THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE
By Orhan Pamuk
Faber and Faber, Paperback, pp. 532, ISBN: 978-0-571-23699-2
Price: £12.99

AM Griffin

Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence is an unnerving tale of one man’s attempt to stay both on and off the beaten track, and a demonstration that to step outside the rules of society is to step outside humanity itself.

For Pamuk’s protagonist, Kemal Bey, Istanbul becomes a place where dignity causes suffering, shame brings relief, and imagination and desire form the basis of his reality. Kemal is concerned with two things- love and time.  He understands his life according to Aristotle’s appreciation of Time and his belief in the importance of the ‘present moment’- the future little more than a palliative fiction, the past no more than an emendated story. The only thing we may know for sure, the only thing we may cling onto, is the present moment and for Kemal, this becomes the only thing worth living for.

These present moments are cleverly captured by the objects that go on to form the Museum of Innocence.  Its name is a reaffirmation of the innocence of each moment and each decision made, a constant reminder that we must read the text with the knowledge that we ourselves are capable, and culpable, of making decisions to which logic does not apply, and that choice is nothing more than an illusion when our entire beings are engulfed by that which they focus on.

For Kemal Bey the world is what surrounds the beloved, not a single thing, but thousands of little things. These are the objects that make up his Museum of Innocence. He does not attempt to justify the actions of love, but presents each one in its moment of creation, an individual specimen as a part of larger story. In this way Pamuk does what few writers can do- he maintains the innocence of his narrator.

We are not given a story at a distance from its protagonist; nor are we given the wisdom and cohesion that time falsely ascribes to the series of arbitrary events that become a story. We are not given a mitigating narrative of noble emotion, nor are we saved the crippling shame and indignity that love brings.

Kemal believes his actions are motivated by love- but they force us to ask- can love be a one-sided thing? Can it exist of its own accord, in the hope that Fusun, the object of this love, reciprocates? Does such hope justify all actions, all cruel gestures and romantic flourishes that love permits, heedless of a true love’s true desires? His unrelenting quest for fulfilment leads us to question what love is, and whether our word ‘love’ can encapsulate all that it is to love, given that ‘Fusun’ can not encapsulate all that it is to be Fusun.

Pamuk’s accomplishment is not to make up a story, but to take it apart, and thus asks his reader- for all our efforts- can life ever be more than sum of its parts?