Denied the happiness of being with Füsun, Kemal spends his evenings over the next nine years with her and her family, becoming an increasingly pathetic, booze-addled figure, who steals stuff from their house at every opportunity and leaves money lying around to make up for it.
His urge to objectify reflects society: at one point he stands back from the narrative and submits his 1975 attitude towards women and their virginity for consideration by visitors to his ‘museum’ in the year 2010, conscious of how old-fashioned it will seem. Over time we witness uneasy change in other areas too, as the Turkish republic seeks to define the terms of its relationship with Western Europe, and marry secularism with inherited religious traditions.
But it’s all about the things: from an episode when Kemal lies in bed sucking a ruler lately used by his beloved, to a scene when he’s interrogated for curfew violation and cares only about retrieving a quince grater he has just swiped from her home, his obsession always outranks other emotion, and drama is always boiled down to its essence in a physical object — tagged and harmless. By the time he tells us how he collected 4,213 of Füsun’s cigarette butts, Kemal is even pre-empting the reader’s (or the ‘museum visitor’s’) detail exhaustion: ‘I hope they will not grow impatient, thinking I am crowding out the display cases with distracting trivia’.
Füsun effectively becomes an exhibit too, whom Kemal would rather curate than nurture, and by the end this is a broken, peculiar man, who makes objects his refuge to the extent that anything can evoke some point in his past, and whose urge to catalogue and preserve like a Nabokovian lepidopterist has scotched the prospect of change or evolution wherever it can.
The Museum of Innocence demands patience. Its subject is the weight of a man’s entire experience, and with it comes a Bosphorus of detail. Whether you sink or swim, be prepared to get wet.
Heliopolis by James Scudamore is published by Harvill Secker.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.