Masumiyet Müzesi (The Museum of Innocence)
A man who says he loves her for eight years does not once wonder what the woman wants. Someone telling his own story can be the most unreliable source about himself.
Careful: this gives away the plot and the ending of the book.
Kemal is thirty, the son of a rich family, has a good job and is about to get engaged to Sibel.
In a shop he enters to buy a bag he sees Füsun. Eighteen years old, a distant relative, her family poor.
For a month and a half they meet in secret. Then the engagement takes place, Füsun comes to the engagement, and the next day she disappears.
Eight years
Kemal finds her. Füsun has married.
And Kemal begins going to dinner with Füsun's family on most evenings of the week. For eight years. A total of 1,593 evenings; the book counts.
Every evening he takes something from the table and puts it in his pocket. A cigarette butt. A salt shaker. A hairpin. A tea glass. Over the years, thousands of objects.
In the end Füsun is made to leave her husband, they set out together, and Füsun drives the car into a tree. She dies.
Kemal devotes the rest of his life to building a museum from the objects he collected.
My anger
When I finished the book I was angry at Kemal, and I think this is what Pamuk wanted.
In the first hundred pages I understood him. In the middle my patience ran out. At the end something else happened: I saw the distance between the story he tells and what he actually does.
For eight years he says he loves her.
But not once does he wonder what Füsun wants.
Füsun wants to be an actress. Kemal knows this and sets up a film company — but never makes the film, because he does not want Füsun to be seen with other men. He uses the girl's only goal to get close to her and then blocks it.
The woman's own life, her own distress, her own anger are almost absent from the novel. Because the narrator does not see them.
Kemal does not lie. He cannot see himself. The difference between these two is the whole matter of the book.
Füsun's anger
What I noticed when I thought about the book a second time: Füsun actually objects constantly.
Her silence at the dinner table, her not looking at Kemal, some evenings her not coming down at all. Her wanting to get a driver's license. Her finally taking the wheel.
These are told by Kemal as her "whims" and her "sulking." But lined up one after another, something else emerges: someone trying to take her own life back.
In the last scene she is the one driving, and she speeds up. Whether it is an accident or not — Pamuk does not say.
I think this is the book's clearest sentence, said not only in words but as action.
I was split over the objects
Kemal cannot remember something without holding it. Everyone describes this as a sickly fastidiousness.
It did not seem so to me.
As someone who has difficulty believing that what I do not see exists, I understand all too well entrusting a memory to an object. What goes into the cupboard disappears for me; what sits on the counter exists.
But the difference is fine and important: I put an item at eye level to remember it. Kemal turns a person into an object.
The book stands exactly on that line and leaves it to the reader which side it is on. This is, I think, the best side of the book.
Its length
Six hundred pages and repetitive. The same dinner is told over and over, the same streets are passed again and again, the same sentences return.
I got bored. At one point I thought of putting it down.
Then I thought there is no other way to tell how eight years passed. Kemal's life really passes like this: repeating, without moving forward, in the same room.
The pages where I was bored were the pages where the book was doing something to me. I realized this only after finishing, and I am still not sure whether this is a defense or a real insight.
Istanbul of the 1970s
The book's least discussed but best side.
The rich circles of Nişantaşı, the first domestic soda brands, the cinema halls, the waterfront mansions on the Bosphorus, virginity being an issue, girls being judged by "honor."
Behind everything that happens to Füsun is this: the class difference and how narrow a woman's options are.
Kemal never sees this. The novel does.
The real museum
In Çukurcuma, Istanbul, there really is a Museum of Innocence, and the objects described in the book are displayed there. The ticket on the last page of the book counts as entry to the museum.
I liked the novel carrying its own world outside.
But from the inside there is also something unsettling in it: Kemal's obsession has actually turned into a building, and we buy a ticket and walk into that building.