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the complete review - fiction

The Museum of Innocence

by
Orhan Pamuk

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : languorous novel of a place and era, nicely (if a bit slowly ...) done

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Fairly positive -- and like his evocation of time and place (specifically Istanbul)

  From the Reviews:

• "The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk's first book since winning the Nobel, pulses with the hopeful melancholy of an aching heart, but gets bogged down in family dinners, cinema trips, and midday perambulations." - Keith Staskiewicz, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "In calm, elegant prose, Pamuk describes the various stages of Kemal’s passion: erotic obsession, jealousy, despair, the successive waves of hope and fear. He is as accomplished an anatomist of love as Stendhal or Hazlitt in Liber Amoris. Kemal’s narrative crosses decades, assembling a fascinating social world of families, friends and dependants, a rich palimpsest of the lives and mores of Istanbul’s haute bourgeoisie, their parties, dinners, funerals, business deals and raki-fuelled evenings." - Ian Irvine, Financial Times
  
  
• "Es ist eine Geschichte über Klassenunterschiede, Geschlechterrollen und Doppelmoral, die da im Gewand einer Liebestragikomödie erzählt wird -- und zugleich eine Alltagsgeschichte der siebziger Jahre in der Türkei. (...) Die Meisterschaft des Romans gleichen Titels zeigt sich freilich weniger in den Beschreibungen der Sammlungsstücke (die bei genauem Hinsehen reichlich knapp und prosaisch ausfallen) oder den Skizzen der ziellos feiernden, zwischen Orient und Europa, osmanischen Traditionen und europäischen Ambitionen schwankenden Haute volée Istanbuls (auch wenn das knapp fünfzigseitige Kapitel über Kemals Verlobungsfeier zum Besten gehört, was Orhan Pamuk je geschrieben hat). Sie zeigt sich vor allem in der Figur, in der all die Motive, Bilder und Reminiszenzen zusammentreffen, in Kemal Basmaci." - Andreas Kilb, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "Though the narrative remains compelling as it darkens from love story to study in florid pathology, it does become, in some ways, problematic. The compulsive pilfering, along with the museum itself, are certainly an inspired variation on the Proustian idea of recoverable time. But having established the conceit, Pamuk doesn't so much develop it as reiterate it. (...) Before anything else, it is simply an enthralling, immensely enjoyable piece of storytelling." - James Lasdun, The Guardian
  
  
• "Stretching over 30 years, but seldom straying far from a few Istanbul neighbourhoods, this is a tale of life-defining desire and devotion marked out in hair-clips and ashtrays, china dogs and ticket stubs, pumpkin seeds and ice-cream cones, salt-shakers and quince graters. Its loving, even relentless, attention to the "the consolation of objects" builds into an overwhelming tribute to "the power of things", which "inheres in the memories they gather up inside them"." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
  
  
• "Far more interesting than the creeping progress of Kemal's shabby suit is Pamuk's underlying theme of the relative position of men and women in Turkey, and the conflict of modern, liberal lifestyles with a traditional society only thinly overlaid by Ataturk's secularism. (...) Mostly Pamuk's characters are sharp and bright, but Kemal languishes rather unsympathetically within an insulating bubble of self-absorption that is undisturbed by the exciting (but far too fleeting) references to martial law, coffee-house bombings and political assassinations. The sheer narcissism of his decade of collecting Füsun-touched ephemera saps energy from an over-long, uneventful novel" - James Urquhart, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "Formally Pamuk’s most conventional novel, The Museum of Innocence has a modest bag of framing devices, but they’re not too cumbersome (.....) The Museum of Innocence is, apart from anything else, a wry, perceptive novel of manners about the Turkish bourgeoisie." - Adam Shatz, London Review of Books
  
  
• "The Museum of Innocence deeply and compellingly explores the interplay between erotic obsession and sentimentality -- and never once slips into the sentimental. There is a master at work in this book." - Tim Rutten, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Das Museum der Unschuld ist nicht zuletzt eine Liebeserklärung an genau diese unvollkommene materielle Welt, in welcher der Roman handelt. (...) Diese zarte, poetische, mit gleich viel Witz und Melancholie entworfene Liebesgeschichte hat Gerhard Meier in glasklares Deutsch gebracht." - Angela Schader, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "But the novel skips a crucial stage in its portrayal of his obsession. Sensory alertness is a product of interest, not its cause, and Füsun as she appears to us on the page is an implausible spur for Kemal's vividly documented devotion. The best that can be said for her is that she fulfils the western criteria for female beauty at a time when the youth of Istanbul are aspiring to western values. (...) This being a work of fiction published in the 21st century, it inevitably emerges -- later rather than sooner -- that Kemal is in fact a stooge, and his narration an artifice." - Leo Robson, New Statesman
  
  
• "Pamuk's great feat, in this novel, is to evoke the particulars of a society built on received ideas. (...) The Museum of Innocence develops, therefore, into something of a rich and almost-modern Age of Innocence, translated to a confused world that doesn't know quite how modern it wants to be." - Pico Iyer, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "Part of the delight in The Museum of Innocence is in scouting out the serious games, yet giving oneself over to the charms of Pamuk’s storytelling. He often makes use of genre, turns the expected response to his purpose." - Maureen Howard, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Istanbul's every place and moment of beauty seem as if irradiated by sadness. That makes the novel a modern-day counterpart to the masterpiece Pamuk set in the 16th-century city, My Name Is Red; and certainly it's a richer book than its predecessor, Snow. It does have weaknesses. Most of Kemal's friends are names rather than fully realised characters, and however vivid his desire for Füsun, she herself remains a bit shadowy. The novel, too, could have been shorter. Yet the story isn't so loosely built as it seems, and it's hard to say just which meal or moment of longing should go. The Museum of Innocence earns its length, a length that allows Kemal's story to burrow into us, a habit one looks forward to indulging." - Michael Gorra, The Observer
  
  
• "The wonder is that this solipsistic story is also a broadly social one, creating an evocative picture of a city that’s at once strange and familiar. (...) Whether it’s a public or a private life you want to explore, The Museum of Innocence proves equally compelling." - James Crossley, Review of Contemporary Fiction
  
  
• "The Museum of Innocence demands patience. Its subject is the weight of a man’s entire experience, and with it comes a Bosphorus of detail. Whether you sink or swim, be prepared to get wet." - James Scudamore, The Spectator
  
  
• "As a study of obsessive sexual and emotional attachment, the novel fails to grip. Where it does exert a hold is in its enthralment with Istanbul." - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
  
  
• "Beginning in 1975 and narrated from the vantage point of the future, one of the novel’s conceits is that it is a museum catalogue of its exhibits. Reflexive and overdetermined, it is a conceit that fully reveals its rather heavy hand towards the end. (...) It is a novel relentlessly anchored in the materiality of a very real, and very realistically evoked, city, thick with details" - Neel Mukherjee, The Times
  
  
• "One of the many oppositions or paradoxes in The Museum of Innocence is between the chaos of the collection and the regimented, systematic mind of the collector. Notwithstanding the intensity of the feelings depicted, the tone here is cool and direct, even scientific. Eighty-one short chapters, together with a map at the beginning and an index of character names at the end, indicate that the novel, however intimate the subject, is itemized and ordered. Kemal has a liking for lists and numbers. This calm taxonomy counterpoints, or perhaps compensates for, the intensity and abandon of the emotional register, mixing the absurd and poignant. It is an attractive voice, and surely to the credit of Maureen Freely’s translation, that subtle, nuanced social moments and psychological states are caught and rendered without fuss or affect." - Rónán McDonald, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "As familiar as the subject of love might seem, The Museum of Innocence is a startling original. Every turn in the story seems fresh, disquieting, utterly unexpected. Like the old Turkish legend of love-struck Ferhat, who literally tunnels through rock to reach the object of his affection, Pamuk's hero, Kemal, finds no obstacle too daunting in the single-minded pursuit of Füsun. (...) For all of its many layers, however, this is a book wholly centered on love and our desperate need to make sense of it." - Marie Arana, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Das Museum der Unschuld ist ein wunderbarer Beleg dafür, wie man mit den Mitteln des Romans der Welt ihren Reichtum, ihre Komplexität, ihre schwierige Schönheit zurückgeben kann -- jenseits der dümmlich ideologischen Raster der gängigen politischen Moralisierung und Kriminalisierung. Es erzählt davon, wie wir bis in unsere intimsten Regungen vergesellschaftet sind und doch nie weniger in der Lage waren, die Gesellschaft im Geflüster unserer Leidenschaften zu entdecken." - Walter van Rossum, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Museum of Innocence is a love story. Narrated almost in its entirety in the voice of Kemal Basmacı, it recounts his decades-spanning passion for a distant relative, Füsun. Soon after he meets her for the first time since she was a child, in 1975 when she is eighteen, they begin a passionate affair, but Kemal is involved with -- and just about to get engaged to -- another woman, Sibel. He loses both women, but eventually reconnects with Füsun -- but she is already married by then, and hence romantically (and sexually) out of reach. Nevertheless, Kemal continues to be obsessed with her, and for years spends many evenings visiting Füsun and her family, even supporting her husband's efforts to make his own movies.
       Kemal becomes a collector: from the beginning he speaks of his 'Museum of Innocence', and introduces readers to pieces that he exhibits in it -- "an illustrated menu, an advertisement, a matchbook, and a napkin" from a restaurant, for example, are among the first items he mentions. These are the often everyday tokens and totems that remind him of the past. During the time when he cannot have Füsun he can at least fall back on these reminders of her, and of his circumstances. Rather than building a future, he clings to the small pieces of the past, as if collecting and assembling them could stop time and allow him the hold that otherwise eludes him. (He is not the only one: when his father dies he notes how his mother doesn't want the sheets changed, clinging to the smell of the beloved deceased that lingers.) By the end, he has taken things to all extremes: among his exhibits are 4213 cigarette butts (smoked by Füsun) under each of which is pinned a note indicating "the date of its retrieval"
       The Museum of Innocence is set in changing times. Most of it takes place in Istanbul, and political upheaval occasionally intrudes upon life, as with the curfews the military governments set that limit how late Kemal can stay with his beloved and her family. Just as Kemal is unable to march clearly into the future -- by marrying and settling down -- so Turkey as a whole seems hesitant in making the transition from a relatively backward country with a single TV channel to a modern state, and so the book is filled with the remnants of the old -- which quickly feel outdated and out of place in the new, modern world and seem to belong in some musty museum .....
       The Museum of Innocence is very much a novel of changing mores. Typically:

     The anxious adherence to the forms of deference that we associate with traditional families -- sitting straight and never crossing one's legs or smoking or drinking in front of one's father -- had over time slowly disappeared.

     One thousand nine hundred and seventy-five solar years after the birth of Christ, in the Balkans, in the Middle East, and the western and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, as in Istanbul, the city that was the capital of this region, virginity was still regarded as a treasure young girls should protect until the day they married.

     To become reacquainted with each other as we explored the city, to see an undiscovered part of Istanbul each day, and an unknown side of Füsun -- it was a pleasure that constantly renewed itself.

But when our museum was established, Mr.Orhan Pamuk recalled that Füsun had danced with two people early on.

- M.A.Orthofer, 3 March 2010

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Links:

• Faber publicity page
• Vintage publicity page
• Official site (Turkish)
• Hanser publicity page

• angels in the architecture
• Cultural Tales of Two Cities
• DeutscheWelle (German)
• Entertainment Weekly
• Fiction Writers Review
• The Guardian
• Independent on Sunday
• Irish Independent
• Liisas Litblog (German)
• The Literateur
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• London Review of Books
• The Los Angeles Times
• Montreal Gazette
• MostlyFiction Book Reviews (1)
• MostlyFiction Book Reviews (2)
• National Post
• The Observer
• The Onion
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
• PopMatters
• Sandammeer (German)
• Seeing the World Through Books
• taz (German)
• 3 Quarks Daily
• titel (German)
• The Washington Post
• Words without Borders

• The Comprehensive Orhan Pamuk Site
• Profile in The Guardian
• Nobel Prize, 2006
• Orhan Pamuk at books and writers

• Istanbul
• My Name is Red
• The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
• Nights of Plague
• Silent House
• Snow

• See Index of Turkish literature
• See Index of Books by Nobel laureates under review
• Geoff Nicholson's collecting-obsessed works

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About the Author:

       Internationally acclaimed Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006.

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© 2010-2022 the complete review

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