The Museum of Innocence

The Museum of Innocence
Orhan Pamuk, trans. Maureen Freely
Vintage International, 2009
531 pages
ISBN 978-0307386243
Recommended by: Andre





This book. I loved this book. It is an early contender for My Favourite Book I Read This Year. Not only is it a novel on a subject very close to my heart and mind (i.e., romantic obsession and possession, the subject of my senior thesis), but it was probably the most remarkable experience I've had reading a book so far. As I've come to realise, mostly through going to shows, the truly transcendent experience of going to a concert or reading a novel can't be achieved through objective merit alone-- the ones that stay with you do so because the external experience-- what you yourself bring to the table-- aligns perfectly with the novel or concert or whatever in question to produce something truly amazing. So let's recap-- I started reading The Museum of Innocence a week or so before I left for Istanbul, the hometown of the author and location of the events of the novel, and finished it there. I had already read three of Pamuk's books and so was familiar with and excited about him as an author. When I arrived in Istanbul, the friend I was visiting had just finished re-reading it (having recommended it to me last March, when I was finishing my thesis), and we were both pretty excited to have someone to talk to about it. Being able to share a novel with someone is something I value very highly, and to be able to share it with not only another person, but to be in the city it's about... well, there you have it. The recipe for a truly memorable reading experience.

Briefly, Museum is about Kemal, the sort of Orhan Pamuk protagonist I've started to become familiar with-- young-ish, melancholy-ish, somewhat aimless, prone to disastrous romantic attachments. Kemal is interesting, though, because he is not an artist, but a rather apathetic businessman, born into a rich family and given a position in the family business (in my experience most, if not almost all, protagonists in these narratives of disastrous romantic obsession are artists or academics). Kemal is happily engaged to Sibel, but upon a chance meeting with a distant relation, Füsun, he begins an ill-fated affair. The affair ends fairly quickly, but Kemal's emotional involvement with Füsun does not, to the detriment of, well, basically his entire life-- his engagement, his friendship, his business, all forgotten in the light of his all-consuming obsession. He begins to collect little objects connected, sometimes quite distantly, to Füsun. It is this objects that comprise the so-called Museum of Innocence.

The Museum of Innocence, on Cukurcuma

As in all of Pamuk's books, the line between fiction and reality is artfully blurred; there is the appearance of Pamuk himself at the end of the novel that I have come to expect by this point, as well as a map at the beginning of the novel pinpointing the exact location in Istanbul of the Museum of Innocence (which I set out to find one day), and in true Nabakovian style, an index at the back of important names occur throughout the novel. Not only here, though, is this line less clear than it could be: having just finished Memories and the City, Pamuk's memoir, I was struck by how closely certain places, experiences, feelings and people in Museum mirror the ones described there. Museum, out of the novels I've read, seems the most personal yet of Pamuk's novels, the nearest to being autobiographical. Of course, it is not as if Kemal is as simple as a fictional stand-in for Pamuk, since Pamuk appears as himself in the novel-- but it is perhaps a little more complicated than saying that he isn't, either.

There are also some fairly intriguing meditations on the museum, enhanced for me by all the museums I went to during my stay in Istanbul (everywhere from Ayasofya to the Istanbul Modern); I'm starting to want to write a paper on the museum, or on the act of collecting. Fascinatingly, Pamuk continues to bring this novel into the realm of reality by opening a real Museum of Innocence, supposedly later this year, at the location on Cukurcuma (I assume, given the fresh coat of paint and security cameras in the photo above), containing artifacts collected by himself from the Istanbul of his childhood. I'm a little sad I won't get to see it.

It appears that, like a big moron, I neglected to mark quotations I particularly liked, so I won't be able to include any of them-- I was hoping I had at least marked something about museums and curators from the section at the end of the novel where Kemal, now interested in displaying his very weird collection of Füsun's things, visits thousands of museums around the world, displaying collections sometimes as bizarre as his. But I didn't.

And so ends the Orhan Pamuk Project, for the time being. I did buy The Black Book a week or so ago (I was tempted to buy it at the wonderful Isankitap in Istanbul, but English books are understandably pricey and the Vintage International edition is nicer anyway), but I think I'll leave it for later on, when I want something familiar that I know I'll enjoy and be fascinated by. If I ever end up writing an MA thesis in literature, Pamuk is looking like a pretty likely topic for it.