Book review: The Museum of Innocence

(Published in Mail Today, November 2009)

The Museum of Innocence
Orhan Pamuk
Faber and Faber
POUINDS 12.99, 536 pages
ISBN 978-0-571-23699-2

“What I am trying to explain,” Orhan Pamuk wrote in Istanbul (2005), “is the huzun (melancholy) of an entire city, of Istanbul.”

Pamuk, the most celebrated of Turkey’s writers, has had to carve out an unusual path in his decades of writing. Unlike his contemporaries in Turkey, he gives himself the freedom to see his country with a clear, unsparing eye. Unlike writers from the West, he must explain the culture his writing is steeped in. Instead of explaining Istanbul or Turkey, though, he reinvents and reimagines this world for an audience that could just as well be sitting in Istanbul’s cafes as Europe’s salons, or India’s metropolises.

The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s first novel after he won the Nobel Prize for literature, is ostensibly about love and obsession. It’s also an evocation of huzun, a meditation on the attractions and uses of melancholy.

“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.” There is a precision to this moment, as there is to the rest of Kemal’s story—it happens “on the afternoon of Monday, May 26, 1975, at about a quarter to three”, as he enters his lover from behind, and nothing in his life will ever be the same again. Kemal is rich, successful, on the brink of the perfect marriage to Sibel, a girl from a similarly privileged Istanbullu family, and what will change his life is the oldest story in the world—his love for Fusun, a shopgirl, and a distant relative from an impoverished branch of Kemal’s family.

If this sounds like the storyline of a Turkish—or an Indian—melodrama, Pamuk sets up the echo deliberately. The Museum of Innocence is a straightforward tale of desire and obsession; an unusual form for the master of the baroque plot to choose, almost a reversion to the early 21st century Marquezian or Nabokovian explorations of the topography of love. Fusun and Kemal occupy the no-man’s-land between the conventional demands of Istanbul society, and its yearning for the beguiling but dangerous freedom of the individual promised by the West.

The definition of love Pamuk offers in The Museum of Innocence is “deep attention” blended with “deep compassion”; Kemal’s obsession with Fusun is a function of the painful, acutely focused attention he finds himself compelled to offer--as with lovers down the ages, for no good reason. Rendered impotent with his fiancee, he retreats, Sibel by his side, from the round of parties and opulent amusements that govern their “insular, intimate” circle, but the relationship ends; Fusun marries someone else; and Kemal spends eight years at the edges of her life, a guest at her family’s very middle-class dining table, a possible source of funds for the film she wants to make and star in, a casual but committed drunk.

Released from the glittering but airless world of crumbling privilege he was born into, Kemal discovers the vivid and corrupt world of Turkey’s film-makers, who aspire to make art films, sometimes make melodramas, and must usually survive by making or dubbing soft porn films. By the 400th page, the reader knows that this tale will have a conventional, dramatic twist; and Pamuk delivers as expected.

It’s a conventional storyline, but what lifts The Museum of Innocence into the realm of the classic is Pamuk’s understanding of the frailty of love, and the fierce effort needed to maintain it.

Rising up alongside the figure of the lovers is the ghost of Istanbul, a city struggling to be remembered, known, familiar, mired in its own melancholy, reaching for change even as it holds on to the sexual and social shibboleths of the past. And Kemal’s closest kin are not other lovers, but the obsessive collectors of Istanbul, whose homes fill up with the accumulated memorabilia of a city just as he allows the many rooms of his life to be filled with shrines to a love often consummated but never possessed. The last chapter is turned over to the figure of Orhan Pamuk, allowing the writer to make a cameo appearance in his work.

The Istanbul he evokes is familiar to readers of his previous work, and The Museum of Innocence is as much a tribute to its lost, forgotten icons as it is to the power of first love. Turkey’s first domestic fruit soda, Meltem; a floral batiste handkerchief folded carefully by Fusun; a modified Nisantasi map of Istanbul; tombala sets and salt-shakers, New Year’s lottery tickets, china dogs, 4,213 of Fusun’s cigarette butts, bottles of Altun Damla cologne, everything that might be found in the locked glass cabinets of a well-off Istanbullu’s home.

The Museum of Innocence is not Pamuk’s most ambitious work, but it is his most evocative. And Pamuk retains his ability to surprise, even within the bounds of convention. Three-fourths through his lushly told but straightforward narrative, Pamuk reaches Chapter 69, where every sentence, for four pages, begins with the word ‘Sometimes’. The young Pamuk would have felt the need to exhibit his literary exuberance throughout the book; the older Pamuk allows himself this one flourish, and then lets us meditate again on why there are no museums to the human heart, except for the one that he has built in these pages.

(For a much more detailed review and overview of Pamuk's work, read Pico Iyer's long essay, Secret Love in the Lost City. And visit Pamuk's real-life Museum of Innocence--it's beautiful.)

Orhan Pamuk's furious flame

(For the Business Standard, October 16, 2006)



"I don't want to be an artist," I said. "I'm going to be a writer."

That is the last line of Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk's haunted tribute to the city where he has lived for the last fifty years. The book is the biography of a city, written by perhaps the best-known of its citizens, and an exploration of the early years of a writer, but Pamuk closes the door gently before he comes to the works that made him famous. He was only a little past fifty when he finished writing Istanbul , and it may have seemed premature to look back when he had so much ahead.

When the Swedish Academy announced that Pamuk had won the Nobel Prize for Literature last week, many assumed that the timing of the Prize was influenced by political considerations. At 54, Pamuk is a young Nobel laureate, and several pointed to older, equally suitable authors—Philip Roth, Adonis, Mario Vargas Llosa, for instance.

But there's a reason why Pamuk's name has come up for the last decade every time Nobel season comes around. There are many twenty-somethings who make the same pronouncement Pamuk did; there are very few who can live by his creed.

At 23, Pamuk had already tried and rejected several professions. He came from a family of well-off engineers, but declined to join the profession; studied to be a journalist but dropped out; studied to be an architect and dropped out. He dismayed his family by announcing he would be an artist—"we're not rich like we used to be," his mother said during one of their many arguments. He escaped from the endless rounds of supplication and arguments into the "mournful streets" of Istanbul: "The sublime, dizzying, pure anger I felt…would leave me after an hour of wandering…wherever I went, as I got colder and colder, I'd be warmed by the furious flame of my brilliant future."

The one book by Pamuk I have never read is his first, widely considered a masterpiece in Turkey. Cevdet Bey and His Sons spans three generations of an Istanbul family, and is astonishing in its ambition according to those who have read the samizdat English translation. (Pamuk refuses permission to have this translated into English.) It reminds Western readers of the masters of the 19th century novel; from the few excerpts I’ve read, Indian readers would settle comfortably into Pamuk’s style, so close to that of Tagore and Premchand. He finished the book when he was 26; it was published when he was 30 and established his reputation immediately in Turkey.

Over the next two decades, it seemed that Pamuk had set out to rediscover—and, like Haruki Murakami, to transform—the modern novel. His second novel was Sessiz Ev, or The House of Silence , and instead of the sprawling canvas of Cevdet Bey , this spanned just a week in the riot-torn Turkey of 1980 and is seen from the perspective of three siblings mired in their grandmother’s crumbling house.

His third, The White Castle , was as different from his first two works as they were from each other. Pamuk had left the 19th century behind him—now he was operating in the realm of Kafka and Borges, with a nod to Cervantes. Set in the 17th century, The White Castle featured a captive Italian who is sold as a slave to a Turkish scientist who looks just like his doppelganger. This was followed by Kara Kitap , or The Black Book , in which a man roams the streets of Istanbul in search of his missing wife, ransacking her brother’s cryptic and brilliant newspaper columns for clues to her whereabouts. Pamuk was barely forty by the time he had finished these four works, and many contemporary novelists would give an arm to have written just one of them.

The books that made Pamuk famous in the West—the willfully obscure My Name is Red, Istanbul, and the unsettling Snow--were written over the next 14 years, and he is finishing yet another novel.

For those of us who discovered Pamuk in the same way that we discovered Murakami, with astonishment and delight, it doesn’t feel as though the Nobel Prize was bestowed on him prematurely. It’s just that Pamuk is a rarity: a writer who, having announced his intention to write at an early age, didn’t discuss the matter any further. Instead, he roamed Istanbul for inspiration and found it; he weathered controversy, and suspicion at his early success; he sat down in that famous study facing the Bosporus, the stretch of water where Europe meets Asia, and he wrote as though his life depended on it.

The Pather Panchali complaint

(Written in October 2006 for the Hindustan Times)



Here are two of the more curious phrases you might Google for: "insulting being a Turk" and "Kiran Desai sari".

In February 2005, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk said in an interview, "Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody dares to talk about it." To say that Turkey is sensitive on this subject is an understatement. Anti-French protests erupted in the country this week after France's lawmakers passed a bill making it a crime to deny that the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during World War I amounted to genocide.

Some months after Pamuk's 2005 interview, Turkey's parliament introduced a new penal code. Article 301 made it a crime for any citizen to insult "being a Turk", and Article 301/3 stated: "Where insulting being a Turk is committed by a Turkish citizen in a foreign country, the penalty…shall be increased by one third." Pamuk, who had been forced to leave Turkey briefly because of the vehemence of the protests against him, was charged retroactively for "insulting being a Turk" and returned to face the charges. Thankfully, the case was dropped before it came to trial in January 2006.

For those of us who had followed Pamuk's writings from the early days of The White Castle and The Black Book to the more recent My Name is Red, Istanbul and Snow, the trial played out like scenes from an absurdist drama.

In many ways, Pamuk exemplifies the "rooted" writer. He speaks fluent English, but writes chiefly in Turkish. His first novel, the monumental Cevdet Bey and His Sons, traces the history of modern Turkey through three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family, and on Pamuk's own request, has never been translated into English.

In Istanbul, his dense and rather beautiful biography of the city, he writes: "I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets and neighbourhoods of my childhood…. Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul—these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots, but through rootlessness; mine, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am."

And yet, this most interestingly "Turkish" of writers, this man who has explored his country's history with passion and curiosity and its present with unflinching openness elicits complex reactions at "home". Reading Turkish newspaper reports about Pamuk over the last year, I was struck by how often he was castigated for his "arrogance", admonished for coming across as “superior”;—even when the reporter was sympathetic to him. Long before the genocide controversy, his success had made him suspect. “When my sales went up my welcome from the Turkish literary scene disappeared,” he told The Guardian once. He cannot be accused of being less than Turkish; but he is often accused of “belittling national values”, of “writing the wrong things”, in short, of insulting Turkishness.

Anxiety, suspicion of an author’s success, the urge to “correct” an author who is giving the “wrong impression” of his country, accusations of “arrogance” or of “distance”—but surely none of this could sound familiar in the Indian literary context? Consider the fascinating case of Kiran Desai’s sari.

When Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, it didn’t occur to me to question what she wore to the ceremony. I’m in the minority. Fox News and several other agencies reported, erroneously, that Kiran Desai wore “a traditional Indian sari”. Desai mentioned that her mother--writer Anita Desai--had told her to wear a sari, a family heirloom, but it was too transparent, so she settled for a dress instead.

On net forums, the symbolism of the sari-versus-the-dress was ruthlessly deconstructed--as indeed it was in this paper—surely this was a signal that Inheritance of Loss was meant not for a local, Indian audience, but for a wider, Western audience. I found both Fox’s reaction (Indian woman wins, ergo she must have been wearing a sari) and local reactions (what message was she sending out, by not wearing a sari) telling in their assumptions.

Desai’s book shifts between locales—the Kalimpong of the ‘80s, the grim underbelly of immigrant New York, a racist, inhospitable England dealing with its first flux of educated immigrants, the Indian village of Piphit adjusting clumsily to its first Western-returned local boy.

Desai, who still holds an Indian passport, once said that she cannot help seeing everything “through the lens” of her Indianness. She chose to write about the 1980s, she said in an interview with The Hindu, because that was the India that was most familiar to her, the place where she lived until she was 14 or 15: ”I find myself at a disadvantage because India has changed, moved on. I go every year, yet the subject belongs to Indian authors living in India.”

Just as Pamuk is questioned about whether he is the right kind of Turkish writer, Desai’s Booker win has raised a kind of anxiety in India. Is she writing as an “outsider”? (Hell, no.) Is her win a triumph for the ”diasporic” writer at the expense of the local, Indian kind?

Among a small group of NRIs, I hear what you might call the Pather Panchali complaint, in memory of those who excoriated Ray for making films about the “wrong” India. And why, when India is, as we all know, shining so brightly you can barely see what lies behind that hard, brassy light, would she write a passage like this, from the perspective of an Indian cook’s son struggling to survive as an immigrant worker in New York’s restaurants?

From other kitchens, [Biju] was learning what the world thought of Indians:
In Tanzania, if they could, they would throw them out like they did in Uganda.
In Madagascar, if they could, they would throw them out.
In Nigeria, if they could, they would throw them out.
In Fiji, if they could, they would throw them out.
In China, they hate them.
In Hong Kong.
In Germany.
In Italy.
In Japan.
In Guam.
In Singapore.
Burma.
South Africa. They don’t like them.

In Guadeloupe—they love us there?
No.

Nations make terrible readers, and nationalism is a blinkered guide to literature. To read Pamuk through the lens of nationalism, you must discard his beguiling imagination, the merciless clarity of his prose, the feverish intensity with which he blends the everyday with the fantastic, the complexity of his characters, the subtle nuances—tension, repulsion, fascination, tenderness—that hold east and west together and apart. In fact, you would lose everything that is essential about his writings.

If you see Kiran Desai through a set of applied labels—Plain Vanilla Indian, Diasporic Indian, Alienated Diasporic Non-Sari-Wearing Anti-National Indian, Good Little Prize-Winning Successful Indian—you miss the generous spirit, the humour, the sharp dissections of globalization, the deep understanding she brings to the figure of the outsider, the subtle crafting of her prose.

Writers belong to nations by accident and by default, but the only country that can really hold them is the borderless country of the imagination. We diminish ourselves as readers every time we forget that.