|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Museum of
Innocence
Spurred by his love for Sibel, with whom he is on the verge of getting married, Kemal goes out to buy a Janny Colon handbag at an upmarket store where he meets his long forgotten cousin Fusun. The bag turns out to be a fake and Sibel asks him to return it immediately. This gives him another opportunity to meet Fusun towards whom he is deeply attracted: "I was profoundly moved that she, hardly knowing me, had chosen me, had so deliberately elected to give herself to me. Her long neck, the dip of her abdomen that was like no other, the blending of sincerity and suspicion in her eyes at the same instant, their melancholic honesty when they looked right into mine as we lay in bed, and our kisses, all played on my mind." Kemal invites her to his mother’s unoccupied apartment where he begins the most meaningful and traumatic love of his life. Kissing Fusun’s shoulder, he experiences feelings of bliss "so profound that we went on kissing, heedless of the fall of the earring". The room turns into a paradise of the spirit, mysterious with cold objects and the joy of their kisses that would be at the core of his imagination for the rest of his life. He relives the times spent with her and remembers her in the antiques surrounding him; in the tricycle he took her once on a ride, in the strange light in the dim apartment. Her fallen earring, the floral batiste handkerchief which she had folded so carefully that day, the crystal inkwell and pen she had toyed with that afternoon will also become one of the exhibits in his museum of innocence, relics of the "refinement and the fragile tenderness we felt for each other". His belt which he ties with some arrogance makes him feel guilty afterwards but becomes the "witness to our melancholy as we covered our paradisal nakedness and cast our eyes about the filth of the world once again". The story is the story of sex and desire, but it innocently and passionately transcends the world of love to a level, where the experience becomes both nostalgic as well as historical in its location in the heart of a socially and economically vibrant society. There is zest and verve in their love as much as in the contemporary times of modernisation of Turkey, though Pamuk never lets go of his touch with tradition. Admired for his rebelliousness, the young Turks see in him the future of a peaceful Turkey where some day the two opposing forces of religion and secularism, of East and West would stand reconciled and Turkey finally integrated into Europe where it rightfully belongs both geographically and politically. Pamuk is rightfully the only European writer who could become the much-needed bridge between the West and the East, between an ancient Islamic culture and the contemporary dream of an economically prosperous nation as depicted in the rise of Kemal’s family business. Significantly, Kamal’s parents are in love with Ataturk who represented the secular ideology of his reign in Turkey. Religion though significant in Turkey jostles with the secular element of modernism. Pamuk is of the view that "when we in Turkey discuss the East-West question, when we talk of the tensions between tradition and modernity (which, to my mind, is what the East-West question is really all about), or when we prevaricate over our country’s relations with Europe, the question of shame is always lurking between the lines". The novel is almost a d`E9j`E0 vu of My Name is Red and Snow, which brings the opposites of tradition and modernity together in a style that has the wonderful lightness. As is clear in his fictional work, he has a propensity to delve into religious and historical themes, paradoxes and complex narratives dealing with protean identities. There is inventiveness in his art of going into minute details so as to recall the past and give some insight into the soul of one’s nation and its ever-present history. The past has to be remembered and any amount of westernisation cannot justify the forgetting of one’s history. "If you try to repress memories, something always comes back," reiterates Pamuk. "I’m what comes back." He has a deep fixation for Istanbul which figures in the novel in all its antique beauty and unchanging contradictions in the same way that Dublin exists for James Joyce. Pamuk is a diehard lover of Istanbul where he was born and where he lives: "Istanbul’s fate is my fate: I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am." The novel is a tour de force of Istanbul’s cultural history combined with a passionate rendering of the innocence of love.
|
ORHAN
Pamuk’s new novel The Museum of Innocence takes you from the
aristocratic social world of Kemal with its paraphernalia of lavish
parties, clubs, and society tittle-tattle to the suburbia of Istanbul
where his young middle class cousin, Fusun, resides and with whom he has
a throbbing clandestine affair. Oscillating between the woman he is
engaged to and the cousin he is deeply attracted to, his experience of a
world of cheap hotels and bars will move him to collect objects like
cigarette butts, an earring, cups and glasses that have a deep
association with his beloved. This is his museum of memories and hopes,
of love and shame that reflect a rapidly changing social world of
Istanbul.