The Museum of InnocenceBy Orhan Pamuk Faber and Faber, £18.99
Orhan Pamuk has spent his life in Istanbul, and his books are packed with the intimate descriptions of a local. His latest book, which is also one of his longest, folloows the story of Kemal, an upper-class businessman who is engaged to be married but develops an infatuation with a shop girl, Fusun, who also happens to be a distant relation.
Unwilling to give up his existing life and all its wealthy urbane trappings, but obsessed with Fusun, he begins a torturous existence that slowly pulls him, his lover and his family apart.
Pamuk delights in playing literary games, and this book is no different. It is narrated by the main protagonist, and Pamuk is introduced as a character. Kemal constructed the museum of the title as a tribute to his beloved – and it is a museum that exists in the real world. Pamuk bought a building in Turkey, and on a page of one of the closing chapters of the book is a printed ticket, so anyone with a copy of the novel can visit when it opens this year.
This is an intriguing literary device, and often Pamuk’s writing is as good an invitation to visit Istanbul as you need.
This book could well have been a masterpiece, but its pages are bloated with the narrator’s obsession. The litany of banal objects he associates with his beloved becomes at first infuriating, then dull. It’s difficult to sympathise with Kemal and even more difficult to wade through hundreds of pages of his forlorn love.
There are literary gems here: Pamuk’s depictions of the city are specific to the point of microscopic, and his exploration of Turkish society and its myriad rules and standards is fascinating, but this is dragged into sluggish depths by Kemal’s despairing behaviour.