![]() The liaison becomes the defining event of his life - so much so that after the affair is brought to a halt, Kemal spends the rest of his days attempting to recapture and re-create the experience that sent him into a lifelong swoon. As Museum of Innocence begins, Kemal, 30-year-old scion of a wealthy and Westernized Istanbul family, is soon to marry his European-educated paramour, Sibel.īefore a life of carefully plotted happiness can get under way, Kemal undermines it by entering into an impassioned affair with Fusun, an 18-year-old shopgirl and distant relation whom he seduces while tutoring her for mathematics exams. The Museum of Innocence is an enchanting work of fiction, Pamuk’s first since his brilliant, best-selling political novel Snow appeared in 2004. If we all, indeed, have learned that it can be “pleasurable, even relaxing, to run ourselves down,” as Pamuk puts it, then Kemal, protagonist of The Museum of Innocence, knows better than most the gratification of all-consuming obsession. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “We all know the joys of degradation,” Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk wrote in an essay on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Undergound included in Pamuk’s 2007 collection of nonfiction, Other Colors. ![]()
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