Book Review - Museum of Innocence

The Museum of Innocence
by Orhan Pamuk
Translated by Maureen Freely. 531 pages. 2009.

In recent years, I’d developed a real taste for the writing of Orhan Pamuk. “Snow” was one of the best books I’d ever read, and it was that book which I recommended to all of my friends and family, as one telling the political and social realities of Turkey’s place in the world. After that, I read “Istanbul: Memoire of a City,” which also conveyed the morose feel of a ghost-occupied city, long past her glories. His politics and journalism also put him on the map, particularly his indirect referencing to the Armenian Genocide and the bloody-handed policies of his government in the east of the country.
Where “Snow” and “Memoirs” touched on aspects of Turkish political and spiritual unease, “Museum” seems to explore his nation’s obsession with obsession. The theme in snow of the conflict between the traditional society of Anatolia and the modernising, European-inspired intelligentsia is plain as day for anyone entering the country to see. Aspects of Modern Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara are heavily influenced by other Mediterranean states, from Greece to Spain, and the traditional villagers who roam into those cities are more influenced by neighbouring Iran or Syria. The influence of the Turkish Diaspora populations in Germany and France only serves to exacerbate the division. The divide between ancient glories and modern mediocrity is seen by strolling along the city walls of ancient Constantinople and looking down at the modern slums that honeycomb the districts of Fener and Fatih. “Snow” and “Memoirs” spoke of things that were easy to understand for anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the settings.
Turks obsess. They obsess about football. They obsess about girls. Cars, cell phones, music, Ataturk, fashion, Islam – pick one, or all, of the above; Turks don’t love in half measures. “The Museum of Innocence” is the story of Kemal the wealthy son of an elite family, who falls head-over-heels in love with his 18 year old cousin, despite he being thirty and engaged to another at the time. He obsesses over the girl, but can’t bring himself to call off his engagement. Fusun (the object of his desires) runs off on him and he returns to his fiancé (Sibel), unable to love her while his brain ponders his perfect love of Fusun. Sibel leaves him, he continues to obsess for another hundred angst-ridden pages until he meets up with Fusun again, now married. He becomes business partners with his flower’s new bee, only to stay close to the pollen, and Fusun’s dreams of becoming a movie star are suffocated under the pillow of Kemal’s jealousy and over-protection. Kemal constantly steals mementos of personal value to the family, replacing them but collecting his fetishes in an apartment nearby.
The first problem I had with the story was that of the main character. Like many of Orhan Pamuk’s books, the protagonist is from a wealthy family, and disdainful of the nouveau-riche. He was raised in Nişantaşi, an introverted thinker, and not terribly likeable. In many ways, Orhan-bey writes about himself. This version of himself, however, is neither likeable nor worthy of empathy. I resented spending so much time with Kemal. His whining and moping made him bad company for his friends, all of whom left him. He also made poor companionship for the reader to endure. For many of the 531 pages of this book, I wanted to slap him and say “Snap out of it, man!”

One of the strengths of Pamuk’s other works, particularly “The New Life” and “The Black Book,” is the way he builds characters to define his national culture. The main conflicts in these stories are the main conflicts in Turkish society, and the characters serve as transpositions for different trends, the farm animals in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” substitute for different trends in Russia and England. This was done masterfully in “Snow,” as well. The problem with this book is that the characters become political stand-ins rather than breathing characters. There are industrialists like Zaim, whose role is to develop the country. There are film-makers like Feridun who try to put Turkish art on the world map, but fail, and there are people caught between East and West, like Sibel, who can’t balance modernity and tradition. These characters are as meatless as scarecrows, serving only to stand in for trends within modern Turkey.
One of the difficulties for Pamuk, in writing about Turkey’s culture and nationality, is that in a country where the average citizen lives in a constant state of economic crisis, Pamuk writes about balls and society do’s, that are completely alien to the experiences of the masses. In a deeply religious country, his characters all drink rakı and champagne, party all night and run their own financial empires. The women are kept housewives, all drink and smoke, and of course none wear headscarves. This section of society exists in Turkey, but is infinitesimally dwarfed by the throngs of unskilled labour that pour in from the countryside, claiming and colonizing the cityscape from Pamuk’s old money. The author’s Bourgeois phobia of the emerging reality prevents him from having much to say about the changing face of the country.
It seems almost ridiculous to accuse a nobel-prize winning novelist of being “wordy,” but here I go. William Shakespeare had the good sense to note that “Brevity was the soul of wit,” meaning that keeping it short was the key to being both smart and funny. The Museum of Innocence could have been half the length. The moping of the narrator, the witty observations of life, the lyrical waxing and waning of the author’s keen mind fail to make up for the lack of an engaging story, and the book’s failure to produce likeable characters.