{"id":16988,"date":"2012-04-12T10:04:06","date_gmt":"2012-04-12T14:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookdragon.si.edu\/?p=16988"},"modified":"2014-05-16T00:28:31","modified_gmt":"2014-05-16T04:28:31","slug":"museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk-translated-by-maureen-freely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk-translated-by-maureen-freely\/","title":{"rendered":"Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Museum<\/a>In spite of its heft (500+ pages, or 20.5 hours if you let the perfectly-paced\u00a0John Lee<\/a> read to you), not much really happens in\u00a0The Museum of Innocence<\/em><\/a>. I’m adding here the requisite spoiler alert, but I’m fairly certain that most readers will guess the outcome lonnnggggg before the final pages.<\/p>\n

In Istanbul in 1975, rich man Kemal (30)\u00a0falls in love with poor distant relation F\u00fcsun (18). Kemal goes ahead anyway with his long-planned engagement to perfect partner Sibel; F\u00fcsun\u00a0disappears. Kemal finally breaks off with Sibel, finds F\u00fcsun, waits eight years for her to dump her “fatso” husband (by going to her family’s home some four times a week).\u00a0F\u00fcsun\u00a0dies. Kemal builds a museum to her memory, filled with everyday objects from her life (4,213 cigarette butts alone!). He passes on April 12, 2007 [hence today’s post] on what would have been her 50th birthday. A character named\u00a0Orhan Pamuk<\/a> authors the dead man’s obsessive story.<\/p>\n

In supreme irony, that writer-character \u2013\u00a0“chain-smoking twenty-three-year-old Orhan” \u2013\u00a0makes his first appearance at Kemal and Sibel’s lavish engagement party. Kemal disses the young man as “nothing special,” then dismisses the entire Pamuk table\u00a0\u2013 “his beautiful mother, his father, his elder brother, his uncle, and his cousins” \u2013 as “tedious.” Four\u00a0hundred pages (and some three decades) later, that tedious young man morphs into “the esteemed Orhan Pamuk,” whom Kemal chooses to “[narrate] the story in my name, and with my approval” \u2013 which might remind devoted Pamuk readers that this meta-Orhan announced he was writing a new novel titled\u00a0The Museum of Innocence<\/em> about half-way through the real Pamuk’s\u00a0Snow<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Kemal confesses on the second-to-the-last page of Museum<\/em>\u00a0that although he read Snow<\/em> “all the way to the end,” it proved to be “a bit of a struggle” given his dislike of politics. Snow<\/em>‘s protagonist Ka even gets a quick mention in Museum\u00a0<\/em>as meta-Orhan laments over the public’s accusations of misrepresentations in his work \u2013 which might make you consider\u00a0why Kemal would choose this Orhan as his mouthpiece. Apolitical a character as Kemal might be, Museum<\/em> merely glosses over class, East\/West identity, restrictively gendered mores, the nature of literature (and so much more), for the numbing details of Kemal’s fixated stalking and skeezy kleptomania.\u00a0By book’s end, perhaps we can just blame this meta-Orhan for all the novel’s weaknesses.<\/p>\n

When I lamented over my grave disappointment to an\u00a0erudite literary scholar buddy (because I knew he’s a huge fan of Pamuk’s\u00a0Snow<\/em>), he mentioned the post-Nobel curse that’s plagued other great writers like J.M. Coetzee<\/a>; he also\u00a0admitted he never finished\u00a0Museum<\/em>. Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature<\/a>;\u00a0his gorgeous\u00a0Nobel Lecture, “My Father’s Suitcase,”<\/a>\u00a0makes for a heartfelt antidote to Museum<\/em>. Interestingly, an actual museum is apparently still planned to open in a building that Pamuk bought in 1999 in the\u00a0\u00c7ukurcuma\u00a0neighborhood of Istanbul, where much of the novel is set.<\/p>\n

Which means .. if, after you’ve read Museum<\/em>, and still haven’t had enough of this obsession, rest assured, your entry is guaranteed on page 520.<\/p>\n

Tidbit<\/strong>: I can’t believe this<\/a> turned up in my inbox less than an hour after I hit ‘publish’ for this post: The Innocence of Objects<\/a><\/em> \u2013 Pamuk’s catalog of the objects in his real-life Museum (!)\u00a0\u2013\u00a0debuts this fall! The timing feels surreal!<\/p>\n

Readers<\/strong>: Adult<\/p>\n

Published<\/strong>: 2009 (United States)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In spite of its heft (500+ pages, or 20.5 hours if you let the perfectly-paced\u00a0John Lee read to you), not much really happens in\u00a0The Museum of Innocence. I’m adding here the requisite spoiler alert, but I’m fairly certain that most readers will guess the outcome…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27419,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,81,6,66,763],"tags":[84,6608,10,613,13,1390,1391,1392],"class_list":["post-16988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adult-readers","category-audio","category-fiction","category-translation","category-turkish","tag-betrayal","tag-bookdragon","tag-family","tag-john-lee","tag-love","tag-maureen-freely","tag-museum-of-innocence","tag-orhan-pamuk"],"yoast_head":"\nMuseum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely - BookDragon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk-translated-by-maureen-freely\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely - BookDragon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In spite of its heft (500+ pages, or 20.5 hours if you let the perfectly-paced\u00a0John Lee read to you), not much really happens in\u00a0The Museum of Innocence. 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