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    The Museum of Innocence: A Novel
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    The Museum of Innocence: A Novel
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    The Museum of Innocence: A Novel
    Audiobook20 hours

    The Museum of Innocence: A Novel

    Written by Orhan Pamuk

    Narrated by John Lee

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    "It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it." So begins the new novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize, from the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name Is Red. It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie-a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, restaurant rituals, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay-until finally he breaks off his engagement to Sibel. But his resolve comes too late.

    For eight years Kemal will find excuses to visit another Istanbul, that of the impoverished backstreets where Füsun, her heart now hardened, lives with her parents, and where Kemal discovers the consolations of middle-class life at a dinner table in front of the television. His obsessive love will also take him to the demimonde of Istanbul film circles (where he promises to make Füsun a star), a scene of seedy bars, run-down cheap hotels, and small men with big dreams doomed to bitter failure. In his feckless pursuit, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress and his afflicted heart's reactions: anger and impatience, remorse and humiliation, deluded hopes of recovery, and daydreams that transform Istanbul into a cityscape of signs and specters of his beloved, from whom now he can extract only meaningful glances and stolen kisses in cars, movie houses, and shadowy corners of parks. A last change to realize his dream will come to an awful end before Kemal discovers that all he finally can possess, certainly and eternally, is the museum he has created of his collection, this map of a society's manners and mores, and of one man's broken heart.

    A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and of the mysterious allure of collecting, The Museum of Innocence also plumbs the depths of an Istanbul half Western and half traditional-its emergent modernity, its vast cultural history. This is Orhan Pamuk's greatest achievement.

    From the Hardcover edition.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 20, 2009
    ISBN9780739369272
    Unavailable
    The Museum of Innocence: A Novel
    Author

    Orhan Pamuk

    Orhan Pamuk is the author of such novels as The New Life, The Black Book, My Name Is Red and The White Castle. He has won numerous international awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. He lives with his wife and daughter in Istanbul.

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    Reviews for The Museum of Innocence

    3.5/5

    363 ratings30 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Masterpiece. Pamuk's attempt at Proust is epic and beautiful, if imperfect. A labyrinthine history of mid-late 20th century Istambul as it was lived, in the form of a love story. This book gets right to the limits of time, memory, and the ambivalence of feeling. Worth it for the index of names.
    • 1/5
      If it weren't for my apparent inability to leave a book unfinished, I'd have abandoned this a quarter of the way through. Long book? No problem. Long book with no plot? Potentially very problematic. In this case, I don't think the author managed to redeem the lack of plot with any other features.
    • 3/5
      In places the Pamuk's writing is excellent; you get a real sense of the obsessive and emotional lead character, Kemal, and his frustrated love for Fusun. But, paradoxically, it is the efforts the author takes to convey that obsession that let this novel down. Details of Kemal's bizarre behaviour drag on for page after page, chapter after chapter; and though it is well observed, it is dull. Ultimately, the plot is simply not interesting enough for this novel to warrant the higher rating the writing deserves.
    • 4/5
      A book which speaks of the importance of objects in our lives. It is as if each object has its own life or that it drains the very life of people around them and becomes a part of them. This is why museums amaze us, for they bring to our days the immortality of their long gone owners.Museum guide interventions during the story are quite sudden and strange but maintain an informative and entertaining aspect.
    • 5/5
      This is a book about the quotidian in love and in time. By focusing on everyday objects, Pamuk inverts the usual treatments of Romantic love. Those treatments assume that the dynamic of love is as a transcendental escape from the quotidian. In Pamuk's story, on the contrary, the dynamic of Romantic love *is* the everyday. The escape is consequently displaced from the external world and into the psyche of male narrator, who, in recognizing the everyday aspect of love must also flee from it - in particular as his feelings relate to their object (in a literal sense), his beloved, who he can never perceive as a thinking being like himself. It is for this reason that Kemal is incapable of recognizing Fusun's inner-life and desires. This conceptual and narrative dynamic is used by Pamuk to comment on male/female sexual repression in Turkey and on the nature of time itself, which can stretch or shrink as the narrator perceives it. Politics, rightly, only impact on the fringes.
    • 5/5
      Writing about Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada, Orhan Pamuk said that "Nabokov reminds us that our memories allow us to carry our childhood with us, and with it the golden age we thought we had left behind." This is not that dissimilar from the memories of the narrator of Orhan Pamuk's scintillating novel The Museum of Innocence. It is with a memory of love, obsessive and passionate, inflamed by Eros that Kemal, the narrator of the story, begins his tale.It is a tale that reminded me of Socrates discussion of the myth of the chariot in The Phaedrus. The charioteer is filled with warmth and desire as he gazes into the eyes of the one he loves. Ultimately he is torn by a sort of divine madness. In the novel Kemal tells how "I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge men into a deep dark, lifelong loneliness for which there is no cure." (pp 52-3)Fairly soon into the story Kemal throws over the perfection of his fiance, Sibel, whose "perfect placement of every pearl" cannot compete with the hold that Eros has over him in his overwhelming passion of the young girl Fusun.Now if this is all there was to this story the novel would be short, semi-sweet, and in spite of the beautiful prose of the author not worthy of much further comment. But, as you may suspect there is more to this novel than this simple, albeit passionate, tale of a Turkish love triangle. No, the Museum of Innocence plumbs the depths of illusion. There is the illusion of love, the illusion of time, and ultimately the illusion of life.The malleability of time is evidence of what the narrator calls "the illusion that is time." (p 282) It is compared to the difference between the personal life we each live within and the "official" time that we share with others. Kemal's obsessive love controlled his personal time even as the clock on the wall in Fusun's home ticked off the "time". The reader experiences a similar sensation when the regularity of short chapters of the novel is suddenly broken by chapter 24, "The Engagement Party", which is almost five times longer than the average length of those preceding. You must discover for yourself what intimacies of plot detail warrant a slowing of the flow of the story. Kemal's obsessive love is also illusory and leads him through memories of a life that is just as much illusion as he is blinded to the reality of the individuals who people his world.Ultimately the narrative succeeds in communicating the complexity of what Kemal calls "the strange and mysterious spirit" of his days spent pursuing the illusion of life through obsessive love. The suspense keeps building as the novel progresses to the point where you begin to feel like those actors on the stage who wait for the next direction. The novel becomes a collection of episodes in the life of a collector - someone whose passions make for exceptional reading.
    • 5/5
      Thanks Nur-Kr for your review, that makes a lot of sense. Whilst reading this I did get a "Lost in Translation" feeling. Firstly, it did seem as though Pamuk is making a criticism of the cutural values of westernised, would be sophisiticated Turks, and suggesting that the pull to older cultural stereotypes (the obssession with virginity, seeing women only as objects of desire, an obsession with symbols not with substance) is far from broken. Secondly, there did seem to be a tie to the structure of melodramatic Turkish movies, which feature heavily. Thirdly, the civil disorder leading to the 1980 coup all happens in the background, and when it is mentioned it is only as a mild inconvenience - there are curfews to be avoided, roads that cant be crossed - which is surely a condemnation of the passivity with which sophisticated elites, caught up with their own trivial obsessions, greeted these events. Fourthly the casualness with which tragedy is reported (people are crushed by runaway trucks, characters die and are removed from the narrative with scarcely a word of farewell) again shows the insularity and fecklessness of people like KemalSo for me, Kemal's obsession with Fusun, and before that his obsession with nightclubbing and similar frivolities at the expense of his business, came across as a methaphor for and condemnation of the shallowness of a whole generation - one of which he is a part, for surely there are traces of Pamuk's ownexperience here. He is well known as a walker of Istanbul, and Kemal is constantly prowling the less fashionable neighbourhoodsOf course I am probably wrong; I don't know enough about Turkish history or culture to know if there's any validity to this argument. But that's how it read to meBecause as a simple love story, or simple obsession with love story, it doesn't really work. As others have mentioned, the detail is really too obsessive, and too long winded and Pamuk is too good a writer not to recognise this. No narrative needs Kemal visiting Fusun's family for dinner every night for 8 years, stealing the occasional glance and many objects from her house, unless the point is to show Kemal's (and by extension Kemal's class) blindness to what is going on around him. Kemal fritters his life away on obsessions, symbols, and his pointless "museum". But as far as he is concerned, he's had "a happy life". In fact it is Kemal, ultimately, who is The Innocent. And the Museum in question refers to the Innocence and shallowness of a whole generation and a whole way of life, which Pamuk has captured.As such I think this is a brilliant literary achievement; not always easy to read, and at times almost dull. But something that makes you think, rare these days
    • 2/5
      Not overly enamoured of this book. Found the central character irritating and felt like I was supposed to empathise with him, when I just wanted to slap him. Nothing wrong with the writing (very good in places, especially for example the end of the affair) but I just didn't get it.
    • 3/5
      I did not enjoy this book a great deal. I did read the whole thing, and I am unsure why. For long stretches, I simply detested the narrator and wondered why the same pattern of obsessive, stupid behavior justified my continued attention.In the end, I believe I continued reading because I felt certain (and judicious foreshadowing implied) that the narrator would suffer in the end, and I admit that I really wanted him to suffer, and I wanted to see it. This made me feel dirty inside.The narrator is a conceited, self-absorbed, foolish individual. He never grows out of adolescence. To be in his presence is misery, and in fact, most of his friends leave him behind.The narrator never sees his "beloved" as a person. He never recognizes that his passion for Fusun is mere narcissism, that he loves "himself loving her," not her for herself. In the end, everyone and everything is a means to an end (self-flattery) and his "beloved" Fusun is simply the most important means at his disposal.Pamuk executed an amazing character study of a most miserable character. But as with any art form, the experience of consuming a very "technical" performance -- is not always a pleasant experience.This book would best suit a reader who wants to read the complete works of Pamuk, or else a literature students who want to use this work for the purposes of writing a literary critical piece. For an introduction to Pamuk's writing, try almost anything else.
    • 4/5
      If you read this, read it right to the end. And then visit the Museum of Innocence.
    • 5/5
      This book does a wonderful job of dissecting the male ego and accompanying, gender-specific, obsessive tendencies. As you might expect, many of the books characters are women, all of whom are lovingly wrought and all of whom are in some way repressed or destroyed by Turkish societal norms. For this reason, it can be difficult to read, although the beautiful prose and the clever structure mitigate the harshness of the storyline. I put it right up with Lolita, which is a book that I love.
    • 5/5
      I will never walk through a museum so blithely dismissing some of the seemingly trivial collections again! Another Orhan Pamuk work of genius. In this novel the reader works through the "Museum of Innocence" created by the narrator and protagonist, Kemal Bey. Is he obsessive? Passionate? Ludicrous? Pathetic? Noble? That is for each reader to decide. The major themes of this story about love include: Passion, obsession, loss, family, social expectations in Istanbul in the 1970s, cultural change and its impact in Istanbul, women's issues in Istanbul, and about how one can savor one's life through the minutiae all around us at all times. What an amazing writer!
    • 4/5
      Excellent and enjoyable book (despite 500+ pages) - though not a great stylist (as conyeyed in the English translation), I was held by the sense of lasting obsession that the narrator conveyed. If only I could experience and share the narrator's knowledge of "the one". The book's ending was neat, too. Thanks!
    • 3/5
      Five hundred pages of long-face about a pair of star-crossed lovers.They're cousins. Only not really. And it's set in Istanbul in 1975, with excursions to the present.I know more about Istanbul in 1835 than 1975, though the latter is within my own lifespan. (Okay, okay, WELL within my own lifespan.) I like Turkish history because it's so improbable and so full of moments when they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory! I like alternate history so I love those moments where things could have gone either way...rich fodder for imaginings.I thought this book, about the life lived by a wealthy man who seduces his poor, estranged teenaged cousin in his mother's extra apartment would fill in a gap for me.Ew.The obsessiveness with which this poor schmoe turns his very real guilt over his cousin's blighted life into a passion for collecting the minutuae and ephemera of that life is, well, distasteful. It's just amazing to me to imagine that kind of passionate hold a person has over another, and for such a negative reason.The cousin dies, of course, because no bad girl can live, right? And the man withers and wastes away, insisting to the author (who appears as himself, called "Orhan Bey," in what I can only describe as a grandstandy little bit of Maguffinry) that he's led a happy life, tell the story of the happy life, as he's about to die at, what, sixty? Codswallop! He's led a miserable half-life, and quite appropriate too, and frankly the only thing that keeps this from being a 50s Ann Bannon lesbian romance is the gender of the protagonist and the Nobel Prize for Literature that Orhan Bey has won.Read at your own risk.
    • 2/5
      This story of obsessional love was obsessively written. In spite of the wonderfully drawn characters (none of them likable) and an interesting and challenging story, I can't give the book more than two stars because so many pages of the book I felt like I was pushing my way past words, lots of words, too many words. The author's innovative final chapter was brief and to the point, wrapping up the loose ends of the story nicely.
    • 4/5
      It is 1975, a perfect spring in Instanbul. Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, Daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Fusun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relative. a story of the nature of romantic obsession. A bit too long.
    • 4/5
      A story of obsessive love. I admire Pamuk's dedication to a concept (the concept of obsessive love), and Pamuk captures the concept very well with a lot of detail and repetition. However, the overwhelming nature of the obsession becomes tedious over time.
    • 2/5
      This same story could have been told in half the length. Reading about a guy who created his own misery moon over one of the women he hurt and whine for almost 300 pages was enough for me. I can't do it anymore. I like the bones of the story and it could have been really wonderful, but it's incredibly verbose and the pages drag as a result. Also, inserting yourself as a character in your book is tacky.
    • 5/5
      The Museum of Innocence is a wonderful book that needs some serious cutting. I listened to the audio version. The book works well in that form because there's plenty of repetition. If something distracts the listener, he or she can count on the idea that was missed being repeated at least a few times. But that said, the book is fascinating in countless ways.The notes from the publisher call it, “...a stirring exploration of the nature of romance.” A line like that makes me wonder if the publicist read the book. This would be better – “...a stirring condemnation of a self-centered, self declared romanticist.” It was clear Orhan Pamuk was condemning someone or something, but tricky to figure out who or what. It could simply be the main character, Kemal. But it could also be Kemal's wealthy family, since his father had a similar affair and his mother looked the other way both times. Or it could be Turkish culture in general. Pamuk often mentions the difference between westernized culture and traditional culture in Turkey. The Wikipedia entry on the book centers on this, but I find the lover's misogyny to be the most interesting aspect and something that can be found in other cultures. Pamuk's writing is so detailed, and carefully constructed, he was probably thinking of all these aspects.Kemal claims a great love for Fusun, but he seems to be in love with the way she moves her wrist or the way she walks, never with her ideas or her goals or her opinions. Appropriately, the book opens with a sex act which is in one of the least intimate positions possible. Kemal declares the day this happened as the happiest moment of his life. He is consumed with the idea of a woman as a work of art rather than a living person and from that focus comes the idea of preserving her in a museum.As I said, I think the book is too repetitious, but what I loved about it greatly outweighs my opinion on that one aspect.Steve Lindahl – author of Motherless Soul and White Horse Regressions
    • 4/5
      This book starts well - the first 50 pages are wonderful to read. Then not much happens for the next 600 pages, but, surprisingly, it remains a good read. The author writes in clear simple sentences that just flow across the pages, making up for the lack of plot development. I think for a western reader, the picture painted of live in Istanbul provides a background that also helps keep the reader engaged.While this may not be to the top read of the year, I am certainly interested in reading more of this author.Read as ebook Nov 2015.
    • 4/5
      Subtle and calm and very humane. Small in detail and large in idea - something I always find to be a very good combination. I am not sure about the English translation, though, it sounds very... stringy at times, although it was made by Pamuk's favourite translator. The actual Museum of Innocence in Istanbul is not only a wonderful place on itself, but also an essential extension of the work, and a must see. I loved it.
    • 2/5
      The two stars are for the historical background and the writing, but otherwise I thought this book was poor. Plotting was very one dimensional, focusing on the relationship between Foosan and Kemal Bey, which after 200 pages or so gets very tiring. Odd that an author would put himself in the plot, as himself.
    • 2/5
      Although I have been a big fan of Pamuk's since I acquired The New Life in an English Department holiday book exchange back in 1997, I slogged through his latest novel. It is long (over 500 pages) and it feels excruciatingly, even tediously, long. However, even though I didn't much enjoy reading this novel, I know I will think about it more than a lot of books I've read. The Museum of Innocence is the very detailed account of a man named Kemal's (wealthy scion of the Istanbul haute-bourgeoisie) obsessive love for his much younger, distant cousin Fusun. That's the overt story. The novel brings to my mind, for very different reasons Nabokov's Lolita, Carsen Mcculler's Ballad of the Sad Cafe and the novels of Milan Kundera. Back when I read Nabokov's Lolita, I wasn't able to overcome my disgust and anger over HH's rape of Lolita the child, no matter how cognizant I was of the universally-proclaimed literary merit of the work and the fact that the novel is really about language and many things other than its ostensible story. In a similar, although less extreme, fashion, Pamuk's novel is about many things other than its "story" of one man's oppressive devotion to his love object. These other subjects include tradition & modernity with their uneasy commingling in contemporary Turkey; time, timelessness & nostalgia; historical event versus the fluidity of experience (emotional, psychological, sensual); & time as space (home, country, world, museum) & vice versa. Pamuk writes "Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space." As in many of Pamuk's novels, current political, economic & social events run in the background & occasionally burst into the foreground of the "love" story: a news reel between programs on the TV, the curfews that interrupt Kemal's evenings with Fusun & her parents, the military coup that causes Kemal and his chauffeur to be stopped and questioned regarding a quince grater (potential weapon?) that Kemal has pilfered from Fusun's home to add to his collection of objects related to & touched by his beloved. More than anything, Pamuk, as in his memoir Istanbul, writes about a place and that place is Turkey and, even more specifically, Istanbul & its environs (the Bosphorus is central). The loved one is both the city and the woman; Kemal's obsession and anguish is that of a man who cherishes the old yalis, the popular neighborhoods and the trashy censored films churned out by the Turkish film industry while he remains tied to the the upper middle-class, Western-educated social & economic elite with their posh parties at the Hilton Hotel and all-night outings to fashionable bars, nightclubs & restaurants. Everyone (at least all the men) of every social class drinks glass after glass of the national liquor, raki, even though the rich switch to black market whiskey and champagne for their tony affairs. As several other reviewers have mentioned, the novel is most readable in its final 100 pages, when events speed up and reach their mostly inevitable conclusion. Star rating: somewhere between "OK" and "I liked it."
    • 2/5
      since I am about to travel to Istanbul, I wanted to really like this book and learn about the culture, but I only found an obsessed man who is in love with his distant cousins and waits 8 years until he can be together with her (again). The start was still very interesting to me but when his waiting started, I caught myself flipping 50 pages ahead not missing the beat of the story, so I actually skipped now in 100 page rhythm and speed read through the rest. for sure I know I won't visit the museum in Istanbul.
    • 1/5
      A pity the Nobel prize of literature has become all but fiction.... i.e. that the assignation is politicized and has little to do with writing and much to do with representation. Continent, race, religion, gender, and language have more to do with who the next winner will be than his/her qualities as a writer. Orhan Pamuk is not of Nobel-size, not as far as writing goes anyway. (Today I will say that the Man Booker Prize is much more reliable if you search an evaluating body to sift your next reading project through.)This book is a verbally sluggish slowmotion through a man`s selfishness, feticism and obsession; A heavy project for anyone. When done in a dull and non-inventiv, repetitive and boring language it is insufferable. Add an unbelieveable storyline/ main character (none is that stupid that long) and you get the gist of it.The one star is for me - for trying....
    • 2/5
      um... I enjoyed the first half, wondering how things would turn out with Kemal and Sibel and Fusum. But... the second half, while well described was for me mawkish and annoying. That Kemal would spend (spoiler alert) nine years pining after Fusum in her own house! Reading what he wanted into looks and brushes of the hand. I wanted to shout GET REAL all the time. And as for the "shock finale" of Fusum, I'm afraid I sniggered. This was billed as a paean to love, but the only love Kemal had was always for himself and I couldn't care less about him.
    • 1/5
      If it weren't for my apparent inability to leave a book unfinished, I'd have abandoned this a quarter of the way through. Long book? No problem. Long book with no plot? Potentially very problematic. In this case, I don't think the author managed to redeem the lack of plot with any other features.
    • 4/5
      This is the second time I have to write this review. I tried to upload it first time but I don't know what happened and I lost whatever I had written. So I will try to rewrite whatever I remember from the first review. I first came to know about this book from a youtube video in which I heard one news anchor mentioning it. I forgot the reason why he was mentioning it but anyhow I bought it online from Barnes and Noble. When I started reading it, I didn't like it in the beginning and this feeling remained till the end though to much lesser extent. I will explain in detail what I liked and didn’t like about this book but first I would like to comment on what is unique about this book. And that is, the writer “Orhan Pamuk” (who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in literature), went on to create a museum, a real museum (in Turkey) based on the characters and objects mentioned in the novel. I believe that whoever is reading this book and at the same time visiting the museum will have a deeper impact and have deeper understanding of how some object in our lives have an emotional memory attached to them. I mean a cup present on the shelf is just a cup until you know why it is there, what story is attached to it and how it is connected to the person who is seeing it as a museum piece. They must have felt the presence of Kemal, Fusun, Sibel and everyone else mentioned in the book among the objects placed in the museum. As the story is fictional and everything mentioned in the novel is a fictional account, but when you visit the museum and have the feeling of seeing and experiencing the fictional characters and account as real, that is uniqueness I am talking about. I am not sure it the first novel in that category but at least this idea was new to me. And I believe that is whole idea of literature i.e. to entertain and stimulate at the same time and I think this book serves this purpose very well. Now I will explain what I didn’t like in the book: first as I started reading the book I thought of it as one of those novels in which a rich spoiled guy falls in love with a poor nice girl (or vice versa) and everyone else get together to conspire against them so that they can’t be together only because they are rich or poor. I mean these kinds of stories are so common in the part of world to which I belong that whenever I read a book or watch a movie or television show about it I get very nauseated. But I would give credit to the author that he somehow kept on to attract my attention so that I was able to finish it. Second, there is not much going on in the book. This is story of two persons and two or three people surrounding them. And therefore reading more than five hundred pages become kind of difficult because everything start to seem as repetitious. Third reason is that (and I understand it is my own shortcoming) I would have liked to read this book in its original language. It is not that the translation is poor but it is my belief that you can’t enjoy the taste of sentence or a word until you understand what depth of meaning it conveys and to understand that depth we have to know the original language in which that word or sentence was said or written.Now the things that I liked about the book: first thing is the idea of establishing a real museum and its role in stimulating the reader. Second I came to know a lot about Turkish culture and very little about Turkish history. I am not going to delve into the discussion of politics and culture, suffice is to say that it is not very much different from the rest of Muslim world, at least to the extent described in the book. Third I read many people describing this novel as one of their reasons to travel Turkey. My reason for traveling to Turkey wouldn’t be this book but I will definitely go to the “Museum of Innocence” in order to see what impact it leaves on me. And then perhaps I will update my review. (I am not sure if I could use my book as a ticket for admittance into the museum, though the novel claims that I can).
    • 2/5
      Okay, I'm going to tell it as it is. Nobel-winning writer aside, this book is insufferable. I frankly don't understand the hype, the glowing reviews, attention from the New Yorker - this book is bad. Really bad.The story revolves around a privileged man in Istanbul who has a short affair with a shopgirl and proceeds to become completely obsessed with her. So obsessed is he that after the girl marries someone else, he ends up sitting at their dinner table for the next 8 years.When Kemal is not hopping around the latest upper-class Istanbul hotspots, he's becoming an expert kleptomaniac, pocketing everything around Füsun's house. He reports back about his activities with glee - "After having taken all those matchboxes, and Fusun's cigarette butts, and the saltshakers, the coffee cups, the hairpins, and the barrettes - things not difficult to pick up, because people rarely notice them missing - I began to set my sights on things like ashtrays, cups, and slippers…" Several pages later, we find out that "during my eight years of going to the Keskins' for supper, I was able to squirrel away 4,213 of Fusun's cigarette buts. Each one of these had touched her rosy lips and entered her mouth, some even touching her tongue and becoming moist [shock of all shocks!] as I would discover when I put my finger on the filter soon after she had stubbed the cigarette out; the stubs, reddened by her lovely lipstick, bore the unique impress of her lips at some moment whose memory was laden with anguish or bliss…"There are plenty of signs that Kemal's obsession is not well received. Going back to cigarette stubbing, we find out that "sometimes she would stub it out with evident anger, sometimes with impatience. I had seen her stub out a cigarette in anger many times, and this caused me disquiet."This might be an interesting storyline if it wasn't the same old hogwash repeating itself for 560 pages. There are entire chapters of this. Allow me to list out some chapter names for you: "The Melancholy of Autumn" is followed by "Cold and Lonely November Days". A few chapters later, there is a chapter titled "An Indignant and Broken Heart Is of No Use to Anyone." Other reviewers have tried to find beauty in this book by its descriptions of Istanbul in the 1970's. Some have claimed that Pamuk's "museum" is a commemoration of a time and a place in Istanbul and that the book tries to showcase a lost culture. I disagree. Sure there are a few pages scattered here and there about Istanbul, and sure, the writing does shine in a few small segments. But the vast majority of the book is about Fusun's lips, tears, anger, family, dinners, cigarette butts, marriage, saltshakers, eyes, expressions and words. These discourses have only the most tangential relation to anything enlightening about 1970's Istanbul.There is a disconcerting conceit about the author, when he introduces himself as a character - "This is how I came to seek out the esteemed Orhan Pamuk, who has narrated the story in my name and with my approval… I had also heard that he was a man lovingly devoted to his work and who took storytelling seriously." There is a lot more self-advertising in this book, but I won't delve into it. Suffice it to say that I really suffered through this book and would have abandoned it were it not so bad that I spent most of my time thinking about how I would justify such a critical review of such a well-hyped book.
    • 4/5
      The book is about obsession and happiness, solitude and melancholy, and the plot is about two lovers and their melodramatic story full of twists and turns. Yet the plot didn’t seem at the core of the book. The main story was Istanbul, really - its people and their values, interests and their approach to life, depicted and analyzed in minute detail and with great depth. The characters reflect their times (70s and 80s of the last century) and the milieu known to Pamuk – he himself makes an appearance twice- once at the engagement party of the main character at the beginning of the book, and then by the end of it. The main characters: Kamal, a young successful industrialist, and two of his lovers: Sibel and Füsun are very well portrayed with equally minute detail. The problem was that even though I appreciated the masterful portrayal of Kamal, I didn’t like him much. He reflected the times perfectly, and even though he thought of himself as of progressive modern man, above his peers and ahead of his times, he was neither particularly noble, nor in any other way outstanding. His actions were inspired by the societal norms, and for the most part, he failed to illicit my sympathy. Actually, it was quite painful to endure him for such a long time (the book is over 500 pages long), and listen to his little lies and self-deceptions. The two female characters, on the other hand, are also products of their time, but completely different from each other: Sibel, intelligent, progressive and modern, and Füsun, more approaching an ideal of an obedient and beautiful young girl, but deeply troubled by an inability to fulfill her life’s aspirations, with her name probably not accidentally rhyming with the Turkish word for melancholy, hüzün.Even though the writing was very good, the whole didn’t work so well for me. All in all, it felt somewhat artificial, like one of these Turkish movie melodramas Pamuk is writing about thrown against the panorama of the society and the city.