The Museum of Innocence
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- Publisher: Knopf
- Since: 2009-10-20
- Media: Hardcover
- ISBN-10: 0307266761
Users who read this book
1 books read
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Quessir 10 months ago |
"The Museum of Innocence" by Orhan Pamuk @ivread So impressed. As for me, it's muuuch better than "Snow". |
1 books read
Reviews on Amazon
(38people)- The museum is a conceit. Physical objects, materials, represent emotions, states of mind. Collection and display make memories secure.
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>It is 1975. Kemal, the narrator, is to marry Sibel. Fusun and Kemal call themselves cousins, although they are not really related. Fusun is attractive to Kemal because she summons up childhood memories. Fusun shows resolve. <
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>Kemal's brother calls Sibel a woman with a lot of sense. In her intense and giving relationship with Kemal, Fusun is acting contrary to Turkish custom. Kemal asserts that people do not recognize the happiest moments of their lives as they are living them. <
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>Istanbul, like New York City, is a city of sights, sounds, and diversity, and is, in other words, an appropriate representation of the world-at-large. It seems that in Istanbul being provincial is social death. One of the guests at Kemal's engagement party at the Istanbul Hilton is Orhan Pamuk, (the Pamuks have lost their money). Eventually Kemal's engagement is broken. <
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>This is indeed worthy of a Nobel Prize winner. In scope and thrust it is Tolstoyan, broad and deep. In its smooth delivery and appeal to heart, it resembles the books of the late William Styron. In addition to Tolstoy, the other model from world literature to be cited is Proust. <
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>Kemal finds himself in the same position vis a vis Fusun as Turgenev did vis a vis Pauline Viardot. He visits Fusun several times a week for eight years. In the course of the visits he begins his collection. The end is surprising. This is postmodern. There is an excellent index of characters <
> - Now that I have finished The Museum of Innocence, I am not sure what all the fuss was about. This is a very long book but only the first third or so was engaging. I found almost the entire rest of the book pretty dull and laborious - maybe that's the point, I thought at some point: maybe the experience of reading the book is to help the reader feel the frustration and tedium of Kemal's life. Well, if that's true, then I got it, albeit about 300 pages before the end of the book. Ultimately, the story gets bogged down in details and the introduction of lots of characters that don't seem to add anything to what could have been a great love story.
- I'm finishing this book only because I have nothing else to read at the moment. I don't know why so many reviewers use the word "love" to describe the protagonist's obsession. This is a book about "desire," not love, a difference that most of the men in this novel don't seem to understand. This older man attracted to a younger, beautiful cousin just before his engagement with another woman is about breaching taboos. Grow up! These are not characters who truly know each other, but rather are driven by sexual attraction and superficial qualities (her youth and beauty, his money and position). If there is a "plot" in here, I haven't found it yet. The historical aspects of Istanbul and Turkey are interesting, but certainly don't add anything to what can be found elsewhere.
- Pamuk's novel is an exercise in torturing the reader. It is perhaps the most boring novel I have ever read. Maybe the main character's obsessive fixation on a teenage girl is of some interest as a minor study in pathology. I'll give him 200 hundred pages for that unremarkable achievement. But this novel is drawn out to nearly three times that length in order to tell the story of a life so relentlessly banal, so rigidly solipsistic that one's head spins at the very idea that any reader enjoyed being subjected to its elaborate emptiness. The main character narrates only his self-enclosed, preposterously privileged life. And his life--so to speak--is nothing but a ludicrously pursued and utterly unconvincing romantic desire for a stock character who is presented as a mere object. Except for knowing that she has a great body and is bad at math, we know nothing about her at all. The same is true for most of the other characters who inhabit the novel. They are pasteboard. Meanwhile, the ego-fixated narrator treats us to endless commentary on the trivial objects he pilfers in order to build his "museum." I kept waiting for his mind-numbing detail about his stolen ashtrays and earrings to turn into something like the imaginative fictional device that Tim O'Brien used so stunningly in "The Things They Carried." But no--his collecting fixation is all about his collecting fixation.
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>Add all of this to a cheap-trick ending, and one has to wonder how far the Novel Prize Committee in fiction will go in pursuit of some crass multicultural ethic. And forget about this novel as an insightful account of cultural change in Istanbul during the seventies and eighties. You'd be better off skimming a Wikipedia entry. - I have enjoyed Pamuk's other books but this one takes much too long to detail one man's unhealthy obsession with a young woman. The descriptions of life in Istanbul during the 1970's is interesting, but the unbelievably fixated character of Kemal and his lengthy tale of woe lost me long before the end of the novel.
