When the Swedish academy awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature to the Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk—a choice that surprised
many at the time—the academy made it a point to note in its citation that
‘in
the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city [Istanbul] [Pamuk] has
discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.’
In his Nobel
lecture (which he gave in Turkish), Pamuk spoke (in allegorical terms) about
the relationship between Eastern and Western civilizations.
In The Museum of Innocence, his first
full length novel since his Nobel triumph (at whopping 728 pages it is a
weighty work of fiction in more sense than one), Pamuk touches on the themes of
the clash of Eastern and Western values, but that is not the main focus of the
novel. The Museum of Innocence is a novel about obsession.
The setting of the novel is Istanbul in the
mid-1970s. Istanbul and Turkey are still seeped in the traditional values. But
times, they are a-changing. At least amongst the rich and the bourgeoisie of
Istanbul. Women and men are mixing more freely; women have begun smoking in
public places, during functions, and in the presence of family elders; and
virginity is no longer the most prized possession of unmarried women. The
sexual mores, amongst the bourgeoisie who have travelled to the West, are
beginning to relax; however, the enlightened sections are still hesitant to
embrace fully the laid-back Western attitude towards premarital sex. Some women
might be prepared to go all the way, but only with their betrothed and only
after they are sure—as sure as one can be in these matters—that the man intends
to marry.
It is in this ambiance, of decadence
existing cheek by jowl with poverty, that we meet the narrator and protagonist
of The
Museum of Innocence, Kemal Basmaci, the scion of a rich industrial
family. The year is 1975. Turkey, almost five decades after it became a
Republic, is still a poor country, steeped in customs and struggling to find
the balance between tradition and modernity. Kemal is a rich man in a poor
country. When the novel opens, we meet Kemal with his fiancée, Sibel. Sibel is
a modern woman, and in keeping with the moneyed bourgeoisie of Istanbul, she
consents to sleep with Kemal even before they are officially engaged. Kemal and
Sibel have clandestine sex in his office in the evenings. Then one day, while
walking down a street, Sibel notices a Jenny Colon handbag in a shop. Later,
intending to give the bag to Sibel as a surprise gift, Kemal walks into the
shop where his gaze alights on the young shop-assistant, a young woman named
Fusun, who has just turned eighteen. This meeting would change Kemal’s life
forever. Fusun, it turns out, is Kemal’s distant cousin. She is born into the
poor branch of the family and, when young, used to visit Kemal’s house with her
seamstress mother. Kemal’s family, which has never considered Fusun’s family to
be in the same league as they, has severed contacts, when, a couple of years
earlier, Fusun’s mother, Nesibe, brought shame on the family by allowing her
then sixteen year old daughter to take part in a beauty pageant.
Right from the moment he sets his eyes on Fusun,
Kemal is totally, hopelessly, irrevocably besotted with her. He cannot get her
out of his mind. This obsession would haunt Kemal for the rest of his life and
would come to affect not just him but those around him in a way no one could
have anticipated. The bag Kemal buys from the shop—Sibel spots it instantly—is
a fake Jenny Colon. This gives Kemal an excuse to return to the shop and, over
the next one and half month Kemal and Fusun come to enjoy a passionate, if
illicit, sexual relationship. Kemal’s family owns an apartment in another part
of Isanbul, to which Kemal and Fusun escape in order to enjoy intense afternoons
of sex. In the meanwhile Kemal’s family is going ahead full speed with his
engagement with Sibel, which takes place in the Hilton. Kemal manoeuvres to
invite Fusun’s family to his engagement (you are left wondering to what end,
seeing as the wretched man cannot bring himself to break his engagement with
Sibel, not after she has gifted him her virginity). If Kemal has plans to carry
on carrying on with Fusun—and he obviously has, because in the midst of his
engagement party, he finds time to assure Fusun that he would figure something
out and begs her to meet him the next day—they are dashed when Fusun fails to
come to their secret rendezvous the afternoon after the engagement. After
futilely waiting for her for a week, Kemal strikes upon the bright idea of
visiting the shop where Fusun works—where he is told that she has left the
job—and then to Fusun’s house—where he is informed by the neighbours that the
family has upped and left. The news plunges our lovesick hero into the kind of
deep depression that, were he in the West, would immediately have brought him
to the notice of mental health services and hefty doses of Prozac (or its
precursor). However, since this is Turkey, the remedy is three months of
quality time with Sibel in the family’s summer house. That regrettably does not
bring about any improvement in Kemal Bey’s mood; into the bargain he manages to
make Sibel depressed by confessing to her about his infatuation. Sibel may be
modern enough to lose her virginity even though she is unmarried, but she is
not about to jettison her class snobbery. She is terribly put out that Kemal
has fallen for a mere shop girl. She interprets Kemal’s state of mind as
infatuation, an illness she hopes can be cured with regular sessions of vigorous sex (with her) and staying away from the object of infatuation. She is wrong.
Kemal is not infatuated; he is obsessed. As months go by and there is no change
in Kemal’s state of mind, Sibel throws in the towel. She returns the engagement
ring and breaks the engagement. The scandal provides enough material for high
society gossipers to dine out on for months; the consensus being Sibel is the
wronged party. Kemal, now that he is free and single again, renews his search
for Fusun and, eventually, with the help of a common friend, traces her to a
rundown part of Isanbul where her family has bought a building (not so poor,
then). Only to discover that she is now married. In the year since Kemal last
saw her, Fusun’s parents—knowing that no decent man would marry their daughter
now that her hymen was no longer intact—have married her off to a man named
Feridun. Feridun is so impoverished he can’t afford to buy or rent his own
house and has moved in with the in-laws. Feridun is a screen-writer, but he
fancies himself as a director of movies. He has a master-plan of making an art
film in which Fusun is going to be the heroine. Kemal takes to visiting the
family two to three times a week as if the prolonged intermission of one year
did not happen. The family members too act as if Kemal is nothing more than a
rich relation who happens to enjoy their company. Feridun and Fusun are hoping
that Kemal would bankroll their film. Kemal is ambivalent about financing a
film and letting Fusun act in it; however, sensing that his chances of seeing
Fusun on an almost-daily basis would be greatly enhanced if he kept on dangling
the carrot of a film in front of them, he keeps on dangling the carrot of a
film in front of them. In this manner years pass. Kemal spends long hours at
Fusun’s house as her mother natters, Fusun pouts, and her father asks Kemal his
views on television programmes Kemal has no interest in. Slowly he loses touch
with his former circle of rich friends. From time to time Kemal gets indignant
when Fusun drops less than subtle hints that the only reason she is entertaining
him is because of her hope that he would finance her husband’s film. He decides
not to see her again forever, but returns to her house after two days. He also
takes to purloining various objects in Fusun’s house which he thinks have an
outside chance of having come in contact with Fusun’s body. The family is fully
aware of the kleptomaniacal tendencies of their guest, but they manage to turn
a blind eye (probably because Kemal always replaces the stolen article with a
costlier version, and, at a later stage, takes to hiding bundles of Turkish
currency at various places in the house). These pilfered objects, along with
other junk Kemal collects from eccentric collectors of trivia, would go on to
form Kemal’s museum of innocence. Kemal eventually does finance Feridun’s film;
but it is not the art film Feridun has in mind, and it does not star Fusun. The
film is a commercial melodrama which requires the main character to shed a lot
of clothes, which, Papatya, a relatively unknown actress chosen for the lead
role, willingly does. So taken in is Feridun by Papatya that he starts an
affair with her. This gives the patient Kemal the chance to claim back Fusun
and relive the glory of the 44days leading to his engagement all those years
ago. Fusun’s father conveniently dies around the same time; Fusun divorces
Feridun; surely, there is no obstacle in Kemal and Fusun getting together. But
then fate has one final twist for Kemal.
The Museum of Innocence is the world’s longest case study of one man’s obsession with a
woman. Kemal is bewitched by Fusun on approximately second or third page of the
novel. In the next seven hundred pages the reader is repeatedly treated to long
and zealous descriptions of Fusun’s spellbinding beauty and Kemal’s
enamoredness with her. The problem for the reader is: in the absence of
photographic evidence of this great beauty, he is unable to appreciate the
life-changing impact Fusun’s pulchritude has on Kemal. Herein lies the other
problem of the novel: despite the reams and reams of pages devoted to her,
Fusun does not really come alive for the reader. At one point in the novel
Kemal, while describing their lovemaking, lets it be known that he swallowed her
whole breast (so they can’t be very big), which suggests that sex for them is fantastic—at
least it is for him; the reader is not made a privy to Fusun’s thoughts on
Kemal as a lover; at another point, the reader is informed that Fusun allows
Kemal to enter her from behind (so you guess she is not afraid to try new
positions despite being raised in a traditional Muslim country). But beyond these
physical descriptions, there is nothing. The reader does not understand what
makes Fusun tick. Her inner world remains unavailable to the reader, because
Kemal, the verbose and self-centred narrator, is incapable of seeing beyond
physical beauty. As a result the narrative becomes monotonous after a while.
When you read for the 314th time how awestruck Kemal felt by Fusun’s
spellbinding beauty (if you think ‘beauty’ is repeated too often in this review
it is nothing as compared to its use in the novel), instead of savouring the
delight along with the narrator, the reader is likely to think ‘not this
again’; or when Kemal, at periodic intervals, unleashes (with the ruminative
relish of an obsessive describing the objects he has to touch or avoid)
page-long lists of everyday objects he has stolen from Fusun’s house because
they have assumed unparalleled emotional significance for him by dint of theirs
having been associated with Fusun in some way, it is about as interesting as
reading a grocer’s list. It is difficult to appreciate repetitive descriptions
of sensory impact Fusun’s charms come to have on the ever-so-receptive Kemal;
they are obviously the result of Fusun’s personal appeal for him, but the
reader remains in the dark as to their cause (unless you suppose that Kemal is
a shallow person interested only in appearances).
Towards the end of the novel is a
postmodern twist: a writer named Orhan Pamuk, whom the reader first meets
briefly in Kemal’s engagement party (‘the tiresome Pamuks’) and the ‘23 year
old chain-smoking’ Orhan even dances with Fusun. Years later Kemal approaches
Orhan Pamuk to write the story of his great love for Fusun and the museum of
innocence he is going to create, having taken inspiration from museums created
by 17th and 18th century men in France and Italy who were
obsessed about leaving behind traces of their lives; and Pamuk tells him that
he too was smitten by Fusun. It requires some conceit to appear in your own novel
for no other reason than giving a metafictional twist. Unconvincing, to say the least.
Where the novel succeeds is in vividly
creating for the reader the world of the bourgeoisie of Istanbul in the 1970s,
the world of restaurants where polite waiters politely serve the freshest fish
and politely pour the most sumptuous wine for the third generation of patrons
dining in the restaurant, the old Ottoman mansions converted into cinema halls
as the once-rich families fall on hard times, and the ships and boats sailing down
Bosphorus. Pamuk obviously loves the city he was born in, and his love shows in
the evocative descriptions.
A word about the translation, by Maureen
Freely. The translation is competent but curiously flat. The passion and fire
and ardour that Kemal allegedly feels for Fusun, by the time it is translated
by Freely, is transmuted into something completely unalloyed to index emotions.
I do not know whether the translation does justice to Pamuk’s Turkish which, I
remember reading somewhere, is rather convoluted. If that is the case, Freely
should be thanked for breaking the original tale into bite-size morsels for the
consumption of those (like me) lacking the attention span to read sentences that go on for
two pages.
Reading The Museum of Innocence
is like wading through a lake of treacle. The overwhelming feeling you are left
with as you finally reach the end of this behemoth of a novel is of ennui.
