The Museum of Innocence is the sixth novel by Turkey’s most garlanded novelist and his first since he became a Nobel laureate in 2006. Pamuk’s unflinching eye on his country’s history has brought him well-documented trouble, but it is in the subtle exploration of how west and east collude and collide there that he excels, notably in the novel My Name Is Red, a bravura extemporisation on art and representation at the Ottoman court of the 16th century, and in the more modern setting of his political thriller, Snow.
With this new novel, an elegiac wallow in the Istanbul of the 1970s, he further cements his claim on the city that furnishes his imagination. Our narrator is Kemal, son of one of the city’s wealthiest families. When the novel opens in 1975 he is to marry a suitable girl called Sibel, who like him enjoys a position in the most westernised, elevated part of society.
But however cosmopolitan its aspirations, this is a world whose sexual protocol is mired in a censorious age: virginity is a treasured component of the bride’s dowry, and if not intact when she marries, should only be compromised by the groom having taken an advance. This understanding allows Kemal and Sibel to meet for rendezvous in his office prior to their formal engagement, and worsens his predicament when he coincidentally begins an affair with Füsun, a distant and much younger relation.
Their encounters take place in a little-used apartment of his mother’s, which also becomes a repository for all the objects he accrues as his obsession with Füsun becomes increasingly fetishistic. Kemal’s expanding collection is the museum of the title (which Pamuk is apparently also constructing in real life):
We can bear the pain only by possessing something that belongs to that instant. These mementos preserve the colours, textures, images and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanied us through those moments.
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