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Title details for The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk - Wait list

The Museum of Innocence

by Orhan Pamuk
John Lee
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“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.” So begins the new novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize, from the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name Is Red. It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal, scion of one of the city’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie—a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, restaurant rituals, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay—until finally he breaks off his engagement to Sibel. But his resolve comes too late. For eight years Kemal will find excuses to visit another Istanbul, that of the impoverished backstreets where Füsun, her heart now hardened, lives with her parents, and where Kemal discovers the consolations of middle-class life at a dinner table in front of the television. His obsessive love will also take him to the demimonde of Istanbul film circles (where he promises to make Füsun a star), a scene of seedy bars, run-down cheap hotels, and small men with big dreams doomed to bitter failure. In his feckless pursuit, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress and his afflicted heart’s reactions: anger and impatience, remorse and humiliation, deluded hopes of recovery, and daydreams that transform Istanbul into a cityscape of signs and specters of his beloved, from whom now he can extract only meaningful glances and stolen kisses in cars, movie houses, and shadowy corners of parks. A last change to realize his dream will come to an awful end before Kemal discovers that all he finally can possess, certainly and eternally, is the museum he has created of his collection, this map of a society’s manners and mores, and of one man’s broken heart.
A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and of the mysterious allure of collecting, The Museum of Innocence also plumbs the depths of an Istanbul half Western and half traditional—its emergent modernity, its vast cultural history. This is Orhan Pamuk’s greatest achievement.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    October 20, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415965689
      • File size: 592116 KB
      • Duration: 20:33:34

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      To write a very long book about obsession is something of a parlor trick, since no matter how thoroughly the story's narrator explains the reasons for and symptoms of his obsession, the reader may marvel but cannot share it. Pamuk creates a richly detailed portrait of Kemal, a wealthy young Turkish man pathologically in love with beautiful shop girl Fusun, his distant poor cousin. The narrative pace is leisurely as the years pass and nothing happens between them, and John Lee works quietly but deftly to bring Kemal sympathetically to life. The portrait of Istanbul in the '70s drawn by Pamuk and Lee is a marvelous carpet for the claustrophobic space in which the story plays out, but while masterfully imagined and beautifully performed, it has its longeurs. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from September 14, 2009
      Nobel laureate Pamuk's latest is a soaring, detailed and laborious mausoleum of love. During Istanbul's tumultuous 1970s, Kemal Bey, 30-year-old son of an upper-class family, walks readers through a lengthy catalogue of trivial objects, which, though seeming mundane, hold memories of his life's most intimate, irretrievable moments. The main focus of Kemal's peculiar collection of earrings, ticket stubs and drinking glasses is beloved Füsun, his onetime paramour and longtime unrequited love. An 18-year-old virginal beauty, modest shopgirl and “poor distant relation,” Füsun enters Kemal's successful life just as he is engaged to Sibel, a “very special, very charming, very lovely girl.” Though levelheaded Sibel provides Kemal compassionate relief from their social strata's rising tensions, it is the fleeting moments with fiery, childlike Füsun that grant conflicted Kemal his “deepest peace.” The poignant truth behind Kemal's obsession is that his “museum” provides a closeness with Füsun he'll never regain. Though its incantatory middle suffers from too many indistinguishable quotidian encounters, this is a masterful work.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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