It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal and Sibel, children of two prominent families, are about to become engaged. But when Kemal encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation, he becomes enthralled. And once they violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeoisie. In his pursuit of Füsun over the next eight years, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress—amassing a museum that is both a map of a society and of his heart. Orhan Pamuk’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize is a stirring exploration of the nature of romance.
The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International)
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2009: The story of Kemal, the half-hearted industrialist who is the hero of The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk's first novel since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a deeply private one, built around an often inexplicable obsession that he attempts to justify to the reader. In honor of Füsun, the poor, beautiful cousin he had a short affair with when he was 30 and engaged to another, he has hoarded a museum of relics, both of their time together and of the much longer time when, like Gatsby drawn by the green light on Daisy's dock, he hovered at the edge of her life, held in check (but yet held nearby) by the proprieties of Turkish society. From Kemal's passion Pamuk constructs a masterful meditation on time, desire, and possession, saturated with the details of the city of Pamuk's youth: the brand names, the film stars, the streets, the intricate social relations between classes and between modernity and tradition. It's as if the museum of the title was built in honor not of Füsun but of Istanbul, circa 1975. --Tom Nissley
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred 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 Füsun, his onetime paramour and longtime unrequited love. An 18-year-old virginal beauty, modest shopgirl and poor distant relation, Füsun 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 Füsun that grant conflicted Kemal his deepest peace. The poignant truth behind Kemal's obsession is that his museum provides a closeness with Füsun he'll never regain. Though its incantatory middle suffers from too many indistinguishable quotidian encounters, this is a masterful work. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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More About the Author
Orhan Pamuk, described as 'one of the freshest, most original voices in contemporary fiction' (Independent on Sunday), is the author of many books, including The White Castle, The Black Book and The New Life. In 2003 he won the International IMPAC Award for My Name is Red, and in 2004 Faber published the translation of his novel Snow, which The Times described as 'a novel of profound relevance to the present moment'. His most recent book was Istanbul, described by Jan Morris as 'irresistibly seductive'. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. He lives in Istanbul.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
32 of 33 people found the following review helpful
By S. Weaver
Format:Paperback
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.
79 of 91 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
102 of 120 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
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.
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.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Claustrophobic obsession can drive you nuts
I had to put this down for three months before I could bear to go on with it. He can write well but the obsession gets so tedious you want to scream
Published 24 days ago by ron thomas
1.0 out of 5 stars
WOW!
This was the most repetitive, boring book ever. A man obsessed with a woman, over and over again. After reading more of the same I gave it up half way through.
Published 1 month ago by Elizabeth M. Beagle
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps the great Orhan's best yet
What flair and originality-what verve and passion, and what humor, and sweetness.Nerurotic love, fixated love, young love in a not/young fellow. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Roman Anshin
3.0 out of 5 stars
Intruguing story
I started out liking this book, but about halfway through it became repetitive and I no longer cared about the characters or the outcome. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Sandra Siegel
3.0 out of 5 stars
Alright, already!
Clever, but I just plain got tired of the protagonist's obsessiveness. The writing itself is good, to be sure, but I found myself scanning to get through parts. Not a good sign.
Published 2 months ago by Daniel Barbezat
3.0 out of 5 stars
Your ego is showing
This book told the story of an ego maniac who felt he had no responibility in what he did to women or other families. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Ilene J. Wagner
5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful love story.
This book is eloquent. Every paragraph is filled with so much details that I became Kemal in love with Fusun in Istanbul and it's neighborhoods.
Published 2 months ago by Raymond sassine
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Museum of Innocence
Learned a lot ..... I want to go to Turkey and visit the museum ....
Made me order the book Ataturk.
Made me order the book Ataturk.
Published 3 months ago by Emily Reynolds
5.0 out of 5 stars
A haunting book with a remarkable ending
Very long, sometimes tedious, but then the main character is a very tedious fellow. As I got closer to the end of this 530 pager, I started falling in love with it and now... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Michela Pasquali
5.0 out of 5 stars
Takes You to a Very Different Time and Place
I was transported to another world. A world of people and customs with which I was totally unfamiliar. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Dan
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