When Pamuk finished the novel, he remained obsessed. Kemal is haunted by giant billboards depicting her in a bikini, flagrantly slaking herself with a tin of the stuff.Īs Pamuk wrote, he stimulated his imagination not with lashings of a certain sugary elixir, but with old Turkish pop songs and detritus from junk shops. In one of the novel’s intermittent lapses into comedy, Füsun becomes a model for Meltem. It stands for the promise of desire slaked, and symbolizes the unsatisfactory commercialization of Turkish society. This canned elixir is both a woman’s name and the name of the cooling late afternoon wind. Setting aside the possibility that this entire depraved saga is not a veiled autobiography, the real object of Pamuk’s desire is the Istanbul of his youth, a city of decaying mansions, impossible romance, and a ubiquitous soft drink called Meltem. Our hero-if, that is, there is anything heroic about this morbid stalker-ends up immuring himself with his Füsun memorabilia in what he calls his Museum of Innocence. This cheers him up immeasurably but, without giving too much away, things don’t go entirely to plan. And who wouldn’t?Įventually, Füsun divorces her husband, and Kemal at last takes possession. When Füsun gets married, he invites himself over for dinner under false pretexts so that he can “borrow” further fetishes, sometimes with onanistic intent. To allay his misery, he collects objects that are associated with his trysts with Füsun. Although he is in love with Füsun, he marries the more suitable Sibel after a splendid engagement party at the Hilton Istanbul. Set in Istanbul between 19, the novel relates the obsessive love of Kemal, a businessman from a decaying aristocratic family, for his distant and socially inferior cousin Füsun. You will not be as lonely, though, as Kemal Bey, the protagonist of Pamuk’s novel Masumiyet Müzesi ( The Museum of Innocence), which was translated into English by Maureen Freely in 2009. Pamuk” means Orhan Pamuk, the Noble Prize-winning Turkish novelist, then you are in the former category-an exalted position, but quite possibly a lonely one too. You will not be alone I will be there too. Pamuk, a dashing Ottoman diplomat, expires during coition with Lady Mary, then you are in the latter category. If those words evoke the first season of Downton Abbey, in which Mr. A simple test to determine whether you are a person of refinement and taste, or a sofa-wallowing, chip-snacking barbarian: what mental image is conjured by the name “Mr.
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