the experience of writing his book. As fascinating and hilarious as his speech was, I don't think he was able to convey what readers should be expecting in Museum of Innocence.

Museum of Innocence is a love story that alludes to much more. It is said that this is Pamuk's first novel about love (I disagree). The story is centered on Kemal's experience of encountering his love Fusun, as an almost married man, losing her and trying to win her back. Almost the entire story is told from his perspective because he represents multiple oppressive forces that existed in Turkish society in the 70s and 80s, despite his own resentment of these forces. The story is divided into short chapters with titles that convey metaphysical inquiries about love and happiness in the most colloquial and at times cliché language. The writing itself is rather poetic but contains a greater dose of realism than Snow. The storyline is punctuated with breathtaking imageries. Kemal's obsession with Fusun, manifested through his fetish of collecting the objects with associations with Fusun, is absurd by nature but made real and even what somewhat sensible by Pamuk. (The actual museum, which Pamuk has been organization is scheduled to open this year in Istanbul and all objects mentioned in the book will be on display)

When reading this book, I cannot help but be reminded of three other novels - Lolita, Anna Karenina, The English Patient. One of the major theme found in Museum of Innocence is the exactly the central theme in Lolita - the objectification of the object of desire. HH's lust of Lo and Kemal's persistence pursuit of Fusun are so similar in that they are both characterized by fetishism. The Istanbul society, the setting of Museum Innocence is not much different from the one Tolstoy described in painstaking details in of St. Petersburg society in Anna Karenina. Pamuk gave the same level of attention to detail to the inanimate objects in Museum of Innocence as Tolstoy did in AK. But writing in a more modern and tender prose, reading Museum of Innocence is more similar to reading the English Patient than to the tediousness of reading Tolstoy.

I read the Museum of Innocence after having gone a long period without reading much fiction. It is a tremendous pleasure and I was completely immersed in the story that by the time I got off the train and arrived at work, I cannot stop thinking about the story. It is a long book but Pamuk will pull you through quickly. I cannot claim this as a literary masterpiece at this point but it is definitely a great read.

Before Museum of Innocence, I had read only one other Pamuk book- Snow- and did not like it much. Having a keen interest in Turkey, I found the story mildly intriguing. But something about it did not connect with me. Perhaps it was Pamuk's prose, which can be cold. (That may be due to the translation, but until I learn to read Turkish, I will unfortunately have to review based on the English.) Anyway, I had no plans to read any more Pamuk until I happened upon an autographed copy in a book store in NYC. Being a bibliophile, I figured a signed edition by a Nobel Prize Winner would be a good addition to my collection. So I picked it up, and I'm glad I did.

Museum is about Kemal, a man in his thirties from a wealthy family who is attached to another woman, Sibal, but falls for his eighteen year-old cousin, Fusun. Fusun and Kemal begin a torrid, six-week affair that abruptly ends after Kemal and Sibal's engagement party. Kemal seems to only go through with the engagement because Fusun had promised the affair could continue, but after the party she seems to disappear off the face of the earth. This complete abandonment sends Kemal into a state of agitation so great he can barely function, and he can think of nothing but finding Fusun. Sibal notices Kemal's distance, and even figures out the cause, but treats it as an illness that can be cured. Of course, this does not work and eventually Sibal and Kemal split, leaving Kemal to fall further into his obsession.

Giving up anymore of the plot would spoil the many surprises in this book. But suffice it to say, the rest is devoted to Kemal's obsession with Fusun and collecting her things, which he discovers as a way to ease the pain of living without her love. Kemal confides all his deepest feelings with us. And, like any friend, we have empathy for him, and can even feel some of the same tweaks of the heart that we ourselves have felt from past loves. But like a friend who's become obsessed with something, there are points in the book where we get tired of his whining; Pamuk takes us a little too far and we lose our interest. But then, when it seems we should just shut the book and let Kemal to his agony, a twist in the road pulls us back in. All the while, Pamuk ties in cultural aspects that add to the density of the book and gives us a much needed perspective. This is set in 70's and 80's Istanbul, so the conflicting feelings of the infiltration of the West is much evidence here as an antagonist, especially as it applies to the transitioning sexual mores in Turkey at that time.

Museum is a great book that would interest anyone who has felt the obsession of unrequited love, or has an interest in Turkish culture. This work shows that, though Pamuk has garnered the ultimate prize for a writer, he is by no means done contributing to the art.

Nobel Lauriate author, Orhan Pamuk, has again written an intense, and deeply sad novel. This novel is not an easy read for me, but as with "Snow" and "Black Book" making the effort to read this is rewarding. It has been skillfully translated by Maureen Freely.

This is more than a simple airport novel. Like his other novels, the underlying story is about the tension between the Western(particularly European) and the established conservative traditional Turkish culture. Here is a young man who on the surface has everything going for him, a wealthy family, a good education, and a "respectable" and "fashionable" Sorbonne educated fiance. The rest of the story is about how he loses his bearings, becomes infatuated with another young girl who is a distant cousin, and wastes his life chasing this infatuation. It is this infatuation that becomes a symbol of Turkey's pathology. Underneath all this novel's entropy, we see a successful bougeois society that feels that its own culture, art, film, and physical attributes are inferior to its European counterparts. In the end, we see a people including the protagonist who are not European, but pretend to be European. It is a tragic failure, and our protagonist lost an sense of value that he can use to guide his life, as he has abandoned the conservation Turkish value system and find the European one no better.

This is the anti-Huntington thesis. Samuel Hungington, the author of "Clash of Civilizations" believe that international tensions arise from international distrust of different cultures. But, the tension here arises not from distrust, but from a sense of inferiority.

Pamuk inserts himself directly at the end of the novel. It is here that he uses his "bully pulpit" and tells us that we need to be comfortable with the characteristic that we have, and not strive to be someone else.

The Museum of Innocence strikes me as being a book that requires the reader to do a moderate amount of thinking to mine its treasures. It helped me immensely to make notations, because as is the case with Pamuk's other novels, it's a puzzler.

Start with the title: why museum? and why a museum structured so that the visitor can simultaneously see all of the artifacts of the love Kemal cultivated over his life for Fusun? And why of innocence, especially in light of a most extraordinarily carnal relationship?

The museum that Orhan portrays is more than a little like an Eastern style painting, a subject he plumbed in My Name is Red, not only in topography but in the miniaturization of its subjects. This museum is Kemal's search for consolation for a lost love, something Fusun recommends early in the book (p.143). The ultimate aim of the museum's design is to make the visitor lose all sense of time, life's greatest consolation (p.520).

On the subject of innocence (a pure intention without knowledge of a world divided between the inherent realities of good and evil, east and west), the impossibility and relentlessness of the pursuit are innocent, as are Kemal's frustrating dreams, hopes, and intentions.

I think the best way to view the museum, that is the bet way to read the book since it is the museum, is to take Pamuk up on his invitation on p.124 and skip ahead at that point to the final chapter and read it. By doing so, the reader gains the perspective of the museum that Kemal wants. The book/museum is seen as a whole and it is possible to mitigate, if not lose, the sense of time that is experienced in reading beginning, middle, and end. At least it worked that way for me when I took up Orhan's invitation.

Reading Museum of Innocence is a bit like mounting a docile mare and getting unceremoniously bucked off. The landing is abrupt and hard. Yes, this is an artistic, groundbreaking work. I can't think of when romantic love was so, for lack of a better word, "obsessively" detailed. Obsession is the theme of this book and falling in love is one of the splendid, morose obsessions of our time. Such love is supposed to graduate itself. In the case of Kemal, main character of the book, no graduation takes place. Instead he obsesses (that word again) over the stray bits left in the wake of his love for Fusun. Fusun has been born to the wrong class, the wrong neighborhood, has the wrong ambitions and possesses too egregious a style for an elite Istanbulli like Kemal. None of this prevents him from taking Fusun surreptiously as a teenage mistress, while planning a public announcement of his engagement to another woman.

Poor Fusun. Poor Kemal. Poor us.

Orhan Pamuk's writing is once again laden with a level of imagery that will keep decades of doctoral candidates busy with interpretative studies. I read the Museum of Innocence as soon as the publishers could release it into my hands. However, the book bucked and kicked, probably because I am a woman. I caution readers that Museum of Innocence strips away all semblance of actual innocence to the point of excruciation, enshrining Kemal's imitation of love. It is a dead love. Fusun's life is a series of survival moves, which no amount of worship from Kemal can remedy or improve, despite his fixation. Kemal seeks a form of possession, collecting the totality of Fusun's life through lost earrings and crumpled cigarette butts. He is also afflicted by a serious lack of real nerve. He has no desire to contradict the social construct that imprisons him, Fusun and his erstwhile fiance. Not that social revolt would actually help them, given Turkey's slide into martial law, also described in the story background.

If half the sin be scandal, then Turkey's upheaval in the seventies and eighties never appears to rock Kemal's class beyond tepid fears of lost status and the inconvenience of martial law. Fusun, who begins the book as a Lolitaesque figure may be Kemal's great love, but she begins to look like a mouse trapped in the paws of a moody cat. She is doomed by her poverty and low status, even though she possesses blood ties to Kemal's family. So powerful is Fusun's allure to dopey, depressed Kemal that Fusun's family, includimg her eventual husband, can never quite tell Kemal's apologetically deep pockets to sod off as he becomes an uninvited, daily presence in their lives.

Fusun is Turkish Lolita with blither spirit while Kemal is Humbert Humbert with less malignance. At least he believes he genuinely loves, though he is nearly as morbid as the execrable Humbert. The result is an exhaustive examination of ungraduated love and its tiresome foible. Or the book is an examination of halted progress, personal and political. It could be a deep look at the motivations we unwittingly project through our notions of romantic love. Pamuk's glory as a writer is that he plumbs art from this. The end of the book has some amazingly original post-modern turns that are Pamuk's signature as an author.

Fusun, it becomes clear, must die. What else to do with her? By the time feminism arrives to her neighborhood she will be a self-destructive mess. Fusun's character is frustratingly remote. Kemal has all the right upper-class props to support his exquisite self-loathing, which unforgivably obscures Fusun's potential to the point of vanishment. After her tragic death, he plans his tribute, the Museum of Innocence. Fusun's possessions, including the discarded cigarette butts, are organized into a collection.

All this in the name of abused virginity and social standing. How ugly. How true. Must "true love" be exploitive? Museum of Innocence may be read more easily by men, which leads me to think Pamuk's partial intention was exactly this, literary expose. Maybe I am too wishful. However, Museum of Innocence is a great work. Like Pamuk's other books, a certain level of discomfort is required (in my case, a great deal of it). I had the same reaction when I read Lolita, which in hindsight was an amazingly prescient novel, similarly ugly, but true. I recommend this book and will read it again, just not right now. (By the way, the book also managed to slap me in the face. My name is Bentler, the same name of an Ottoman era forest near Istanbul that Kemal visits early in the book. That is another story).

Turkish author Orhan Pamuk's latest novel soars to new heights, taking fiction to an exhilarating new level and blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Ostensibly the obsessive love story of Kemal Basmaci, age thirty, for a beautiful shop-girl named Fusun, eighteen, the novel examines not only the physical passion which underlies their relationship and their lives, but also broader themes involving the connections between love and memory, between memory and reality, and between love and reality.

Including metafictional elements in the telling of Kemal's story, the author participates in the story as both a fictional and a real character, adding another level to the story. In a unique tour de force, the author is also creating a (real) Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, located in the house in which Fusun and her fictional family "lived." In essence, we have author Pamuk creating a fictional story about fictional people, whose real house and the objects in it become a real physical memorial to the fictional characters in the love story which Kemal has "asked" Pamuk to write for him. In creating a real-life memorial to the lives of fictional characters, Pamuk is ultimately freeing the reader's imagination from the constraints of fiction--giving greater meaning to "reality" by allowing fiction to have a physical role in it.

However multilayered the novel may be, it is also playful and great fun to read. Main character Kemal, thirty years old in 1975, when the novel opens, is from a wealthy family, about to become engaged to Sibel, an equally prominent young woman of his own "class" and someone he truly loves. When he meets Fusun, a shop-girl to whom he is passionately attracted, and who is also passionately attracted to him, he behaves the way his father and uncles have always behaved---he believes he can marry Sibel and lead a social life among people of his "class," while continuing to have an active private life with Fusun, a girl of a different "class" whom he cannot live without.

The ensuing action takes place over the next thirty-one years. Kemal, weak, "entitled," and selfish, allows his engagement to Sibel to take place, and Fusun surprises him by vanishing from his life. Kemal, by now obsessed with Fusun, befriends her parents, becoming increasingly isolated from his "real" life as a wealthy businessman, and collecting every object, including 4213 cigarette butts, which Fusun has ever touched. His kleptomania at her parents' house becomes worse as time progresses, and he soon has the beginnings of a museum to Fusun in an apartment that his mother uses for storage.

What gives the book its final power is the re-appearance of Orhan Pamuk as a character in the novel's conclusion, as he explains his relationship with Kemal (he says he is not Kemal) and his decision to start a real Museum of Innocence in Fusun's family house. This gives the novel a thrilling level of reality which may be unique in fiction. Compelling to read, filled with unusual characters, and structured to achieve the maximum possible thematic effect, The Museum of Innocence is a breath-taking novel, the best I've read by Pamuk, and one he will have a hard time bettering. Mary Whipple

Snow
My Name Is Red