Pamuk, Orhan. Museum of Innocence. İletişim Yayınları, Istanbul, 2008. English translation by Maureen Freely, 2009. F; 9/26.

Pamuk is 74 and easily the most celebrated novelist in his Turkish language. He was a Nobel laureate in 2006, is author of lots of novels and other literature, and is active in the creative writing world. He founded a European writers’ group with novelist Jose Saramago whose fairly terrifying novel Blindness I read several years ago and reviewed. Pamuk is also fearlessly outspoken and nearly went to jail for talking about his country’s Armenian and Kurdish genocide. His novels are said to often involve troubled men and their more–troubled love lives, and this one is no exception.

Protagonist Kemal is a wealthy young businessman engaged to attractive socialite Sibel. Kemal meets younger and even more lovely Fusun (the two are distant relatives) in a shop and starts a secret fabulously enthralling love affair with her, one session of which is called “the happiest moment of (his) life”.

(H)appiness that opened a gate ever so slightly, suggesting a paradise few will ever know in this life. Our kisses delivered us beyond the pleasures of flesh and sexual bliss for what we sensed beyond the moment of the springtime afternoon…

…it seemed to me now that I was going to be able to enjoy the same good fortune—partaking of all the pleasures of a happy home life with a beautiful, sensible, well-educated woman, and at the same time enjoying the pleasures of an alluring and wild young girl.

Kemal recalls spending time with her when she was an older child, during which they witnessed a terrible car crash where a woman is killed.

Fusun shows up at Kemal and Sibel’s huge engagement party and among other events dances briefly with someone called Orhan Pamuk. Kemal gets drunk and feels jealous, but he’s far more upset when Fusun disappears and his innocent but duplicitous joy disappears too. His engagement with Sibel ends and he sinks into a period of depression searching for Fusun. He finally makes contact with her but finds she has married a young film writer and they are living with her parents. Then there begins a bizarre and awkward long period of eight years where Kemal spends several evenings a week at Fusun’s family’s home, pining in unrequited love:

…(t)here was something challenging, almost haughty, about the way she looked at me; I was suddenly aware that the change she had undergone over the past two years was far bigger and more dangerous than this little trouble we’d had with some drunken actor—and so were her expectations.

And (also bizarrely to me) Kemal surreptitiously gathers bits and pieces from the home and stores them in the apartment where they had had their affair: “… the old familiar suffering was again upon me, and again I would be returning to the Merhamet Apartments to take the cure.” Everyone, all his former wealthy and happy friends, know what a fool he is being.

As their relationship seems to improve, Kemal gives Fusun driving lessons, but progress is slow.

PLOT ALERT: Eventually although she’s angry and ambivalent at never having a hoped-for film career and about their relationship, Fusun and Kemal reconcile and leave with a chauffeur for Paris. Darkly foreshadowed in the car accident years ago and in her awkward determination as a driver Fusun dies in an intentional car crash with her at the wheel. END PLOT ALERT.

I’m sure a native Turkish reader living through the country’s recent history would have a better appreciation than I did of some of this story’s complexities. I had to try to imagine social acceptability of sex before marriage, open media gossip about wealth, preoccupation with “western” thought and behavior, arrchaic social mores, and controversy about women’s “place” in society.

During Kemal’s very extended self-inflicted pain over his relationship I had almost given up on his credibility as a character. I kept wondering what’s really going on during all those eight years? Kemal’s celibacy and creepy collecting masturbatory relics of Fusun? What about his money and his job? What’s her relationship with her husband like?

But in the denouement semi–fictional author Orhan Pamuk suddenly becomes the narrator. He describes writing this book we’re reading and setting up a museum to house Kemal’s collection of Fusun’s cigarette buts and other odds and ends. It’s also clear that the real author did set up such a museum in Istanbul which people can actually visit.

This novel reminded me of John Galsworthy’s short story The Apple Tree in which a young city guy meets a beautiful country girl and they have a brief affair but he leaves her. Then he, now 60ish, visits the same area with his wife and they come upon a grave. The man wonders if it could be that of his long-ago girlfriend. The wife is painting and asks her husband what he thinks might be missing in her canvas. He thinks but doesn’t say, “Missing? The apple tree, the singing, and the gold.” (a quote from Euripides.)

Museum of Innocence is also a tragedy but it’s a lot more harsh than Galsworthy’s tale. The contrast between the early affair and Kemal’s descent into contemptibility is incredibly stark. His life is ruined socially and probably financially. His self–respect is replaced with the “museum” which the author in a deft fiction–within–a–fiction sleight of hand compares to pathological hoarders:

The owners of the rubbish dens would be objects of ridicule in apartment houses and neighborhoods, feared as much for their being solitary cranks as for combing trash bins and consorting with junk dealers.

But Pamuk is up to something quite different too here. In the flesh he has seriously reified the fictional museum in Istanbul for all the “real” world to look at. Here, see? The characters’ tragedy isn’t just a story. I found this twice-over merging of art and objective reality impressive. There are similar author-in-fiction appearances in Amis’s Money and even Steinbeck’s East of Eden but they seem simple gestures compared to what Pamuk is up to. His sad Kemal is all of pathetic, creepy, very real, and taken seriously but held at a distance. Erotic romantic love is – as most people find out – one beautiful mask on life’s changing face.

There is plenty of depth and complexity waiting for anyone who can persevere through the at times tedious details of Kemal’s lovelorn misery.

9.1/?? (style depending on translation and familiarity with the Turkish world)