Audacious love story by Nobel winner Pamuk

By Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely

Knopf Canada, 544 pages, $35

Lit from within by humanity like a Rembrandt painting, this is an audacious, sweeping and timeless love story by the 2006 Nobel Prize winner for literature.

The Turk Orhan Pamuk sets his fictional tale of obsessive passion in Istanbul from 1975 until 2007. Meanwhile, a bricks-and-mortar counterpart to the novel, a real Museum of Innocence, is taking shape in the same city. An entry ticket is printed near the end of the book.

Influenced strongly by Borges and Nabokov, the novel's experimental style, restrained tone, and length may not be for everyone, but its scope echoes great tragedies like Anna Karenina. There is fodder here for generations of literary discussion.

Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 to a formerly wealthy, non-religious Muslim family. Demand for his works at home has been insatiable. Widely translated, The Black Book, My Name is Red and Snow, among others, have received high acclaim.

Reluctantly drawn into international controversy after speaking up about Turkey's slaughter of Armenians and the treatment of Kurds, Pamuk was put on trial for insulting Turkishness. (The charges were dropped.) He now divides his time between his birthplace and the U.S.

By telling his countrymen's own stories, Pamuk's books have articulated the struggle for identity within the constant tug-of-war between East and West in Turkey -- vital for a nation that has endured a kind of amputation from its past.

It was only in 1928 that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the new republic, pushed through westernizing reforms in a matter of months. A deeply Islamic region was proclaimed suddenly secular, Western dress took the place of head scarves, and a new alphabet, the Latin one, was brought in.

Drawing on a tradition of hidden meanings in Sufi literature, Pamuk's novels are also allegorical. For example, The Black Book's main character takes imitation to an extreme by assuming the identity of a famous journalist, rejecting himself in the process. One of Pamuk's main themes is that Turkey's fascination with all things European belittles an incredibly rich past.

Hidden parallels abound in The Museum of Innocence. Thirty-year-old upper-class Kemal is a man in love with two women (East and West?). Schooled in America, and on track to meet his family's expectations of business success, he is engaged to Paris-educated Sibel, a beautiful and compassionate woman.

He walks into a shop to find his 18-year-old, working class, and extremely beautiful distant cousin, Füsun, at the till.

Derailed by passion that seems to be beyond the reach of his personal will, Kemal begins an affair with her, leading to disaster for both young women. One very beautiful passage describes the comfort of a fisherman and his son bobbing on the water in the dark as the miserable, but still engaged couple listens.

It all ends badly with Kemal in a kind of no man's land for eight years before achieving some maturity. In the hope that he will be reunited with the object of his obsession, he tries to soothe the agony of loss with collecting everyday objects which Füsun has touched.

A sense of play is evident as the narrator frequently interrupts to display for the reader an item in the museum. Every so often, the author winks slyly when characters from his previous novels, and even Orhan Pamuk himself, walk on.

The Museum of Innocence is a story on many levels, and more -- in the telling, all of Istanbul life is on the page.

It takes discarded, forgotten moments in time and places them on a literal pedestal, lit up from within.

Ursula Fuchs is a Winnipeg registered nurse with an interest in literature.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 25, 2009 B9