FICTION
‘Museum of Innocence’ an exploration of obsession
The Museum of Innocence By Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely Knopf 536 pages, $28.95
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk turns anthropologist of experience in his new work, “The Museum of Innocence.” He does this by encapsulating the world’s beauty, childhood and happiness with a master writer’s control of an obsessive personality.
“The Museum of Innocence” takes place in Pamuk’s beloved Istanbul, a city both decadent in Western excesses and redolent with Byzantine charm. The story is a “stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and of the mysterious allure of collecting” in Istanbul of the early ’70s until the present.
Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, after the broad success of his novel, “My Name Is Red,” an existentialist tale of the Ottoman Empire, which had earlier received the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
In this new work, creating a memorable human architecture of relationships and GPS of Istanbul is Pamuk’s remarkable feat. He has preserved what seems to be every aspect of upper- class and lower-class Istanbul society — where they went and what they did — in amber, the way that James Joyce insinuated early 20th century Dublin’s street map into our minds in “Ulysses.”
The character who anthropologizes his own life is Kemal Basmaci, a Westernized young man from a wealthy family. He is betrothed to Sibel, beautiful daughter of his parents’ friends.
On Monday, May 26, 1975 — note the Proustian accuracy — a long-lost cousin of Kemal, a poor shop girl named Fusun Hanim, who works at the Sanzelize Boutique, enters the story from the other side of town. “She resembled me. That same sort of hair that grew curly and dark in childhood only to straighten as I grew older,” Kemal says.
At the Merhamet (meaning mercy) Apartments owned by his parents, Kemal and Fusun violate “the code of virginity,” as Kemal puts it. His betrothed, Sibel, knows something is going on. She characterizes Kemal’s “illness” as lovesickness for Fusun. She tries to get him out of his funk, as much for her own future as his.
However, after more than a reasonable time, she breaks off her engagement with Kemal. She does this with a heavy heart, because it means she does not have a marriageable future in Istanbul, in a society where, if it is known that the engaged couple have slept together before marriage — as they have — the woman is damaged goods.
Kemal, at age 30, feels tainted because he has despoiled his fiance, and later, his cousin Fusun, who is 18. He senses “secret spiritual wounds,” “fissures in my soul,” as he puts it.
“Sorrow consumes me,” he relates, understanding that God will not go easy on him. His guilt, however, does not deter him in his pursuit of his cousin for the rest of his life.
Fusun, for her part, “disappears” after hearing of Kemal’s engagement, marries and reappears.
Kemal obsessively searches for traces of the lost bliss (they made love 43 times) between himself and Fusun, what he called “the happiest moment of my life.” He spends inordinate time writing in his diary and, years later, displaying in his museum of their life together, artifacts of his lost love life. He notes innumerable items in his collection.
As time goes by, he locates Fusun and begins visits to her home, ostensibly as a doting relative. He longs to be with her, even if it means intruding upon the family unit of her mother, father and husband for supper in their small apartment over an eight-year period, 1,593 times, he tells us. Think about the awkwardness of a “well-meaning idiot millionaire” cousin, as Kemal describes himself, becoming part of the scenery.
Kemal pulls off the visits on the premise that he is considering backing a film directed by Fusun’s husband, Ferudin, and starring her, that will be a great hit in Turkey. Kemal reflects, “I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.” Kemal is smitten with Fusun’s every look and mood. Fusun’s disdain for him feeds his obsessive addiction.
Readers succumb to the sincerity of Kemal, and his transitory happiness as a fifth wheel, although the repetitions of Turkish names that are hard to remember take their toll. However, the point of good writing is that it can bring to life experiences of otherwise sane people who, under the rapture of lust, or what they take for love do crazy things. It’s what used to sell newspapers.
At one point, Kemal is woozily drunk, trying to cope with the loss of intimacy with his cousin, while the world of Istanbul is threatening anarchy. He notes, “Outside in the streets of Istanbul, communists and nationalists were gunning each other down, robbing banks, throwing bombs, and spraying coffeehouses with bullets, but we had occasion, and license, to forget the entire world, all because of my mysterious ailment.”
As readers, we are fascinated by the activities of those willing—in the writer’s imagination — to break boundaries we try not to trespass. This is part of the allure of good fiction as well as our deeper understanding of humanity and its foibles. One may have strong views about the characters and what they do, but they aren’t our characters, susceptible to our direction. They belong to Pamuk. It is as if the characters in the story can almost operate independently of their creator, or at least they give this appearance, they are so real.
That is part of the illusion of fiction — and Pamuk is a master illusionist.
By calling the novel “The Museum of Innocence,” Pamuk draws the reader into the game. “The Museum” is a compilation of humanity’s possessions, things that bring us together, that counterpoint Kemal’s loneliness and, at the last, his happiness such as it is. Without baring the ending, Kemal meets novelist Orhan Pamuk and asks him to write a novel about his love, an obsession with a semi-sweet ending.
Pamuk does so, and “The Museum of Innocence” is it. In it, Istanbul is pinned like a butterfly, a city with an ambergris quality, a fixative that combines Muslim prescriptivism and new world sin that is at the understanding heart of “The Museum of Innocence.”
Pamuk, who has taught at Columbia University and Bard College, is translated by Maureen Freely, an American novelist who lives and lectures in Britain. This is not her first Pamuk translation, and it is so well-done that the hard work making it seem effortlessly achieved is hidden.
Michael D. Langan is a frequent News reviewer of Nobel laureate fiction.
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