A Nobel Prize winner that is on the top of my list of unread books! Every time i reach for it , i get beaten by its voluminous appeal :) aaah so crunched for time!
Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence (Allen & Unwin, 2009)
Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk‟s latest novel, The Museum of Innocence, is the story of an obsession that marks the life of protagonist Kemal Basmaci. The wealthy thirty-year old, about to get engaged to his long time girlfriend Sibel, meets the young and beautiful Füsun, a poor distant relative, in April 1975 and is instantly besotted by her. The steamy affair which ensues will forever sink Kemal, and us readers with him, into the labyrinth of infatuation that follows the more than 500 pages of the book. Unable to end his relationship with Sibel, who trusted him enough to have sex before their marriage - a taboo which only „European women‟ and „legendary women who were said to wander the streets of Istanbul‟ dared to break (51) - Kemal loses Füsun when she disappears from his life after the engagement party. The desolation and madness which follows is narrated from the vantage point of the future in which the middle-aged Kemal reflects upon his love for Füsun and his desperate attempts to find happiness next to her: „Years later, as I struggled to understand why she was so dear to me, I would try to evoke not just our lovemaking but the room in which we made love, and our surroundings, and ordinary objects‟ (53).
In the apartment where the affair took place, he begins collecting ordinary objects which remind him of her: „Sitting shirtless on the edge of the bed where I had made love to Füsun forty-four times, and surrounded by all those memory-laden things (three of which I display herewith), I spent a happy hour caressing them lovingly‟ (202). Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the reader is transformed into a visitor to the museum envisioning the numerous objects which are displayed for public view - restaurant menus, matchbooks, napkins, teacups, fruit soda bottles, pens, handkerchiefs - and vicariously sharing Kemal‟s delirium. Then, 339 painful days later, he meets Füsun again only to discover that she has married a young struggling film maker whose career Kemal will finance in order to be near her and because her wish is to become a movie actress. For the next eight years, Kemal will dine at her parents‟ home, where she lives with her husband, on average 4 nights a week for a total of 1,593 suppers. Through the narrator/collector‟s fondness for quantifying and cataloguing, not just objects, but also moments and events, we get a sense of the bitter protraction of the love story. During his visits to the Keskin household in Çukurcuma, Kemal will continue his collection by pilfering objects connected to Füsun: saltshakers from the dining table; her hairpins; pits of the olives she has eaten; more than 50 stubs of films seen with her; the china dogs which sit atop the television; her half eaten ice-cream cone; the tombala set used for the eight consecutive New Years Kemal spent at her house. He has even collected 4,213 of her cigarette butts for display at the museum, each with the inscription date of retrieval.
Once Füsun leaves her husband and we, the readers/visitors, whom even the narrator admits must by now be sick and tired of his heartache (180), start to believe there might be a happy ending to this hopeless story, Kemal warns us „a love story that ends happily scarcely deserves more than a few sentences‟ (469). Eventually, Kemal is left with an assortment of objects and after travelling all over the world visiting museums, not the big crowded „ostentatious ones‟, but the „empty museums‟,