This is a tricky time, one would think, for a literary novelist to offer up a 500-page story of a man’s obsessive love for a younger woman.
Fixation no longer reads as romantic and the sexual politics of the subject would seem likely to dampen anything more wicked. Besides, in the age of speed dating and hook-ups, does the notion of a lifelong, all-consuming amour fou still have any real currency?
In The Museum of Innocence (translated by Maureen Freely, published by Faber), his first novel since winning the Nobel prize, Orhan Pamuk strolls into this minefield with serene confidence, his own enterprise courting the same unease as that of his protagonist, Kemal Basmaci. Kemal, a wealthy Istanbul playboy, spends a decade besieging his beautiful young cousin and then, after certain tragic events, devotes the rest of his life to creating a museum in her memory, stocking it with panties, nutcrackers, china dogs, 4 213 cigarette stubs and sundry other trifles recovered from their moments together.
Adding to the fraughtness (and disquieting pleasure) of the endeavour is its setting in a society — upper-class Istanbul of the 1970s and 1980s — poised uncomfortably between modern and traditional attitudes to love and sex, with Eros half out of his cage, but honour and shame still coordinating the perception of private conduct. I doubt whether the subject of a woman’s virginity has been so firmly at the forefront of a significant novel since Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.
The first part reads like a classic tale of reckless passion colliding with bourgeois convention. Kemal is happily engaged to Sibel, a suitable woman from his own class. Daringly, she has already — as Kemal puts it — “given me her virginity”, though only because she trusts in his honour as her betrothed. But as the engagement party approaches, Kemal runs into his sweet, 18-year-old, déclassée cousin, Fusun, working in a boutique, and the two become rapidly, catastrophically, infatuated with each other.
Before long Fusun, too, has “deliberately elected to give her virginity” to Kemal (the deflowering is ominously juxtaposed with images of the Feast of the Sacrifice, with lambs being butchered on every corner of Istanbul) and she vows never to sleep with another man.
Kemal, at this point merely a charming egotist, believes he can have his cake and eat it, even going so far as to persuade Fusun to attend his engagement party. The long party scene, set at the Istanbul Hilton, is a tour de force; a controlled detonation of explosive emotional materials that have been expertly laid and primed during the foregoing chapters. Like any grand act of destructive passion, it is both agonising and riveting to read, not only for the shattering impact on the three principal lives, but also for the way their drama ripples out through the lives of their families and friends.
The large-scale social portraiture of The Museum of Innocence is beautifully assured; lightly satirical but also affectionate; a very tender evocation of Istanbul’s moment of dolce vita (Mastroianni would have made a perfect Kemal). Pamuk, who writes himself in as one of the guests at the Hilton, clearly knows this world well and, personally, I found it much more sharply drawn than that of the provincial intellectuals and Islamists of Snow.
In keeping with the many twists and surprises in this section, the party ends, not with the breaking-off of the engagement (this comes later), but with the hurt withdrawal of Fusun. Her disappearance awakens Kemal to the depth of his attachment to her, prompting an increasingly desperate quest to track her down in the hope of recovering his lost happiness. A wonderfully vivid portrait of Istanbul emerges in the process.
At this juncture, as violent political upheavals begin to rock Istanbul, the book undergoes a radicalisation of its own, shifting gear from more or less conventional social comedy to something closer to the modernist era’s case histories of psychological extremism. Italo Svevo’s neurotic monomaniacs, in particular, come to mind as Kemal proceeds to drag himself through the increasingly painful stations of obsessive love.
When he does find Fusun, she is married to an aspiring filmmaker, both of them living with her parents in a poor quarter of the city. Convinced that he can win her back by drinking the cup of humiliation to its bitterest dregs, Kemal befriends the parents, offers to finance the husband’s film and spends the next nine years as an increasingly pathetic appendage to the family, eating at their table almost every night, abandoning his friends, mismanaging his business and letting his former gilded existence fall steadily into ruin.
Throughout this binge of self-abasement he drifts in and out of a state of morbid, precarious ecstasy, fuelled by the little personal objects — contents of his future museum — that he pilfers from the household and pores over in the solitude of his own room, licking and sucking them in an effort to recreate the precise look or gesture of his beloved that each piece has been selected to memorialise.
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, with the museum itself, is 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.
The pilfering gets worse, the sucking and licking and rubbing more frenzied, the vision for the museum increasingly grandiose, but after a while one begins to hope the idea might go somewhere new. It doesn’t, really; or only to the extent that the last section, with its surprise notes of happiness, seems to want to recast pathology as romance after all; a questionable reversal.
On the other hand, stasis, repetition, sheer duration have their own meaning in fiction, however challenging they may be to the reader. They can monumentalise a character — and they certainly do here. Kemal emerges from this book as a worthy descendant of the colossi of blighted love, with elements of Bluebeard, Miss Havisham, Humbert Humbert, even Citizen Kane in his make-up.
And then, too, a gesture or state of mind sustained long enough in a novel inevitably forces one to consider it as metaphor. In this respect Pamuk strikes a fine balance between suggestion and discretion.
Periodically his hero reflects on the meaning of his own story. He discusses his fetishist rituals in connection with Aristotle’s distinction between the continuum of time and the individual moments by which we experience the present.
He makes claims for himself as a cultural investigator: “I was driven by the very question that lay at the heart of what it meant to be a man or a woman in our part of the world.” In his engagingly scrupulous, almost childlike manner (very well rendered by his translator), he even offers himself as bringer of enlightenment into the shadows of primeval shame: “With my museum I want to teach not just the Turkish people but all the people of the world to take pride in the lives they live.”
As the faintly crazed tone of that last remark suggests, he is not the most reliable of narrators. But even so these assertions indicate the general direction in which the metaphorical aspect of the book develops. Beyond Kemal’s own self-analysis, a number of other interpretations offer themselves. You can read him as an antigen to the brutal model of masculinity prevailing in his own culture; a kind of saint of rejection and patience. Or, given the systematic way in which his pursuit of Fusun is mapped over the book’s richly detailed portrayal of Istanbul, you can read his story as a love affair with a beautiful, enigmatic, wounded city.
Yet this isn’t in any way the kind of book that requires decoding or exegesis to be appreciated: these are merely an indication of the large resonance of its inventions. Before anything else, it is simply an enthralling, immensely enjoyable piece of storytelling. — © Guardian News & Media 2010