Almost a week ago now, I finished reading Orhan Pamuk's novel, The Museum of Innocence but have not posted the review, trying to make it as perfect as his book and worthy of adding to a website dedicated to comments about it. In the meantime, I was curious to see how typical that story was of his Nobel Prize winning style but discovered most of his other books were either too political or historical for the lust list. So I found his most recent publication, The Naive and Sentimental Novelist, the collection of his Norton lectures at Harvard, and devoured it in one day.
Much like my delight in Llosa's The Perfect Orgy analysis of Madame Bovary and Octavio Paz' insight into lust in The Double Flame, I found Pamuk's book to be one that I would stock on my book shelves were I to be teaching a course in literary criticism of novels.
Once again, this review would be as long as the book if I cited all the quotes that I marked while reading it. I guess the concept that will last with me the longest is the idea of searching for this illusive, reader-based center of a novel, sort of the meta-story that proves universal human truths that all fiction readers crave. His lectures are a dance of how and why the writer writes and why the reader reads and who assumes what about the other.
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