Orhan Pamuk - "The Museum of Innocence"
As most aspiring authors do, I take note every year of who the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature is. For example, I can tell you Peruvian author Mario Vargos Llosa was selected in 2010. What I don’t typically do, however, is read one of the selected writer’s works.
But when the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was tapped for the prize in 2006, I bought and read his then most recent Snow because I was interested in the author’s attempt at documenting the recent transformation of Turkish society from secular to rabidly religious. It was Pamuk’s attempt to make sense of what was going on in his homeland much like Freedom is Jonathan Franzen’s attempt at making sense of America post 9/11. Now, being an American, I get most the “types” depicted in Freedom – i.e, the disillusioned liberal, the conservative son, the ambitious minority woman – whereas I did not in Snow because I’m not Turkish. You could say this is evidence of Pamuk’s failure as an author but I disagree. Some things peculiar about our societies are not so much lost in translation as much as they cannot be conveyed.
Still, I liked where Pamuk was coming from even if in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he “stole” my theory that authors eventually pick up a pen or laptop in order to write the book they want to read. I chalked it up to an example of de Kooning’s theory of harpsichords (see my Someone Still Likes You Boris Yeltsin CD review elsewhere in Hellbomb for what that means) and took solace that I shared an original idea with a Nobel Prize winner. And looked for another book of his to read.
I bought several used books – e.g., My Name Is Red and The Black Book - but when The Museum of Innocence was published in English I was piqued enough by the Proustian possibilities to use a 40% off Borders coupon to buy a copy.
And Proustian it is. If you found The Captive captivating, then The The Museum of Innocence is for you. Pamuk uses a story of stolen virginity to depict a unique love story and capture more effectively the changes to Turkish society in the 1970s. Coups and changing mores serve as the backdrop for an accounting of the relationship between of Kemal Bey, an upperclass businessman and eventual filmmaker, and Füsun, his beautiful, poorer, shopgirl cousin: a story that is either one extreme cuckoldry or unadulterated romance. What you think will say a lot about yourself.
Like Proust, Pamuk is interested in the power of inanimate objects to absorb and contain the past so that they become virtual time machines. For Kemal Bey, china dogs and cigarette butts and misplaced earrings serve as his madeleines and his way of holding onto Füsun.
Like reading Proust you find yourself sometimes bogged down by Pamuk’s prose and begin despairing that plot will ever regain traction only to find yourself racing suddenly, anxious to find out what is going to happen to our narrator, who – it turns out – happens to Orhan Pamuk himself! As he relates Kemal Bey’s visits to thousands of museums devoted to not only authors and others – did you know there was an Ava Gardner Museum? - we find out how Kemal finally decided take the numerous mementoes of his love - or obsession and downfall according to some of the novel’s indexed secondary characters – and erect The Museum of Innocence in Istanbul to Füsun’s memory. The final forty pages are the best pages of the book and made this sometimes difficult read worthwhile.
