The Museum of Innocence [Paperback]

This is my 3rd Pamuk book and it leaves me overwhelmed. It is astonishing in revealing the tiny details that make up our lives, overwhelming in it's description of that emotion that many of us will recognise. I have never been to Istanbul but I think I have now, I think I understand why someone would be crazy enough to be obsessed by a love for his entire life, to collect every object related to that love, to wonder if it's possible for any of us to lead happy lives, or whether we would even recognise it when happiness had arrived, or that we had let it slip us by? That is the question 30 year old Kemal o asks himself as the novel starts. I started reading this on xmas day and couldn't stop until i finished it today.

Like in many books by Orhan Pamuk, the real shining star of this novel is Istanbul. The story charts the development of the city's social mores and customs from an Eastern-dominated Conservatism to a much more Western system of values and conceits. Thus such concepts as pre-marital sex, female independence and free-market capitalism are among the major themes of the novel.

It's a great shame, then, that the actual plot of the book falls far short of being the magnum-opus of love and life that the author is attempting.

Kemal, the novel's protagonist, spends the majority of his life in love with Fusun; a `beautiful shop girl' and distant relation. In an attempt to record and preserve their relationship, he begins to hoard inanimate objects which, in one way or another, are relevant to his and Fusun's story - this collection being the titular `Museum of Innocence'.

Pamuk's handling of this rather twee idea is charming at first, but soon becomes so repetitive that the theme of collecting almost descends into farce. Kemal attributes the same emotional weight and significance to every item of Fusun's that he steals. While it is understandable that Kemal would get upset, even distraught, as he contemplates his absent lover's most prized items of jewellery, seeing him cry over her half-eaten food and cigarette stubs in the same way is just taking the concept too far.

In fact, much of the novel's failings come from Pamuk over-reaching himself. Many of his metaphors are extended beyond the point at which they're enlightening (such as an overly long and gratuitous description of how love can be a real, physical pain), and his characters just aren't as complex as the narrator would have us believe. Fusun, the object of love in the novel, comes across as a stroppy and juvenile woman, stuck in a perpetual adolescence. Similarly, Kemal's optimism and chirpy out-look is at odds with his supposed heart-ache and despair.

The first half of the novel is the best - but in a book of this length, that leaves a lot to be desired in the overly repetitive and ambling second half.

Unfortunately, `The Museum of Innocence' fails at as many things as it succeeds. A beautiful and fascinating social history of Istanbul is given somewhat of a back-seat to a bland and uninspiring love story. Nothing ever seems at stake in this novel - there is no real sense of risk. The reasons why Fusun and Kemal don't just get-it-together are largely nonsensical, given the supposed level of passion involved.

The predictable ending of the book is somewhat more engaging that the preceding three or four hundred pages, but again the author is attempting too much. The reasoning behind Fusun's final act isn't explored at all, and the novel finishes with that awful modern-cliché of inter-textual revelation a-la `Atonement'. I was left disappointed, and feeling that this novel could have been so much more, if only Pamuk had held back with certain aspects, and pushed forward with others.

Orhan Pamuk,
The Museum of Innocence

It 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.