“The Museum of Innocence” by Orhan Pamuk (translated by Maureen Freely)

This is a novel about love and patience. It is also a story about class, propriety, gender relations, religious norms, and traditional values. It is also one weird book. The story, above all, is one about an all consuming obsession. Set in Istanbul in the second half of the twentieth century, the novel details the milieu of the city’s nouveau riche and fading aristocracy. Kemal, the narrator, set to marry the daughter of a prestigious civil servant, Sibel, becomes enraptured by a poor distant relative, Fusan, whom he happens upon at a boutique. “Even all these years later I remember that Sibel spoke to me sweetly. Sibel was fun, and clever, and sympathetic, and I knew that with her at my side I would be fine, not just then but for the rest of my life. Late that night, after I had taken her home, I walked for a long time through the dark and empty streets, thinking about Fusan. What I couldn’t stop thinking about, what perturbed me was not just that Fusan had given me her virginity; it was that she had shown such resolve in doing so. There had been no coyness, no indecision, not even when she was taking off her clothes.” From the start of the affair, the mood of the book reveals that things will not end well for anyone. “It was during these days that I first began to feel fissures opening in my soul, wounds of the sort that plunge some men into a deep, dark, lifelong loneliness for which there is no cure.” When Kemal and Fusan become estranged, he sinks to the nadir of his despair, comforting himself with any relic from his apartment that she had happened to touch. “As the pain I felt wondering whether Fusan might come grew less intense each day, I sometimes convinced myself that I was slowly growing accustomed to her absence, but there was no truth to this, none at all. It was simply that I was growing more adept at distracting myself with the happiness I found in objects.” For a time still engaged to Sibel, Kemal obsessively ruminates on the nature of love. “I would entertain the hopeful thought that all serious and honorable men who happened to fall passionately in love went through the same things I did.” The objects of his obsession consume Kemal’s existence. “The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory—of this there is no doubt.” What could be a thoroughly pitiful and depressing tale is interspersed with just a shimmer of light as Kemal struggles on with life. “I had already had intimations that my passion for Fusan would ultimately turn into such a story of stubborn introversion. My love for her, my obsession, or whatever one could call it—it had rendered me incapable of diverting myself onto a path that would lead me to sharing this world freely with another. Even in the early days I’d known deep in my heart that mutuality could never happen in the world I’ve been describing, and so I’d turned inward, to seek Fusan there. I think Fusan knew, too, that one day I would find her inside me. In the end everything would be fine.”