The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

The Museum of Innocence
by Orhan Pamuk
720pp Faber and Faber,

Turkey's struggle with modernity is brilliantly evoked in Orhan Pamuk's story of a young man's pursuit of his first true love, says Michael Gorra writing in The Observer, 10 January, 2010

Left - Lovers looking out to the Bosphorus, Istanbul. Photograph: Rengim Mutevellioglu/ Getty Images

It's getting late in the Istanbul of Orhan Pamuk's new novel (his first since winning the 2006 Nobel prize), late in almost every sense of the word. Not dead, far from that, but the hours are small and time itself seems to be running down, as though the whole city were a memorial to its own better days. Though when was that? Under Ataturk, maybe? Or possibly before, in the Ottoman past that lies all around but of which the book's characters can hardly ever speak. It is an old city, so old that in 1975, when this stately and intricate novel begins, its principal narrator, Kemal Basmací, still drives a 1956 Chevrolet. Yet paradoxically, that's also a sign of its youth, for Pamuk's Turkey itself has come late to a modernity that its citizens identify with the west.

Kemal and his friends in Istanbul's moneyed bourgeoisie speak dismissively of those who seem too "Turkish", and the women in their set go in for blond dye-jobs. His fiancée, Sibel, sees herself as a modern young woman – which means that she isn't a virgin, though she only started to sleep with him "when she was absolutely sure that there would in the end be a wedding". They use the office couch at his family's export business; the employees know, and snigger a bit. Still, it's important not only that they have sex but that they're understood to have it by the few other young people in their world, who like to congratulate themselves on their bravery.

One day Kemal's eye is taken by a designer handbag – the perfect gift, or so he thinks before Sibel tells him it's fake. By then, however, his eye has also been caught by the sales girl. She's a distant cousin called Füsun, a relatively poor relation whom he hasn't seen in some years, and her name carries a hint of scandal, for she's now a lustrous 18 and her parents have let her compete in a beauty contest, swimsuits and all. At first, it's just a seduction. He thinks of her as even more modern than Sibel, and love doesn't come into it. But when he discovers her "growing amazement" at the new world of sex he introduces her to, their afternoons together become an obsession. She knows of his engagement and he knows he must give her up – and he will, any day now. Then she disappears, and he learns that her family has moved.

It will take Kemal almost a year to find her again, a year of driving through every neighbourhood of the enormous city, months of heavy drinking in which he loses all interest in Sibel, even after they move in together. Sibel hopes to save him from what seems an inexplicable sadness, and learning the truth enrages her. To her, Füsun is just "a common shopgirl", a slut, even though they have each only slept with one man. She breaks off their engagement; but that is only the start of Kemal's separation from the social world he had once thought to inherit.

For eventually he discovers where Füsun has gone, and is invited to call at the apartment she shares with her parents in a lower-middle class neighborhood just north of the Golden Horn. The young men in the street are very Turkish indeed, and suspicious of his repeated visits. But they grow used to him, for over the next eight years he will invite himself for dinner some 1,593 times. He will eat her mother's excellent food and drink endless glasses of rakí with her father as they watch the country's single television channel. His longing for her will make him abandon the table of his own widowed mother, and in Füsun's company he will come to know Istanbul with a new depth and intimacy. She is always pleased to see him, but she now treats him as a respected older relative. For she has also rescued her honour by marrying a fat, sweet-tempered boy from her old neighbourhood, and for almost 350 pages Kemal will barely be allowed to do so much as to touch her arm.
The full review at The Observer.