The Museum of Innocence
by Orhan Pamuk
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Book Summary Information
Author: Orhan PamukTranslator: Maureen Freely
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2009-10-20
ISBN: 0307266761
Number of pages: 535
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of The Museum of Innocence
Book Review: "If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts...then the world becomes a beautiful place."
Summary: 5 Stars
Turkish author Orhan Pamuk's latest novel soars to new heights, taking fiction to an exhilarating new level and blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Ostensibly the obsessive love story of Kemal Basmaci, age thirty, for a beautiful shop-girl named Fusun, eighteen, the novel examines not only the physical passion which underlies their relationship and their lives, but also broader themes involving the connections between love and memory, between memory and reality, and between love and reality.
Including metafictional elements in the telling of Kemal's story, the author participates in the story as both a fictional and a real character, adding another level to the story. In a unique tour de force, the author is also creating a (real) Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, located in the house in which Fusun and her fictional family "lived." In essence, we have author Pamuk creating a fictional story about fictional people, whose real house and the objects in it become a real physical memorial to the fictional characters in the love story which Kemal has "asked" Pamuk to write for him. In creating a real-life memorial to the lives of fictional characters, Pamuk is ultimately freeing the reader's imagination from the constraints of fiction--giving greater meaning to "reality" by allowing fiction to have a physical role in it.
However multilayered the novel may be, it is also playful and great fun to read. Main character Kemal, thirty years old in 1975, when the novel opens, is from a wealthy family, about to become engaged to Sibel, an equally prominent young woman of his own "class" and someone he truly loves. When he meets Fusun, a shop-girl to whom he is passionately attracted, and who is also passionately attracted to him, he behaves the way his father and uncles have always behaved---he believes he can marry Sibel and lead a social life among people of his "class," while continuing to have an active private life with Fusun, a girl of a different "class" whom he cannot live without.
The ensuing action takes place over the next thirty-one years. Kemal, weak, "entitled," and selfish, allows his engagement to Sibel to take place, and Fusun surprises him by vanishing from his life. Kemal, by now obsessed with Fusun, befriends her parents, becoming increasingly isolated from his "real" life as a wealthy businessman, and collecting every object, including 4213 cigarette butts, which Fusun has ever touched. His kleptomania at her parents' house becomes worse as time progresses, and he soon has the beginnings of a museum to Fusun in an apartment that his mother uses for storage.
What gives the book its final power is the re-appearance of Orhan Pamuk as a character in the novel's conclusion, as he explains his relationship with Kemal (he says he is not Kemal) and his decision to start a real Museum of Innocence in Fusun's family house. This gives the novel a thrilling level of reality which may be unique in fiction. Compelling to read, filled with unusual characters, and structured to achieve the maximum possible thematic effect, The Museum of Innocence is a breath-taking novel, the best I've read by Pamuk, and one he will have a hard time bettering. Mary Whipple
Snow
My Name Is Red
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