Pamuk’s ‘Innocence’ a Stylistic Triumph

A thick haze of melancholy floats above every page of the works of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, settling amidst the words like fog over the Bosphorus. In his 2005 memoir “Istanbul,” Pamuk intersperses evocative personal reflections on the neglected city with monochrome images of rainy streets and crumbling minarets; his prose, with its concern for the visual over the intellectual, assumes the nostalgic intimacy of a forgotten postcard. The sadness of his characters merges inseparably with the troubled political and cultural landscape of Turkey: though both characters and nation stand on the brink of happiness, it remains always just out of reach.

Pamuk’s newest book, “The Museum of Innocence”—available to an English-speaking audience a year after its publication in Turkey—distills the sepia tones of his oeuvre into their purest and most poignant form yet. Readers looking for a follow-up to 2002’s “Snow,” a politically charged exploration of Islamic extremism, won’t find it here. Pamuk’s name took on a controversial coloring in the wake of that novel—in 2005, his remarks about the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of Armenians and Kurds earned him a much-debated prosecution under Turkish law for “explicitly insulting the Republic,” and a year later he took home the Nobel Prize in Literature amidst accusations by his countrymen that he had sold out to the West. But Pamuk is no activist. In his latest, civil war and sectarian violence make an appearance only as background—instead it’s the relationship between modern love and loss, problematic in its own right, that becomes the stuff of his dreamlike meditations.

Stripped to its essence, the plot is an old-fashioned tale of unrequited love. Kemal, a successful middle-aged Turkish businessman, walks into a boutique to buy a handbag for his fiancée and is immediately smitten with an 18-year-old shopgirl named Füsun, who happens to be a distant relative of his. Their affair—initially, a casual one—takes on a special gravity; despite its European affectations, 1970s Istanbul remains deeply wary of women who have sex before marriage. The two eventually do consummate their relationship, however, and the first few chapters of the book are devoted to surprisingly graphic descriptions of the body and the ecstasy they share.

This being a Pamuk novel, of course, that happiness is short-lived. While the unabashed descriptions of lovemaking can at times verge on clumsy, the descriptions of loss are etched in sharp relief. Kemal, much to his regret, ends things with Füsun, and the next 350-odd pages chronicle his devastating remorse and unsuccessful attempts to win her back. In the process, he alienates his friends, breaks off his engagement, sacrifices his stake in a distribution and export firm, and even starts a production company called Lemon Films Inc. to finance the absurd scripts of his ex-lover’s chubby screenwriter husband (a mere excuse to visit their apartment). Society dismisses Kemal as foolish or eccentric, but to him it doesn’t matter: for love is “something to which one devote[s] one’s entire being at the risk of everything.” Throughout the stunningly long period over which his heartbreak unfolds—2,864 days, or nearly eight years—he obsessively collects thousands of objects that Füsun has touched, or that remind him of her. Cigarette stubs bearing the impress of her mouth or traces of her lipstick, a saltshaker she’d once happened to use—all find a place in his room to be arranged as a “museum of innocence” for his beloved.

The book moves slowly, as it’s meant to. Kemal preserves moments in his memory as meticulously as the objects in his museum, cataloguing them in careful and loving detail. Pamuk himself completed this novel over a period of six years, spending at least 10 hours each day alone writing in a flat overlooking old Istanbul, and the sense of that isolation drifts throughout his painstaking dissection of heartbreak. More than any other novelist today, Pamuk has laid claim to the dispassionate prose style and layered, self-reflective inheritance of Proust. At one point, he follows a numbered list of the ways in which Turkish girls are socially condemned for surrendering their chastity before marriage with a note: “Clever readers will have sensed that I have placed this anthropological lesson here to allow myself a chance to cool off from the jealousy that Füsun’s love stories provoked.” Elsewhere, his reveries achieve an absolute stillness: “There was beauty to behold in the world, that was all there was to it: the summer night was cooled by the north wind blowing off the Bosphorus, rustling the leaves of the plane trees in the courtyard of the Tesvikiye Mosque, and causing them to whisper in that soft lovely way I remembered from my childhood.” “Museum” is a thick tome, but such prose feels as light as air. Indeed, the novel as a whole admittedly prioritizes atmosphere over plot, but that aesthetic of melancholy is precisely where Pamuk excels.

With that mindset wilts one potentially massive critique: Pamuk never writes his way out of Istanbul; the physical and mental geography mapped out in “Museum” is old hat. Lost loves and newspaper columnists, tea houses and Turkish-brand sodas recur in all his books, and the emphasis on B-movies and the world of cinema in particular strongly echoes the more metaphysical treatment afforded them in his novel “The New Life.” These themes could easily grow as worn as the belongings of Füsun’s that Kemal so often caresses.

But Pamuk avoids claustrophobia by elevating his repetitions into a self-referential body of work as complex as that of Nabokov, Barth, or Bolaño. Just as with those writers, the relationship between author and fiction remains intriguingly fluid. Many of Pamuk’s fictional landmarks are recognizable from his non-fiction memoir; Kemal even meets a character named Orhan Pamuk at his engagement party.

In the book’s final pages, the lines between Kemal, the narrator, and the “real” Pamuk blur to the point of indistinguishability—all three men come to seem interchangeable with each other, as well as with any of the narrators in Pamuk’s other books. These tiny, invisible connections unspool gradually to spin out a place both intricate and familiar, the nostalgia-saturated inverse of the fast-paced modern city: turning the first few pages of the “Innocence” feels like nothing more than coming home.

It’s fitting, then, that this novel so sensitive to the memory of past works finds substance in a tale of objects illuminated by the memories they evoke. “Museum of Innocence” may lack the tight construction of predecessors like “My Name Is Red,” but Kemal’s frustrated recollections resonate more intimately than anything Pamuk has written before.

Having taken to long, solitary swims in the unsuccessful attempt to forget Füsun, Kemal remembers that “Later, when I had swum back to shore and lay exhausted under the sun with my eyes closed, I would entertain the hopeful thought that all serious and honorable men who happened to fall passionately in love went through the same things as I did.” Like the anise-flavored raki that characters drink together to take refuge from their individual disappointments, “The Museum of Innocence” can be a bitter draught—but it’s also a sublime consolation.

—Staff writer Jessica A. Sequeira can be reached at jsequeir@fas.harvard.edu.