The Museum of Innocence

This is a deep look at unrequited love using the backdrop of turmoil in late 1970s Turkey

In 1975 in Istanbul, affluent thirty year old Kemal stops at a shop to buy a purse for his fiancée Sibel; also of a wealthy family. He is instantly attracted to the shop girl eighteen year old Fusun, who he knows is forbidden fruits as his family will object to her for being from the poor side of town and besides his match is made; they are also related though quite distantly.

Kemal does not break off his engagement, but maintains everything as memorabilia (in his mind) that involves his non-relationship with Fusun, as he keeps everything and looks at each item as the most precious whether it be earrings, etc in his personal museum. He feels no contentment in spite of his wife's caring tenderness at a time when discontent rules the country. Only with his "priceless" artifact collection reminding him of what he never had enables him to fantasize about his Fusun does he feel some contentment.

This is a deep look at unrequited love using the backdrop of turmoil late 1970s Turkey to enhance the impact of the intense story line. Profound, Kemal makes the tale as he knows he obsesses over Fusun as depicted by his prizes he maintains in The Museum of Innocence. Sibel and Fusun, though differing personalities, are fully developed people who add to Kemal's confusion by being themselves. Although the plot feels overwhelming at times with so much going on in Istanbul, readers will appreciate Orhan Pamuk's powerful tale of a man fixated on a "Goddess" he can never obtain as truly his outside his imagination.

Harriet Klausner

5 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

The Museum of Boring

This book was boring. I had no feeling for any of the characters. In addition, the plot was weak because I figured out what was going to happen by the middle of the book. Kemal is one of the main characters and he is not sympathtic at all. He is in his thirties and he is sleeping with an 18 year old shopgirl. He has a nice finance named Sibel. He could get in trouble for breaking off the engagement, so I understand why he might have waited a bit, but years? Give me a break. Kemal is a bitter man who got his just desserts. He acted like he was shocked by the outcome. I have heard of blinded by love, but come on. The Museum of Innocence is a huge watse of time and paper. This big yawn of a book didn't need to be over 500 pages. I recommend that you read another book.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

A Museum of melancholy

Orhan Pamuk is my favorite writer, his inimitable aromatic prose provides the insights into the existential conundrums of the affluent on the brink of westernization, and yet pulled eastward by the Islamic social mores at a personal level. His books, unequivocally, have provided me with a proxy catharsis. I simply revel in his ethereal command of the human longings. He lives it and experiences it like we all do, but it is his prose that expresses his experience like no other alive today. The recent prose masterpiece "The Museum of Innocence" is a plate full of longings, laced with melancholy, within a societal east-west tug-of-war of the affluent set in Istanbul. Kemal, the protagonist, presents his life in the first person in a baleful and melancholic tone throughout this story of wait and hope. A wait for his love to return to his fold through reticence, betrayals, denials and conscience and class struggles. Many times, I could not help but feel that Pamuk was indeed telling us his own experience, that this was his story and Kemal was just his proxy. Kemal is in a relationship with a beautiful society lady called Sibel, with all the trappings of the affluent set. The impending engagement, the gifts, the parties and get togethers, the secret sex before nuptuals, the picnics and theater with a close collection of friends. Then he discovers Fusun, a distant cousin, and her devastating beauty at a store, where he goes to buy his soon to be fiance, a handbag. The story and the plot are not unusual or anything out of the ordinary, in fact it is downright predictable, but this is not about the plot or the story, it is entirely about the process, it is a story of a suffering and waiting for love, the process that provides us with furtive trips into a suffering man's consciousness about betraying one lady and desperately waiting for the other, no less than ten years. It is a masterful display in the obfuscation of the story and the plot by the process, the process of suffering that makes a man irrational, unreasonable and irrelevant to the present, as he lives in the past and the future simultaneously, looking forward to that reunion with his true love, Fusun. This process of suffering and wait took shape in many ways, the imaginary and the real wanderings looking for her on the streets of various neighborhoods, the purfunctory attempts to reconcile with Sibel, the sittings at the tea shops hoping to catch a glimpse of her. The most heartwrenching aspect of this suffering and waiting process was his collection of "artefacts" that Fusun had touched or was around that sustained his psyche in the present. The chapter on "The Collectors" at the end the book is a real work of art, on people who live by their symbols of life and love in melancholy and permanent wait. This book provides us with a blueprint of how to stretch the genre of fiction by innovative composition and perhaps even break some rules. I highly recommend this prose "museum" by Orhan Pamuk! Raju Peddada

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

The Museum of Innocence

I kept waiting for the point of the book to emerge-there wasn't any.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Excellent

The book is a window into a foreign city and way of life, in a very interesting and fun way.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

wonderful

loved it

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Masterful

Orhan Pamuk is one of my favorite authors, a master craftsman of modern fiction. This story of obsession (of a young modern Turk with a distant cousin for whom he breaks a culturally ideal engagement and with whom he fashions a strained, uncoupled relationship for years) has the power of Nabokov without so much of the creepy, seemy underside. In a couple of chapters it is Joycean in streams of consciousness that rivet attention to the most mundane details of ordinary daily life. It is long, over 500 pages, but if the obsession becomes redundant and boring (all are by definition), stay with the book to the end: Pamuk is at his masterful best in his construction of the circumstances of the telling and publication of the story.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Profoundly moving -- a must read!

Simply stated: I loved this book. Pamuk describes and examines the depths of love through his protagonist who experiences love as finely nuanced within a spectrum that includes pure love, splendorous love, spiritual love, physical love, greedy love, angry love, jealous love, murderous love--all of which must be contained and controlled (or not) by the protagonist. The protagonist's experience of love emerges, innocently, and becomes deep and soulful, as well as profoundly moving, until, like an exhibit in a museum, the abundant facets of human love are fully displayed for the reader.

Pamuk's prose are fabulous--which means the translator did a great job, too! It reads effortlessly and colorfully. I became totally immersed in the book and looked forward to each time I could pick it up again.

Not recommended

If you enjoy reading about a seriously depressed person for page after page, you'll enjoy this book. I found it incredibly boring and uninspiring!

Lyrically well-written, but...

I was pulled in from the first line, but then the story went on and on and on. I connected with his obsessive love for the love of his life, enjoyed the writing style, but this book could have been half as long and I would have enjoyed it a whole lot more.

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sometimes, indignant, he would try to stay away from her. but almost every night he came for dinner with her, her parents and her husband. he'd steal little mementos - from cigarette butts to ceramic dogs and silverware - anything she might have held, treasured to keep in the museum. a life spent on obsessions, repressions, possessions, somewhat happiness and guilt for this one love, the same destruction we always choose. "if we can learn to stop thinking of our lives corresponding to aristotle's time, treasuring our time instead for its deepest moments, then waiting eight years assumes the reality of 1,953 happy nights. today, i remember each and every evening - even the most difficult, the most hopeless, most humiliating evenings - as happiness."

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