It is now months after I started writing this blog entry. I liked the book then as I hit on both a compulsive love and importance of place theme. As time goes by, I remember it more for an unrequited love with his city rather than his cousin. My original comments follow:
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk is one of the books I chose for my annual themed list of books, this year being great love stories, full of passion and lust,. And certainly, the happiest moment of Kemal’s life was when he was passionately making love to his much younger, distant poor relation Fusun. This story does not lack for physical cravings maturing into deeper, soul capturing feelings.
Other elements that I look for in an unforgettable love story are many of those characteristics itemized by Octavio Paz: a “forbidden” love that ruptures or violates the social order; a forced separation; a façade of resuming a “normal” life; and love as a victory over time. It is this last element that plays most forcefully in Orhan Pamuk’s tale. The entire premise of Kemal collecting mementos from his time with Fusun and ultimately setting up a museum to perpetuate his love for her is the motive by which he attempts to have time be transformed into space. Time is tracked by the growth of his collection instead of cycles or celebrations; clocks do not keep time. But while Parmuk is making this dimension tangible, he is also transforming his protagonist from a lover to a patriot.
Pamuk’s recreation of Istanbul in the 1970s and 1980s is accomplished through these contemporary relics of human lives and loves and through fleshing out the main characters with commentary from a city full of Zola inspired friends and citizens. What is striking is Kemal chooses to ignore the political turmoil of the times, making the repression evident in only as it impacts him – rushing home to meet curfew; knowing which officials to bribe for a driver’s license; and dealing with the industry of editors who rewrite plots to pass censorship.
The museum herein created is not an altar to a young woman; it is a time capsule of one’s youth, one’s comfort in family and pride in one’s home town. Our local newspaper recently asked long time residents to submit short memoirs about what best symbolizes their fond memories of growing up in town. People did not recall long term mayors or plane crashes. They remembered horse drawn bread delivery trucks, neighborhood cobblers and the opening of the first mall. So we collected stories, not pastry wrappers, receipts for shoes or store receipts. Even as he amasses such detritus, Kemal knows he has to write to answer the question: “What did these Europeans think about me … think about all of us (Turks)?”
So at the end of the novel, as Kemal blends into Orhan, the museum becomes a paean to an innocent Istanbul, one as yet untarnished by either Western commercialism or Muslim fanaticism. She is the long lost love driving the compulsion to reminiscence.
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