Book Reviews
An enchanting new novel of first love painfully sustained over a lifetime....The city is on exhibit: the romantic touch of decaying wooden houses, the sturdy apartments of the nouveaux riches, postcard views of the shimmering Golden Horn, Soviet tankers on the Bosporus and a Frenchified restaurant once in favor.... Part of the delight in The Museum of Innocence is in scouting out the serious games, yet giving oneself over to the charms of Pamuk’s storytelling.... Freely’s translation captures the novelist’s playful performance as well as his serious collusion with Kemal. Her melding of tones follows Pamuk’s agility, to redirect our vision to the gravity of his tale.... What’s on show in this museum is the responsibility to write free and modern.
Maureen Howard - New York Times Book Review
Startling original. Every turn in the story seems fresh, disquieting, utterly unexpected...spellbindingly told.... The genius of Pamuk’s novel is that although it can be read as a simple romance, it is a richly complicated work with subtle and intricate layers. Kemal’s descent into love’s hell takes him through every level of the social order, past countless neighborhoods of sprawling Istanbul, in a story that spans 30 years.
Maria Arana - Washington Post
Pamuk...is that rare thing, a creator of sophisticated, intensely literary fiction, who is also his country’s bestselling writer...in part...because of his work’s accessibility and his willingness to adapt conventionally popular genres, like historical and detective stories, into multilayered, character-driven novels...mesmerizing, brilliantly realized...[with] marvelous and transporting evocations of Istanbul...and fascinating insights into a society living very much on the unstable borders of contemporary life between the Islamic and Western worlds.... [This] engrossing tale...deeply and compellingly explores the interplay between erotic obsession and sentimentality—and never once slips into the sentimental. There is a master at work in this book.
Timothy Rutten - Los Angeles Times
A world-class lesson in heartbreak and happiness.... Pamuk’s own presence in this wily narrative is as surreptitious as passion itself.
O Magazine
Pamuk’s sensual, sinister tale is a brilliant panorama of Turkey’s conflicted national identity—and a lacerating critique of a social elite that styles itself after the West but fails to embrace its core freedoms.
Vogue
(Starred review.) Nobel laureate Pamuk's latest is a soaring, detailed and laborious mausoleum of love. During Istanbul's tumultuous 1970s, Kemal Bey, 30-year-old son of an upper-class family, walks readers through a lengthy catalogue of trivial objects, which, though seeming mundane, hold memories of his life's most intimate, irretrievable moments. The main focus of Kemal's peculiar collection of earrings, ticket stubs and drinking glasses is beloved Füsun, his onetime paramour and longtime unrequited love. An 18-year-old virginal beauty, modest shopgirl and poor distant relation, Füsun enters Kemal's successful life just as he is engaged to Sibel, a very special, very charming, very lovely girl. Though level headed Sibel provides Kemal compassionate relief from their social strata's rising tensions, it is the fleeting moments with fiery, childlike Füsun that grant conflicted Kemal his deepest peace. The poignant truth behind Kemal's obsession is that his museum provides a closeness with Füsun he'll never regain. Though its incantatory middle suffers from too many indistinguishable quotidian encounters, this is a masterful work.
Publishers Weekly
And they say women fall crazy in love. In this latest from Nobel Prize winner Pamuk, protagonist Kemal becomes so obsessed with a shop girl he meets while buying his fiancée a purse that he ends up throwing away his entire life. Füsan is in fact a distant relative Kemal hasn't seen for some time, and they launch a passionate affair on the very eve of Kemal's engagement party. This is 1970s Turkey, and new ideas from the West would seem to bless the affair. But of course Kemal never considers breaking his engagement, and in the end a deeply bruised Füsan vanishes. As Kemal's fiancée, Sibel, rightly observes, "It's because she was a poor, ambitious girl that you were able to start something so easily." Kemal is not so enlightened as he thinks. He's also a bit of a bore, having compulsively organized an entire "museum" of artifacts pertaining to Füsan that the author repeatedly references; readers may agree with Kemal that "visitors to my museum must by now be sick and tired of my heartache." Verdict: This story is beautifully told, but at great length and in great detail; patient readers, be prepared. —Barbara Hoffert,
Library Journal
Curious and demanding new novel from Turkey's 2006 Nobel laureate, both closely akin to and somewhat less accomplished than its universally acclaimed predecessors (Snow, 2004, etc.). This is protagonist Kemal's impassioned tale of his obsessive love for a beautiful distant relative, Fusun, with whom he enjoys a rapturous sexual relationship as the day of Kemal's marriage to his blameless fiancee Sibel draws nearer. When we meet him in 1975, Kemal is the 30-year-old scion of a prosperous Istanbul family. The Basmacis are privileged people who acquire objects of beauty and value, store them away, then forget them. Not so with Kemal, whose yearning for the elusive Fusun (she's responsive only sexually) outlasts the breaking of his engagement and the years of Fusun's marriage to Feridun. During that period, Kemal is a frequent visitor to their home, from which he steals something each time, adding objects to his "collection" of artifacts commemorating ecstasies shared with his former lover (hence the compelling title metaphor). The author examines Kemal's twisted devotion with impressive cunning and inventiveness; inevitably, we think of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert and his Lolita, but to Pamuk's credit, the comparison does not diminish this novel's eloquence or impact. Suggestions of a tradition-bound haute bourgeoisie unable to let go of passing traditions and values feel honestly earned, and the narrative consistently engages and surprises. It's also too long and sometimes seems more a willed production than a cry from the heart. A rather contrived climax is redeemed by a witty denouement in which a new narrator makes an unexpected appearance. Another richly woven tale suffused with life and color from one of contemporary fiction's true master craftsmen.
Kirkus Reviews