It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal and Sibel, children of two prominent families, are about to become engaged. But when Kemal encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation, he becomes enthralled. And once they violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeoisie. In his pursuit of Füsun over the next eight years, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress—amassing a museum that is both a map of a society and of his heart.
It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal and Sibel, children of two prominent families, are about to become engaged. But when Kemal encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation, he becomes enthralled. And once they violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeoisie. In his pursuit of Füsun over the next eight years, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress—amassing a museum that is both a map of a society and of his heart.
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Overview
It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal and Sibel, children of two prominent families, are about to become engaged. But when Kemal encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation, he becomes enthralled. And once they violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeoisie. In his pursuit of Füsun over the next eight years, Kemal becomes a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle his lovelorn progress—amassing a museum that is both a map of a society and of his heart.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307386243 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/05/2010 |
| Series: | Vintage International |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 560 |
| Sales rank: | 171,658 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1
The Happiest Moment of My Life
It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it. Had I known, had I cherished this gift, would everything have turned out differently? Yes, if I had recognized this instant of perfect happiness, I would have held it fast and never let it slip away. It took a few seconds, perhaps, for that luminous state to enfold me, suffusing me with the deepest peace, but it seemed to last hours, even years. In that moment, on the afternoon of Monday, May 26, 1975, at about a quarter to three, just as we felt ourselves to be beyond sin and guilt so too did the world seem to have been released from gravity and time. Kissing Fusun’s shoulder, already moist from the heat of our lovemaking, I gently entered her from behind, and as I softly bit her ear, her earring must have come free and, for all we knew, hovered in midair before falling of its own accord. Our bliss was so profound that we went on kissing, heedless of the fall of the earring, whose shape I had not even noticed.
Outside the sky was shimmering as it does only in Istanbul in the spring. In the streets people still in their winter clothes were perspiring, but inside shops and buildings, and under the linden and chestnut trees, it was still cool. We felt the same coolness rising from the musty mattress on which we were making love, the way children play, happily forgetting everything else. A breeze wafted in through the balcony window, tinged with the sea and linden leaves; it lifted the tulle curtains, and they billowed down again in slow motion, chilling our naked bodies. From the bed of the back bedroom of the second- floor apartment, we could see a group of boys playing football in the garden below, swearing furiously in the May heat, and as it dawned on us that we were enacting, word for word, exactly those indecencies, we stopped making love to look into each other’s eyes and smile. But so great was our elation that the joke life had sent us from the back garden was forgotten as quickly as the earring.
When we met the next day, Füsun told me she had lost one of her earrings. Actually, not long after she had left the preceding afternoon, I’d spotted it nestled in the blue sheets, her initial dangling at its tip, and I was about to put it aside when, by a strange compulsion, I slipped it into my pocket. So now I said, “I have it here, darling,” as I reached into the right-hand pocket of my jacket hanging on the back of a chair. “Oh, it’s gone!” For a moment, I glimpsed a bad omen, a hint of malign fate, but then I remembered that I’d put on a different jacket that morning, because of the warm weather. “It must be in the pocket of my other jacket.”
“Please bring it tomorrow. Don’t forget,” Fusun said, her eyes widening. “It is very dear to me.”
“All right.”
Fusun was eighteen, a poor distant relation, and before running into her a month ago, I had all but forgotten she existed. I was thirty and about to become engaged to Sibel, who, according to everyone, was the perfect match.
2
The Şanzelize Boutique
The series of events and coincidences that were to change my entire life had begun a month before on April 27, 1975, when Sibel happened to spot a handbag designed by the famous Jenny Colon in a shop window as we were walking along Valikonağı Avenue, enjoying the cool spring evening. Our formal engagement was not far off; we were tipsy and in high spirits. We’d just been to Fuaye, a posh new restaurant in Nişantaşı; over supper with my parents, we had discussed at length the preparations for the engagement party, which was scheduled for the middle of June so that Nurcihan, Sibel’s friend since her days at Notre Dame de Sion Lycée and then her years in Paris, could come from France to attend. Sibel had long ago arranged for her engagement dress to be made by Silky İsmet, then the most expensive and sought-after dressmaker in Istanbul, and that evening Sibel and my mother discussed how they might sew on the pearls my mother had given her for the dress. It was my future father- in- law’s express wish that his only daughter’s engagement party be as extravagant as a wedding, and my mother was only too delighted to help fulfill that wish as best as she could. As for my father, he was charmed enough by the prospect of a daughter-in-law who had “studied at the Sorbonne,” as was said in those days among the Istanbul bourgeoisie of any girl who had gone to Paris for any kind of study.
It was as I walked Sibel home that evening, my arm wrapped lovingly around her sturdy shoulders, noting to myself with pride how happy and lucky I was, that Sibel said, “Oh what a beautiful bag!” Though my mind was clouded by the wine, I took note of the handbag and the name of the shop, and at noon the next day I went back. In fact I had never been one of those suave, chivalrous playboys always looking for the least excuse to buy women presents or send them flowers, though perhaps I longed to be one. In those days, bored Westernized housewives of the affluent neighborhoods like Şişli, Nişantaşı, and Bebek did not open “art galleries” but boutiques, and stocked them with trinkets and whole ensembles smuggled in luggage from Paris and
Milan, or copies of “the latest” dresses featured in imported magazines like Elle and Vogue, selling these goods at ridiculously inflated prices to other rich housewives who were as bored as they were. As she would remind me when I tracked her down many years later, Şenay Hanım, then proprietress of the Şanzelize (its name a transliteration of the legendary Parisian avenue), was, like Fusun, a very distant relation on my mother’s side. The fact that she gave me the shop sign that had once hung on the door as well as any other object connected to Fusun without once questioning the reasons for my excessive interest in the sinceshuttered establishment led me to understand that some of the odder details of our story were known to her, and indeed had had a much wider circulation than I had assumed.
When I walked into the Şanzelize at around half past twelve the next day, the small bronze double-knobbed camel bell jingled two notes that can still make my heart pound. It was a warm spring day, and inside the shop it was cool and dark. At first I thought there was no one there, my eyes still adjusting to the gloom after the noonday sunlight. Then I felt my heart in my throat, with the force of an immense wave about to crash against the shore.
“I’d like to buy the handbag on the mannequin in the window,” I managed to say, staggered at the sight of her.
“Do you mean the cream- colored Jenny Colon?”
When we came eye to eye, I immediately remembered her.
“The handbag on the mannequin in the window,” I repeated dreamily.
“Oh, right,” she said and walked over to the window. In a flash she had slipped off her yellow high- heeled pump, extending her bare foot, whose nails she’d carefully painted red, onto the floor of the display area, stretching her arm toward the mannequin. My eyes traveled from her empty shoe over her long bare legs. It wasn’t even May yet, and they were already tanned.
Their length made her lacy yellow skirt seem even shorter. Hooking the bag, she returned to the counter and with her long, dexterous fingers she removed the balls of crumpled cream-colored tissue paper, showing me the inside of the zippered pocket, the two smaller pockets (both empty) as well as the secret compartment, from which she produced a card inscribed jenny colon, her whole demeanor suggesting mystery and seriousness, as if she were showing me something very personal.
“Hello, Fusun. You’re all grown up! Perhaps you don’t recognize me.”
“Not at all, Cousin Kemal, I recognized you right away, but when I saw you did not recognize me, I thought it would be better not to disturb you.”
There was a silence. I looked again into one of the pockets she had just pointed to inside the bag. Her beauty, or her skirt, which was in fact too short, or something else altogether, had unsettled me, and I couldn’t act naturally.
“Well . . . what are you up to these days?”
“I’m studying for my university entrance exams. And I come here every day, too. Here in the shop, I’m meeting lots of new people.”
“That’s wonderful. So tell me, how much is this handbag?”
Furrowing her brow, she peered at the handwritten price tag on the bottom: “One thousand five hundred lira.” (At the time this would have been six months’ pay for a junior civil servant.) “But I am sure Şenay Hanım would want to offer you a special price. She’s gone home for lunch and must be napping now, so I can’t phone her. But if you could come by this evening . . .”
“It’s not important,” I said, and taking out my wallet—a clumsy gesture that, later, at our secret meeting place, Fusun would often mimic—I counted out the damp bills. Fusun wrapped the bag in paper, carefully but with evident inexperience, and then put it into a plastic bag. Throughout this silence she knew that I was admiring her honey-hued arms, and her quick, elegant gestures. When she politely handed me the shopping bag, I thanked her. “Please give my respects to Aunt Nesibe and your father,” I said (having failed to remember Tarık Bey’s name in time). For a moment I paused: My ghost had left my body and now, in some corner of heaven, was embracing Fusun and kissing her. I made quickly for the door. What an absurd daydream, especially since Fusun wasn’t as beautiful as all that. The bell on the door jingled, and I heard a canary warbling. I went out into the street, glad to feel the heat. I was pleased with my purchase; I loved Sibel very much. I decided to forget this shop, and Fusun.
Table of Contents
Map
Acknowledgments
1. The Happiest Moment of My Life
2. The Þanzelize Boutique
3. Distant Relations
4. Love at the Office
5. Fuaye
6. Füsun's Tears
7. The Merhamet Apartments
8. Turkey's First Fruit Soda
9. F
10. City Lights and Happiness
11. The Feast of the Sacrifice
12. Kissing on the Lips
13. Love, Courage, Modernity
14. Istanbul's Streets, Bridges, Hills, and Squares
15. A Few Unpalatable Anthropological Truths
16. Jealousy
17. My Whole Life Depends on You Now
18. Belkýs's Story
19. At the Funeral
20. Füsun's Two Conditions
21. My Father's Story: Pearl Earrings
22. The Hand of Rahmi Efendi
23. Silence
24. The Engagement Party
25. The Agony of Waiting
26. An Anatomical Chart of Love Pains
27. Don't Lean Back That Way, You Might Fall
28. The Consolation of Objects
29. By Now There Was Hardly a Moment When I Wasn't Thinking AboutHer
30. Füsun Doesn't Live Here Anymore
31. The Streets That Reminded Me of Her
32. The Shadows and Ghosts I Mistook for Füsun
33. Vulgar Distractions
34. Like a Dog in Outer Space
35. The First Seeds of My Collection
36. To Entertain a Small Hope That Might Allay My Heartache
37. The Empty House
38. The End-of-Summer Party
39. Confession
40. The Consolations of Life in a Yalý
41. Swimming on My Back
42. The Melancholy of Autumn
43. Cold and Lonely November Days
44. Fatih Hotel
45. A Holiday on Uludað
46. Is It Normal to Leave Your Fiancée in the Lurch?
47. My Father's Death
48. The Most Important Thing in Life Is to Be Happy
49. I Was Going to Ask Her to Marry Me
50. This Is the Last Time I'll Ever See Her!
51. Happiness Means Being Close to the One You Love, That's All
52. A Film About Life and Agony Should Be Sincere
53. An Indignant and Broken Heart Is of No Use to Anyone
54. Time
55. Come Again Tomorrow, and We Can Sit Together Again
56. Lemon Films Inc.
57. On Being Unable to Stand Up and Leave
58. Tombala
59. Getting Past the Censors
60. Evenings on the Bosphorus, at the Huzur Restaurant
61. To Look
62. To Help Pass the Time
63. The Gossip Column
64. The Fire on the Bosphorus
65. The Dogs
66. What Is This?
67. Cologne
68. 4,213 Cigarette Stubs
69. Sometimes
70. Broken Lives
71. You Hardly Ever Come Here Anymore, Kemal Bey
72. Life, Too, Is Just Like Love. . . .
73. Füsun's Driving License
74. Tarýk Bey
75. The Ýnci Patisserie
76. The Cinemas of Beyoðlu
77. The Grand Semiramis Hotel
78. Summer Rain
79. Journey to Another World
80. After the Accident
81. The Museum of Innocence
82. Collectors
83. Happiness
Index of Characters
Reading Group Guide
An enchanting tale of romantic obsession and shifting cultural mores, The Museum of Innocence, Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s seventh novel, follows the well-stationed Kemal and his lifelong quest to possess the beautiful shopgirl Füsun. Sacrificing everything his family and friends deem valuable, Kemal honors his love through transports of the imagination and an ever-growing collection of mementos. With his planned exhibition, Kemal wants “the world to take pride in the lives they live” (p. 518). Yet under Pamuk’s skilled direction, The Museum of Innocence also becomes, as Maureen Howard wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “the writer’s claim to his workroom, where the gallery of his dreams displays not ephemera devoted to delusion but close attention to the ‘beauty of ordinary life.’”
1. How do modern European culture and Turkish tradition affect the attitudes and actions of the novel’s characters? Are the tensions between both societies reconciled or accommodated?
2. On page 37, Kemal states that his parents were not religious yet they retained many religious customs and traditions. What role does religion play in the novel? In Pico Iyer’s laudatory review in The New York Review of Books, he writes that “As in [Pamuk’s memoir] Istanbul, though even more so, memory becomes a kind of religion, and there is a sense, following Proust, that les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus” (true paradise is the paradise one has lost). What do you think Iyer means? Do you agree with Marcel Proust?
3. What does Chapter 15, “A Few Unpalatable Anthropological Truths,” reveal about sexuality in modern Turkey? How are those “truths” reflected elsewhere in the novel? How might your own cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality influence your views on the behavior of Sibel, Füsun or Kemal?
4. At one point, Kemal reflects on his relationship to Füsun: “Did the pleasure of satisfying evergreen desire give birth to love, or was this sentiment born of, and nurtured by, other things as well?” (p. 54). How might you answer that?
5. Consider the following statements by Kemal: “In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it” (p. 72) and “Now, all these years later, I think that the best way to preserve happiness may be not to recognize it for what it is” (p. 98). Are these two statements contradictory? Do you agree with either?
6. On page 157, Kemal tells of “the astonishing powers of consolation that objects held,” and, on page 73, says that “mementos preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanied us through those moments.” How are these notions expressed throughout the novel? Do you share Kemal’s beliefs regarding objects and mementos?
7. What do you think Kemal means when he states, on page 102, that “the gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region”? What is that “gap”? How are the concepts of the “gap” and “the cleft between the felt and the imagined” (p. 347) represented in the novel?
8. On page 113, Berrin tells Kemal that a “girl with brains doesn’t judge a man by the way he thinks. She looks at his family, at the way he deports himself.” What does this comment reveal about Berrin and his class? Where else is this idea reflected in the novel?
9. How are political events within Turkey from the 1970s and 1980s integrated into the novel? Do the characters address the political turmoil surrounding them? In his portrayal of the characters’ relation to current events, what might Pamuk be saying about them and their society?
10. On page 176, Pamuk writes, “Sibel, with the felicitous intuition so prevalent in the bourgeoisies of non-Western countries, and most particularly Muslim countries, saw psychoanalysis as a ‘scientific sharing of confidences’ invented for Westerners unaccustomed to the curative traditions of family solidarity and shared secrets.” What do you think of that quote? How might it explain Sibel or other characters’ behavior?
11. Is the change of Füsun’s hair color from blond to black significant? How might these two representations of Füsun symbolize the tendencies and paradoxes of modern Turkey?
12. On page 219, Sibel says: “The art of love is in finding a balance of equals . . . If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it’s about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.” What do you think she means? Do you agree? How might Sibel’s definition of “equal” compare with your own?
13. On page 302, Kemal realizes “that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.” How is Pamuk’s writing of The Museum of Innocence both a reflection and realization of that belief? Consider Chapter 52, “A Film About Life and Agony Should Be Sincere,” and Füsun’s later interest in painting birds. How might Pamuk’s depiction of film and the visual arts function as metaphors for the characters’ shifting circumstances and inner lives?
14. Review Chapter 54, “Time,” and Chapter 62, “To Help Pass the Time,” in the context of the rest of the story. How would you describe the novel’s notion of time? Is it realistic? Metaphoric? Philosophic? Did the book make you think differently about time?
15. In 2005, Pamuk spoke to the Swiss press about the Turkish killings of Kurds and Armenians, for which he was subsequently charged by Turkey with “insulting national character.” Although the charges were later dropped, how might Chapter 59, “Getting Past the Censors,” be both a satire and a commentary on Pamuk’s experience with Turkish authorities?
16. Consider the following statement by Kemal: “In those days I’d ceased to think of my life as something I lived in wakeful consciousness of what I was doing: I’d begun instead to think of it as something imagined, something—just like love—that issued from my dreams, and as I had no wish either to fight my growing pessimism about the world or to surrender myself to it unconditionally, I acted as if no such thoughts had entered my mind” (p. 420). What does Kemal’s admission reveal about him? About his relationship to Füsun? How are Kemal’s concepts of the “real” and the “imaginary” reflected thematically and stylistically throughout the novel?
17. In Chapter 82, “Collectors,” Pamuk playfully explores the social and psychological contexts of collecting. Why might there be a sense of shame attached to collecting? How do you distinguish between a collector and a hoarder? Do you collect anything? If so, what do you think drives your passion?
18. In the novel’s final chapter, “Happiness,” Kemal says: “With my museum I want to teach not just the Turkish people but all the people of the world to take pride in the lives they live. I’ve traveled all over, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes: While the West takes pride in itself, most of the rest of the world lives in shame. But if the objects that bring us shame are displayed in a museum, they are immediately transformed into possessions in which to take pride” (p. 518). How do you interpret this passage? Does The Museum of Innocence accomplish Kemal’s goal? What do shame and pride have to do with a museum?
19. How do you understand Kemal’s claim that “As visitors admire the objects and honor the memory of Füsun and Kemal, with due reverence, they will understand that . . . this is not simply a story of lovers, but of the entire realm, that is, of Istanbul” (p. 524)? How might this assertion be true?
20. To what do you think the “innocence” of the title refers? Considering page 124 and the final chapter, “Happiness,” how do Orhan and Kemal’s perceptions of Füsun compare? Does your perception of Füsun differ from theirs? What do you think of Kemal’s final words of the novel?
Orhan Pamuk Reader’s Companion
Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, the first Turkish author to receive the award. He is the overall bestselling author in his homeland and his books have been published in more than fifty languages. This guide is designed to help you explore Pamuk’s world and writings, whether your group chooses to read all of his works or to focus on his acclaimed novels or engaging nonfiction titles.
Born in Istanbul in 1952, Pamuk grew up in a well-to-do, Western-oriented family. As a child he attended private schools and dreamed of becoming an artist. He began his studies at Istanbul Technical University in architecture, but at the age of twenty-two switched to journalism, taking the first step in his career as a writer. Pamuk’s first novel, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, the story of three generations of a Turkish family, was published in Turkey in 1982. The White Castle, the first of his novels to be translated into English, takes place in seventeenth-century Constantinople (as Istanbul was then called) and explores the meeting between East and West, a theme that recurs throughout Pamuk’s writing career. The White Castle also introduced a deeper, more personal interest, one that imbues in his works of fiction and nonfiction alike: the relationship between dreams and reality, memory and imagination.
In his early years as a writer, Pamuk spent five years in residence at Columbia University, where he now holds a position as a visiting professor. In the autobiographical profile he wrote for the Nobel Prize committee, Pamuk reflected on his time as a visiting scholar at Columbia and the influence that had on his evolution as a writer: “I was thirty-three years old . . . and asking myself hard questions about who I was, and about my history. . . . During my time in New York, my longing for Istanbul mixed with my fascination for the wonders of Ottoman, Persian, Arab, and Islamic culture” (copyright © The Nobel Foundation, 2006). For much of those five years, Pamuk devoted himself to writing The Black Book, a strikingly original novel that weaves multiple voices and beguiling stories about Istanbul, past and present, into a modern-day detective story.
In his next novel, The New Life, Pamuk once again transformed the conventions of mystery into an intellectual adventure, creating a world in which a mysterious book, a fleeting romance, and conspiracies real and imagined wreak havoc on a university student’s life and his sense of identity. Set in the sixteenth century, My Name Is Red revisits Turkey’s rich and complex Ottoman past in a fascinating tale about the impact of Western art and aesthetics on an Islamic society that stifled individual creativity and strictly prohibited the creation of representational paintings.
As Pamuk’s fame grew throughout the 1990s, journalists in Turkey and abroad looked to him for elucidation on the political situation in his homeland and its relations with the West. Troubled by the changes occurring in Turkey, Pamuk wrote Snow, his first overtly political novel. A thought-provoking, witty, and balanced portrait of the rise of political Islamism, Snow was widely read and discussed in Turkey and became an international bestseller. The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s newest work of fiction, examines the nature of romantic attachment and the mysterious allure of collecting as it traces a wealthy man’s lifetime obsession with the lower-class woman he had loved and abandoned as a young man.
Collected essays, articles, and autobiographical sketches
Now in his late fifties, Orhan Pamuk lives in Istanbul in the same apartment building he grew up in. His deep attachment to the city is beautifully captured in Istanbul: Memories and the City, a combination of childhood memoir and journey into Istanbul life through his own eyes and those of painters and writers (including European visitors like the German artist Antoine-Ignace Melling and the French writers Gérard de Nerval and Gustave Flaubert); enhanced with photographs, it illuminates the personal and artistic influences on his work. Other Colors showcases the range and depth of Pamuk’s interests. There are short, lyrical pieces about his personal life collected under the apt and intriguing title “Living and Worrying”; critical essays on literary figures such as Dostoevsky, Camus, Nabokov, Vargas Llosa, and Rushdie, along with assessments of several of his own novels; and commentaries on a wide variety of political and cultural matters. A captivating collection, Other Colors provides fresh insights into the mind and imagination of one of today’s most notable writers.
A political drama and the recognition of Pamuk’s contributions to literature
In an interview with a Swiss newspaper in February 2005, Pamuk denounced the Ottoman massacre of millions Armenians in 1915 and the slaughter of thirty thousand Kurds in Turkey during the 1990s. His comments caused a furor in Turkey: several newspapers launched campaigns against him and he was officially charged with the crime of “publicly denigrating Turkish identity.” Facing death threats, Pamuk moved abroad. He returned to face a trial and the possibility of three years of imprisonment; the charges were dropped on a technicality in January 2006. The incident reverberated internationally, highlighting the conflict between anti-European nationalism in Turkey and the government’s campaign to join the European Union. It exposed, as well, the simmering distrust of—and sometimes blatant hostility toward—Muslim populations in the United States and Europe.
In awarding Orhan Pamuk the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, the Swedish Academy said, “In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, [Pamuk] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” Pamuk’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “My Father’s Suitcase” (Other Colors, pages 403–17), offers a more personal explanation of why he became a writer and what he hopes to accomplish:
It was only by writing books that I came to a fuller understanding of the problems of authenticity (as in My Name Is Red and The Black Book) and the problems of life on the periphery (as in Snow and Istanbul). For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us. . . . My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble one other, that others carry wounds like mine—that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble one another.
For discussion
1. Have Pamuk’s books changed your perceptions of Turkey? What insights do they offer into the country’s history and place in the world?
2. Have his books given you a deeper understanding of the Muslim world? Have they altered your opinion about the current situation in the Middle East and other parts of the world where Islam is the dominant religion? Have you become more or less sympathetic?
3. Pamuk’s novels range over a wide span of time, from the sixteenth century (My Name Is Red) to the present day (Snow). Compare your reactions to the historical novels and the contemporary works. Which do you prefer and why?
4. In these books what impact do the tensions between Eastern and Western beliefs and customs have on individual lives, on the relations between classes and ethnic groups, or on political debates? What competing ideologies (or ways of thinking) affect the characters’ behavior and emotional responses? Consider the ethical, religious, and social dilemmas individuals face and how they resolve them.
5. Snow is prefaced by epigraphs from Robert Browning, Stendahl, Dostoevsky, and Joseph Conrad. How does each of them apply not only to Snow, but also to the other Pamuk books you have read? Citing specific passages, how would you characterize the author’s feelings about Western attitudes toward the Muslim world?
6. What role do perceptions—or misperceptions—about Islamic law and religious customs play in the assumptions Westerners make about Muslims? Are there current controversies in the United States or Europe that support your view?
7. Do Pamuk’s depictions of the relationships between men and women conform to your impressions of romance, marriage, and family life in a Muslim society? How are women presented in the historical novels? In what ways do the women in the novels set in the present (or in the recent past) embody both traditional female roles and the new opportunities they have to express their opinions and act on their beliefs?
8. Istanbul opens with an essay about Pamuk’s feelings as a child that “somewhere in the streets of Istanbul . . . there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my own twin, even my double” (page 3). Many reviewers, including John Updike, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, and Charles McGrath, have written about what McGrath calls “an enduring Pamuk preoccupation: the idea of doubleness or split identity” (New York Times, October 13, 2006). Can you find examples of doubleness in the books you have read, and if so, what do these add to the story? What insights do they reveal about Pamuk’s own sense of identity?
9. What techniques does Pamuk use to bring his characters, real and fictional, to life? How do his descriptions of settings, manners, and other everyday details enhance the portraits he creates? What use does he make of humor, exaggeration, and other stylistic flourishes in his depictions of particular situations, conversations, musings, and arguments?
10. Pamuk employs many of the literary devices associated with postmodern and experimental fiction. (McGrath, for example, notes his use of “narratives within narratives, texts that come alive, labyrinths of signs and symbols . . .”). In what ways do his books echo Italo Calvino’s allegorical fantasies? What do they share with the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and other magical realists? What aspects of his literary style can be traced to earlier masters of innovative fiction like Kafka and Nabokov?
11. In an essay on the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa in Other Colors, Pamuk writes, “It is clear . . . that there is a sort of narrative novel that is particular to the countries of the Third World. Its originality has less to do with the writer’s location than with the fact that he knows he is writing far from the world’s literary centers and he feels this distance inside himself” (page 168). Discuss how this manifests itself in Pamuk’s own works, as well as the works of Vargas Llosa and other authors writing from the Third World. Are there creative advantages to living and writing “far from the world’s literary centers”?
12. Pamuk writes in Istanbul of authors who left their homelands—Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul: “Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots, but through rootlessness” (page 6). If you have read the works of these writers, or other authors in exile, do you agree that their books reflect—in style or in content—the effects of living in a new, foreign culture? To what extent is Pamuk’s writing rooted in the storytelling traditions of Eastern cultures? In what ways does it show the influence of his early exposure to Western literature, his participation in international literary circles, and his longtime association with American academia?
13. Despite the many differences between the societies Pamuk describes and our own, why do his characters and their behavior resonant with contemporary English-speaking readers? Are there aspects of Turkish mores that make it difficult to sympathize or engage with the characters in the novels? Do these factors also influence your reactions to his autobiographical pieces, literary criticism, and cultural observations in both Other Colors and Istanbul?
14. How does Pamuk’s personal history, as well as the plots of some novels, mirror the complicated history of Turkey? Consider such topics as: the decline and dissolution of the once powerful Ottoman Empire; the sweeping changes initiated by Atatürk in the 1920s; the conflicting desires to preserve Turkey’s distinctive heritage and to become more active in the global community; and the rise of fundamentalist Islam throughout Middle East today.
15. In discussing the importance of novels, Pamuk says, “Modern societies, tribes, and nations do their deepest thinking about themselves by reading novels; through reading novels, they are able to argue about who they are” (Other Colors, page 233). Do you agree? What can novels provide that nonfiction books and other media do not?
Suggestions for further reading
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy; Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions; Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities; Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground; Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum; Franz Kafka, The Castle; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Milan Kundera, Immortality; Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy; Gabriel García Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera; Vladimir Nabokov, Ada; V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River; Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Pamuk’s works are available in Vintage paperback editions (listed here in order of their first translation into English): The White Castle; The New Life; My Name Is Red; The Black Book; Snow; Istanbul; Other Colors; The Museum of Innocence
(For a complete list of available reading group guides, and to sign up for the Reading Group Center enewsletter, visit www.readinggroupcenter.com)
Foreword
1. How do modern European culture and Turkish tradition affect the attitudes and actions of the novel’s characters? Are the tensions between both societies reconciled or accommodated?
2. On page 37, Kemal states that his parents were not religious yet they retained many religious customs and traditions. What role does religion play in the novel? In Pico Iyer’s laudatory review in The New York Review of Books, he writes that “As in [Pamuk’s memoir] Istanbul, though even more so, memory becomes a kind of religion, and there is a sense, following Proust, that les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu'on a perdus” (true paradise is the paradise one has lost). What do you think Iyer means? Do you agree with Marcel Proust?
3. What does Chapter 15, “A Few Unpalatable Anthropological Truths,” reveal about sexuality in modern Turkey? How are those “truths” reflected elsewhere in the novel? How might your own cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality influence your views on the behavior of Sibel, Füsun or Kemal?
4. At one point, Kemal reflects on his relationship to Füsun: “Did the pleasure of satisfying evergreen desire give birth to love, or was this sentiment born of, and nurtured by, other things as well?” (p. 54). How might you answer that?
5. Consider the following statements by Kemal: “In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it” (p. 72) and “Now, all these years later, I think that the best way to preserve happiness may be not to recognize it for what it is” (p. 98). Are these two statements contradictory? Do youagree with either?
6. On page 157, Kemal tells of “the astonishing powers of consolation that objects held,” and, on page 73, says that “mementos preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanied us through those moments.” How are these notions expressed throughout the novel? Do you share Kemal’s beliefs regarding objects and mementos?
7. What do you think Kemal means when he states, on page 102, that “the gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region”? What is that “gap”? How are the concepts of the “gap” and “the cleft between the felt and the imagined” (p. 347) represented in the novel?
8. On page 113, Berrin tells Kemal that a “girl with brains doesn’t judge a man by the way he thinks. She looks at his family, at the way he deports himself.” What does this comment reveal about Berrin and his class? Where else is this idea reflected in the novel?
9. How are political events within Turkey from the 1970s and 1980s integrated into the novel? Do the characters address the political turmoil surrounding them? In his portrayal of the characters’ relation to current events, what might Pamuk be saying about them and their society?
10. On page 176, Pamuk writes, “Sibel, with the felicitous intuition so prevalent in the bourgeoisies of non-Western countries, and most particularly Muslim countries, saw psychoanalysis as a ‘scientific sharing of confidences’ invented for Westerners unaccustomed to the curative traditions of family solidarity and shared secrets.” What do you think of that quote? How might it explain Sibel or other characters’ behavior?
11. Is the change of Füsun’s hair color from blond to black significant? How might these two representations of Füsun symbolize the tendencies and paradoxes of modern Turkey?
12. On page 219, Sibel says: “The art of love is in finding a balance of equals . . . If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it’s about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.” What do you think she means? Do you agree? How might Sibel’s definition of “equal” compare with your own?
13. On page 302, Kemal realizes “that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.” How is Pamuk’s writing of The Museum of Innocence both a reflection and realization of that belief? Consider Chapter 52, “A Film About Life and Agony Should Be Sincere,” and Füsun’s later interest in painting birds. How might Pamuk’s depiction of film and the visual arts function as metaphors for the characters’ shifting circumstances and inner lives?
14. Review Chapter 54, “Time,” and Chapter 62, “To Help Pass the Time,” in the context of the rest of the story. How would you describe the novel’s notion of time? Is it realistic? Metaphoric? Philosophic? Did the book make you think differently about time?
15. In 2005, Pamuk spoke to the Swiss press about the Turkish killings of Kurds and Armenians, for which he was subsequently charged by Turkey with “insulting national character.” Although the charges were later dropped, how might Chapter 59, “Getting Past the Censors,” be both a satire and a commentary on Pamuk’s experience with Turkish authorities?
16. Consider the following statement by Kemal: “In those days I’d ceased to think of my life as something I lived in wakeful consciousness of what I was doing: I’d begun instead to think of it as something imagined, something—just like love—that issued from my dreams, and as I had no wish either to fight my growing pessimism about the world or to surrender myself to it unconditionally, I acted as if no such thoughts had entered my mind” (p. 420). What does Kemal’s admission reveal about him? About his relationship to Füsun? How are Kemal’s concepts of the “real” and the “imaginary” reflected thematically and stylistically throughout the novel?
17. In Chapter 82, “Collectors,” Pamuk playfully explores the social and psychological contexts of collecting. Why might there be a sense of shame attached to collecting? How do you distinguish between a collector and a hoarder? Do you collect anything? If so, what do you think drives your passion?
18. In the novel’s final chapter, “Happiness,” Kemal says: “With my museum I want to teach not just the Turkish people but all the people of the world to take pride in the lives they live. I’ve traveled all over, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes: While the West takes pride in itself, most of the rest of the world lives in shame. But if the objects that bring us shame are displayed in a museum, they are immediately transformed into possessions in which to take pride” (p. 518). How do you interpret this passage? Does The Museum of Innocence accomplish Kemal’s goal? What do shame and pride have to do with a museum?
19. How do you understand Kemal’s claim that “As visitors admire the objects and honor the memory of Füsun and Kemal, with due reverence, they will understand that . . . this is not simply a story of lovers, but of the entire realm, that is, of Istanbul” (p. 524)? How might this assertion be true?
20. To what do you think the “innocence” of the title refers? Considering page 124 and the final chapter, “Happiness,” how do Orhan and Kemal’s perceptions of Füsun compare? Does your perception of Füsun differ from theirs? What do you think of Kemal’s final words of the novel?
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