The Museum of Innocence 1st Edition

I am not sure I can be objective about this novel. I was absorbed and involved from the beginning in the love story and I loved the easy accessible style of writing. All in all I found it the most affecting story since reading Mishima's Spring Snow as a teenager over forty years ago.This was my very first Turkish novel and is certainly an eye-opener: all that sex and alcohol, the wealth, the envy and imitation of Europe, the traditions and mores of 1970's Istanbul, as well as the social and political unrest besetting a country torn between tradition and modernity. There is so much to it but at its heart is the restless and undying love of Kemal for the ineffable beauty of Füsan which provides many lambent poignant passages.I felt Pamuk was somewhere constructing a parable about modern Turkey and about the place of the female within that new becoming world. In the west Füsan would have been another Grace Kelly, perhaps equally as tragic, but free to be successful, charismatic, beautiful and loved. I think there may be a hymn or paean to abused Turkish womanhood in Pamuk's novel, radiant and pure in its sung idealised sweetness. I need more time however to see this more clearly.I first heard of Pamuk when I was taken with a group of friends to visit the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul some years ago. I loved the museum but regretted not having read the novel. Finally reading the novel I wished I could visit the Museum again as I read.It is a long book and despite my enthusiasm I ran out of steam about half way. For this reason perhaps I did not enjoy the second half or concluding chapters of the novel as much as early ones. I will nonetheless look forward to my next encounter with Pamuk and his world. I am not sure anything however will live up to the love of Kemal and Füsan. But that perhaps is me not being objective...

Orhan Pamuk is a brilliant author and storyteller. I miss that I cannot read him in the original Turkish, because I have to rely on translators to capture the beauty of his language - and I feel that is not done in this translation. BUT the quality of the story structure, the sophistication of the character development, and the way the Pamuk plays here, again, with our ability to trust the narrator: these factors more than makeup for what the translation lacks, in communicating Pamuk’s skill with language. This novel has an extra level of playfulness, in the way that the narrator - a grossly narcissistic fop - dismissively encounters the author as a character woven through the novel. This play allows the author’s views of the narrator to enter in through the cracks, albeit filtered by the narrator (who is filtered again by the author in a critical Hall of Mirrors); and begins to balance the grotesqueness of the central storyline with a bit of berserk sanity. The novel is strange, and obsessive, and brilliant. Nearly a year after finishing it, I continue to mull over its subtlety, complexity, and many nuances. As with Pamuk’s other works: this is not for the faint of heart. But those who read this book and consider it seriously will find complicated, meaty truths wrapped around modern foibles... much to love, hate, ponder, all planted carefully by the author.

FIRST LINE REVIEW: "It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it." And because he didn't recognize it for what it was, Kemel spends the next 9 years trying to recapture the happiness that he lost because he was blind to the gift he had been given. This book has moved me profoundly, not only because I read it while in Istanbul where the novel is set, but because it spoke so heartbreakingly of the little moments that we too often ignore, innocent of the gifts that those moments can be. And in two days I will visit the actual Museum of Innocence and I already know that it will wreck me!

I found this well-written and very evocative of "old" Istanbul. However, I have one major problem with the novel, and this really colored my admiration of the story (spoilers ahead):Kemal's anguish was caused by his losing Fusun, the love of his life. However, in all of the pages that described his trysts with Fusun, we never learned anything about that relationship except for the fact that it consisted of a lot of sex. There was no description of them ever having serious talks, of learning about each other, about their hopes and dreams. So when Fusun leaves Kemal, I found it hard to accept that he missed her for any other reason than missing his sex life with her. Since the entire book is predicated on his sorrow in losing her, this is a big miss for me. If I am to sympathize with him at all, then I need to know why the relationship meant so much to him. Pamuk gives us no clue, except for the fact that they both liked sex. Without really knowing about their relationship or understanding his obsession, the story just becomes 531 pages of the kvetching of a self-centered jerk and the spoiled, immature brat he apparently loves.

Although the writing is exceptional, the characters deep and hugely colourful, this I’m afraid was a bit of a dirge. I can hang on, 100 years solitude, Love in a time of cholera etc etc, but this was soo indulgent. My husband, an Irishman, would say ‘Jaysus, she must have been some ride!?’.....Quite?!

Orhan Pamuk,The Museum of InnocenceIt is both easy and difficult to talk about this intriguing novel by the recent Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature - a prize of course awarded for lifetime achievement rather than for a particular book. The easy part is to tell the plot, which usually in my experience takes up at least half of a review. The difficult part is to convey the quality of one's reading experience. So, to the plot, briefly:Kemal, who tells the story - later we discover his story is ghost-written by a friend - is a wealthy businessman who falls in love with a poor shopgirl, one who has recently come third in a beauty contest. Unfortunately, he is engaged to an aristocratic girl to whom marriage for familial and business reasons would be more suitable. So far, so trite, but this is not Jane Austen all over again; this is romance, writ large to the nth degree. For Kemal is an obsessive; he not only cannot detach himself from Füsan the shopgirl, but can think of nothing else. All through the period of his engagement and, later, his marriage to Sibel, Kemal collects memorabilia associated with his beloved. This collection of sacred relics begins with a lost ear-ring and ends with a museum. What is remarkable about this everyday story of an infatuated lover is the revelation of an interior world, where recalled scenes and images are as life-sustaining as the memorabilia he treasures. Cigarette butts with Füsan's lipstick on and stolen kitchen equipment are but two of the thousands of his objets d'art. Each item brings back a time and place where he loved and suffered in the past. He polishes them or kisses them in his mother's apartment where he sets up his shrine. His fling with Füsan took but a short time, but it remains with him for life. Of course, he occasionally asks himself what good this `love' does him or anyone else. The answer is not a scrap - the reverse in fact. But he can't help himself; the drug will never leave his system, and if it did do so by a miracle, the reader feels the poor man would not survive.The claustrophobic setting is Istanbul in the 1970s and beyond. The streets are narrow and crowded and the heat suffocating. Kemal names every street along which he has passed, dreaming of the beloved or remembering his later suffering. He presents the reader with a map, highlighting important features, and, to complete his encyclopaedia of folly he appends to a 700+ page novel a paginated index of all the characters mentioned.What I loved most about this Proustian novel was the privileged view I was given of another consciousness, a madman one might say, a self-destructive obsessive, one who sacrifices everything for a dream, a no doubt selfish illusion about a fairly unexceptional girl. Except that we are made to realise that nobody is unexceptional, that the other characters whom Kemal damages are alive and immortalised in the book, just as his treasures are enshrined in his museum. We feel sympathy for them, even those who are hostile to him.

I used this novel to analyze Pamuk's "modest manifesto," proposed in relation to the creation of a building called after the book's title The Museum of Innocence, his belief that a museum should have the capacity to reveal the humanity of the individual, how the museum lives up to this and how this statement relates to his work as a novelist (reviewed in academia.)

So its a new setting to me - Istanbul is not a literary destination I have often visited. I loved this book - I loved the visceral depiction of love and of Turkey. It is long but the central obsession keeps it moving. When it drags, I felt that the writer wanted the tediousness of obsession to drag. Its not a sentimental view of love, but a tragic view of destructive, obsessive love that no one benefits from. I really loved this book and got lost in its pages.

I loved this book, but it left me feeling awfully desolate after reading it. Need to visit the actual museum at some point.