This is by Orhan Pamuk, and it was originally published in 2008. My French version, translated by Valerie Gay-Aksoy, was published in 2011.

Most importantly, it is the novel that corresponds to the museum of the same name (the one we visited in Beyoglu, Istanbul, just a few weeks ago). As I noted in that post, the museum and the novel have a symbiotic relationship. Pamuk began collecting objects more than 10 years before completing the novel, and the items he acquired profoundly influenced the story he was telling. He would buy objects, and then "wait for the novel to 'swallow' them". The way they ended up fitting into the story then demanded the purchase of further objects...

Pamuk originally intended to write the novel in the form of a museum catalogue. It didn't turn out that way, but -- unsettling our ideas even further about the conventional distinctions drawn among truth, fiction, invention, and fact -- we have a subsequent publication, The Innocence of Objects, which reads (or so I understand) like a catalogue of the exhibits, while talking about the characters in the novel as though they were real. And then there's the documentary, Innocence of Memories, which follows the evolution of the whole vast project, and is in part narrated (or so I understand) by a character from the novel... In addition, while working on this book, Pamuk also wrote Istanbul: Memories and the City, and there are definite resonances between the two.

Contributing to the whole feeling of bamboozlement is the question of the I-figure. Our narrator is Kemal. On the verge of his engagement to the eminently suitable Sibel (whose persona somehow constantly reminded me of Trudy Campbell from Mad Men...), Kemal falls in love with his younger and poorer distant cousin, Fusun, who is currently working in a shop while she waits to take her university entrance exams. The book recounts the tumultuous story of this relationship.

Later, however, we are told that the narrative is in fact written by Pamuk, who makes a fleeting appearance early on in his own story, and then re-emerges towards the end in the guise of the ghostwriter of Kemal's memories. Pamuk tells Kemal, "In the book... I am speaking in your voice." This disturbs Kemal. The whole scenario messes with our brains...


Our visit, February 2023

The Museum of Innocence (the novel) can, I think, be read on at least three levels:

1.

The first level is the one reads like an ethnography of 1970s/1980s Istanbul. And the book is worth reading for this level alone. It's absolutely fascinating -- a beautiful, absorbing account of Turkish social history, flavoured of course with the melancholy that is Pamuk's stock-in-trade.

Among so much else, we learn about the betwixt-and-between position of Turkey (trying to emulate the west, but also loath to give up its own traditions); the ubiquity of alcohol (and a host's responsibility for providing imported alcohol for events); the ubiquity of cigarettes; the political violence on the streets of Istanbul; the coup of 1980; outdoor cinema, and picnics by the Bosphorus, and grand events at the Hilton (the engagement party scene is a tour de force, rivalling Ferrante; the ins and outs of the film industry, particularly the convoluted processes required to pass the censorship requirements; the daily ritual of watching television (just one channel); the dangers posed by inflation, and the temptation of rash investment; the importance of cars, a motif throughout; the rigmarole of getting a driving license (especially trying if you don't want to pay a bribe); and the privileged role of the rich boy (however many mistakes Kemal makes, he still seems to have plenty of money...)

Particularly fascinating (and appalling) is the account of the era's sexual mores. Young Turkish women are aware of the winds of change in the "west", but are still very afraid of sexual relations before marriage. Everyone is WAY too interested, it seems, in other people's virginity. Other WOMEN's virginity, that is. Young schoolboys can go off and spend their lunch-hours at a brothel, and that's OK. But for women, it's an entirely different story.

For them, premarital sex carries obligations -- generally marriage. Women who have had premarital sex and been abandoned feature in the newspapers, with black bands over their eyes. This is the same convention used for sex workers arrested by the police, women convicted for adultery, and rape victims, so that "reading the newspaper in Turkey at that time gave you the impression you were at a fancy-dress ball where all the women hid the top of their face behind a black mask".



Even premarital sex in the context of a stable, loving relationship carries dangers. An army comrade tells Kemal at one point that he had split up with his girlfriend "because they had made love a lot before they were married" (only with each other, mind you, but even so the woman's willingness to have sex made her suspect as a wife).

Fusun is 18 when she consents, for the first time, to "go all the way" (that's how they put it) with the 30-year-old Kemal. All sorts of imagery surrounds this event. We have Kemal's recollection, when they were both much younger, of touring the streets of Istanbul with Cetin (the family chauffeur) at the time of Id Al-Adha. Cetin, more religious than Kemal, explains about the ritual of sacrifice: "When we offer to a being that we love the most precious thing we have without expecting anything in return, the world becomes beautiful." On the way home from that expedition, they see a terrible road accident. Sacrifice, love, death... The themes are established, and we'll be thinking hard henceforth about who is offering a precious thing without expectation of return, and whether or not that brings about beauty...

Kemal doesn't tell us, the first time he mentions "the happiest moment in my life", that it, too, had been preceded by the sight of a car accident... It's on this occasion that Fusun tells Kemal she has fallen in love with him. Fatal accident, confession of love (and vulnerability), happiest moment... Another strange and prophetic conjunction. And it turns out that the victim in the latest car accident is known to Kemal. She's Belkis, and she's another woman who has been penalized for "going all the way" before marriage.

At one point, Fusun tells Kemal that she has long been subject to low-level sexual harassment from people in her environment, including her father's friends. No-one seemed to notice. Yet taking part in a beauty contest, at the age of 16, puts her beyond the pale of respectability. After that, it is automatically assumed that she is no longer a virgin (Kemal can vouch that she was, as though this should be anyone's business). Kemal's brother warns him that Fusun thinks she is too beautiful: "If she doesn't quickly marry an honest man, first she'll get herself talked about, and then she will be unhappy."

In another little incident that prefigures the tragedy to come, Kemal's father tells him about the mistress he consorted with for 11 years. She was 27 years his junior. Eventually she asks him to choose: Marry her, or she will leave. She disappears, and he thinks she has married. It's only later he finds she has died of cancer. He gives Kemal the earrings he had bought for her. He says they'll be great for Sibel. Kemal gives them to Fusun...



2.

The second level offers a meditation on time, memory, nostalgia, and the preciousness of objects. Kemal's relationship with Fusun runs anything but smoothly, and to console himself for her loss (first to disappearance, then to marriage to someone else, and finally to death), he starts to make off with objects that have a connection with her. Quince graters, china dogs, hair clips, cigarette stubs -- he sees everything as fair game.

Objects, we are told, have the capacity to evoke and also fix the past. For Kemal, in all the different stages of his not-having-Fusun, possessing and touching objects associated with her offer a substitutive, consolatory power. He even derives from the story of the sacrifice that Abraham is commanded to make of his son the lesson that you can always substitute something else for the object of your affection...



But this paean to objects has broader dimensions. Elif Batuman writes: "Pamuk’s museum restores a specialness to objects of mass production, transmuting quantity into quality. A middle-class fake is more magical than a priceless painting, precisely because it’s everywhere at once. Late in the novel, no matter where in the world his Byronic gloom takes him, Kemal can’t stop running into Fusun’s mother’s saltshaker. Cairo, Barcelona, New Delhi, Rome: 'To contemplate how this saltshaker had spread to the farthest reaches of the globe suggested a great mystery, as great as the way migratory birds communicate among themselves, always taking the same routes every year.'... Every few years, Pamuk writes, 'another wave of saltshakers' washes in, replacing the old generation. People 'forget the objects with which they had lived so intimately, never even acknowledging their emotional attachment to them'. Unlike the Mona Lisa, which is always and only in the Louvre, the saltshakers are everywhere for a few years, and then they’re gone, shifting the dimension of rarity from space to time."

It's not just everyday objects that Pamuk brings into focus, it's habits. The chapter entitled Sometimes is brilliant in its evocation of all the little things -- the little habitual events, the little comments people routinely say, the little gestures they routinely make -- that effectively constitute a life.

The novel also offers a discussion of the role of museums themselves. Contrary to the fixation with national identity evinced by many of the world's museums, Pamuk's museum is interested in the personal, not the collective: "The objects that Kemal collects, and eventually displays in the literary Museum of Innocence, are frequently commodities which reflect Turkey’s modernising and secularising policies throughout the twentieth century, including Parisian perfume, advertising materials for Meltem, ‘Turkey’s first domestic fruit soda’, and designer European brands such as the 'Jenny Colon' handbag that Kemal purchases from Fusun the first time they meet... Yet for Kemal, collecting objects and, in the process, converting them into souvenirs, disturbs this museal assumption about object meanings. In the literary Museum of Innocence, items such as the Turkish cigarettes Fusun used to smoke do not reflect, for example, the Turkish interest in imitating American and European brand names, but are instead used primarily to recount a personal narrative."



3.

The third level is much more disturbing. It is the portrait of a vicious, destructive person who has no inkling of his noxious reach. That character is Kemal.

He starts out seeing no problem with having both Sibel and Fusun (posh wife, prestigious social position, and an exciting young lover on the side -- his father managed it for many years, after all), and this complacency and sense of entitlement lead him to lie, deceive, harass, and manipulate.

But Fusun is not up for this bargain. After the engagement party, with Kemal now publicly linked to Sibel, she vanishes. Good for her.

Kemal goes completely ape at her disappearance, and ends up destroying his relationship with Sibel (who eventually comes out of it all OK -- but that's a stroke of luck -- she could have ended up like Belkis).

From there on in, the story recounts a mounting tragedy of objectification.

Fusun, having failed her university entrance exams, given up hope of any future with Kemal, and realized that she has sacrificed her precious virginity for no return whatsoever, is heartbroken. She is married off by her father to salvage her reputation, and increasingly becomes a puppet in the hands of those around her. She and Feridun, her would-be film-maker husband, live with Fusun's parents, and Kemal takes to haunting the house like a homeless mongrel (which must have been great for this new marriage).

To gain a foothold in the family he is constantly inflicting himself on, Kemal starts giving them money under various pretexts (as an "investment" in Feridun's film company, for example, or as compensation for the household items that he steals for his collection). He seems to have no concept of the way he is affecting power relations within the family group.



From Saturday 23 October 1976 to Sunday 26 August 1984, he estimates he has eaten dinner with the family 1,593 times...



And, increasingly, he starts impinging on Fusun's life. He wants her to be there when he visits, for example, so (through the mediation of Nesibe, her Kemal-enabling mother) her social life becomes more restricted. His jealousy means he can't contemplate her involvement, either on-screen or off-screen, with other men, so her film career ambitions are thwarted. And as time goes by, he feels he loves her all the more because she hasn't been sullied by the shame and poverty of the world of cinema: "I convinced myself one more time that I had done well to keep her away from all these people and their bad intentions."

What do we know of Fusun, at the end of the day? Very little, since everything is filtered through Kemal's highly limiting gaze... We know that she was beautiful; that she was daring (boldly pushing boundaries); that she liked painting, and seemed quite good at it; and that she wanted to be a film star... Otherwise, what did she do? Once that first passion is over, she has little in the way of conversation. We never really learn her views on anything. We don't even know, after that sacrifice that brought her nothing, whether she had any love left for Kemal, or regarded him simply as a means for furthering her ambition to be a film actress. Through the clues planted guilelessly by Kemal (or artfully by Pamuk...), we think it's the latter... Even Kemal recognizes the rage that has gone into extinguishing some of the cigarettes whose stubs he collects, but he doesn't seem able to draw any conclusions.

Fusun was no doubt much more than this shadow Kemal presents us with. She started out, at the beginning of their relationship, as much more of a person, with views to express and stories to tell. But increasingly she fades from our view. As Clare Hayes-Brady puts it, the male narrator has no access to Fusun's interior life, and doesn't seem particularly bothered by his limited vision. Portrayed here is "a narcissism that reflects an inability to see the female as anything other than object".

Kemal's obsession with things is also suspect, signalling "a desire to possess rather than to love". The transformation of Fusun into an object of collection begins well before her death, and contributes to "the misogyny of the pedestal".

Eventually, the disintegration of Fusun's relationship with Feridun and the death of her father clear the way for Kemal to transition from incubus to suitor, aided and abetted by arch-intriguer Nesibe.

It's 1984 by now, and they decide to set off for Europe (with chauffeur Cetin and Nesibe). They have a quiet engagement ceremony. They sleep together (again a bit of Nesibe's manipulation). But there's an anger in Fusun that even Kemal can't overlook. On their last day, there is more clarity in the air than there has been for a long time.

Discussing Kemal's kleptomania over all those years, she says: "My father was concerned. My mother acted as if it had no importance. And me, I wanted to be a film star." Kemal assures her she will be, but she won't take any more nonsense: "What annoys me greatly about you is that you are so easily capable of lying... You know very well that you will never make me an actress." Kemal replies -- so very glibly -- that if she really wants it, it will come. She replies: "I have really wanted it for years. You know that very well." Then she talks about having been fooled into having sex the night before: "Guys like you don't marry after that." He kisses her. She turns away: "In reality, I'd like to kill you."



In that awful final roadside scene, after Fusun has set off to walk up the road, and Kemal has gone in the car to find her, she says: "I've not been able to live my life because of you, Kemal. I really wanted to become an actress." She knows that Kemal and Feridun prevented that from happening: "Out of fear that I would become famous and would escape you, you jealously kept me shut in the house all the time."

Eventually, with Kemal in the passenger seat, she drives the car at high speed into a tree. Is this a deliberate suicide attempt? It's not entirely clear. She seemed to know what she was doing, says the narrator, but a little later he implies she didn't want to die. Hayes-Brady remarks: "It is interesting to note that even after she drives her car into a tree with all the appearance of destructive intention, Kemal cannot conceive of Fusun having sufficient agency to commit suicide... Kemal works hard to rationalise or deconstruct the evidence of her agency, repositioning her as a victim instead of an originator of destructive action."

The after-she-dies period is passed over surprisingly quickly. Kemal seems to channel his grief very effectively into the creation of his museum. Which, again, I find a little suspect... In a sense it doesn't matter to him whether Fusun is alive or dead.

And the museum itself is a strange kind of tribute. Is this how Fusun would want to have been remembered? Not through film publicity, or reviews, or awards, or even the trivial razzmatazz of the movie world -- but through banal things like earrings?

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm setting too much store by conventional understandings of success. Maybe this testimony of adoration really is admirable and moving. But Kemal is so resolutely self-obsessed that he taints everything. Kemal's last words to Pamuk are: "Let everyone know I've led a very happy life." There's no indication there of self-questioning or remorse. He seems to remain blissfully ignorant of the way he has wrecked another person's life...



4.

Which leaves us with two questions:

Leigh Turner wonders: "How aware is Pamuk of the ghastliness of his protagonist Kemal?" He concludes, and I agree, that Pamuk is absolutely aware that he is "depicting someone pretty vile", even while inviting us to consider whether this vileness is something fairly endemic in society. James Lasdun, writing in 2010, reflects: "This is a tricky time, one would think, for a literary novelist to offer up a 500-page story of a man's obsessive love for a younger woman. Fixation no longer reads as romantic..." But if we see Pamuk's work as diagnostic, then the current era seems the perfect time to publish it.

It seems pretty clear to me,then, that while Pamuk, always an exponent of nostalgia, may admire the collection his protagonist has come up with, he does not admire the collector's motivations. Yet I've read many reviews vaunting the book as a "love story".



The other question concerns the meaning of the title. What is the "innocence" here? Is it the kind of innocence that is actually naivete of the most destructive kind (ie Kemal's)? Nelly Kaprielian suggests something akin to such an understanding: "This is the tragedy of Kemal and of all life: we never understand anything. We are all innocent people who go through our lives blind."

Otherwise, I'm not sure who is "innocent" in this story. Definitely not Kemal... And not Fusun either, really. Those of us who have grown up in the west would struggle to understand the fixation on virginity we see here, and wouldn't worry about consensual physical relations before marriage. But Fusun knew Kemal was about to be engaged... She knew she was potentially destroying a relationship. That's not innocent, exactly...

Does "innocence" in fact equate to "victimhood"? Is this the museum of Fusun-the-victim? Relatedly, is "innocence" quite simply virginity? This thread keeps resurfacing throughout the narrative, in relation to various women. Does this museum effectively say: This immortality is what I gave you in return for the virginity you gave me.



I think the clue to the best explanation, however, lies in the title of the illustrated museum catalogue that Pamuk eventually wrote: The Innocence of Objects.

Pamuk's own Modest Manifesto for Museums makes the point that large, state-sponsored museums exist to promote the narrative of the state -- "neither a good nor an innocent objective". Instead, he says, museums should tell the stories of individuals, "re-create the world of single human beings -- the same human beings who have labored under ruthless oppression for hundreds of years". Which is a good point, but inevitably, as soon as you create a narrative around those individuals, you risk manufacturing an innocence that perhaps can never be present. Neither the one who tells the story nor the one whose story is told can ever, surely, be entirely innocent. There are always axes to be ground. No narrator can remove him/herself from the story, and start from a truly virgin canvas.

No, it's the OBJECTS that are innocent, surely. As Elif Batuman puts it: "The novel, though fiction, isn’t uniformly fictional. Endings are fake, because nothing in real life ever ends; characters are composites, because real people are either too close to you or too far. But the furniture and clothes: that stuff must almost all be real. There’s no way Balzac invented all that furniture. All those soaring ambitions and human destinies are just a pretext for telling the truth about the sofas and the clocks... When you watch a film adaptation of a novel, you always have to stop and ask yourself what are the odds that Eugene Onegin happened to look exactly like Ralph Fiennes, and yet a teapot from the right historical period is a real part of the world that created the character and plot..."

True, that. The curator might create all kinds of inevitably subjective narratives around that teapot, but the teapot itself is guileless. It is innocent.

Pamuk always makes you work, it seems. But there's no way I won't be back for more.