The Museum of Innocence (Vintage International)

A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Kansas City Star “Spellbinding. . . .xa0A resounding confirmation that Orhan Pamuk is one of the great novelists of his generation. With this book, he literally puts love in our hands.”— The Washington Post “Mesmerizing, brilliantly realized. . . . Deeply and compellingly explores the interplay between erotic obsession and sentimentality . . . . There is a master at work in this book. . . . Istanbul—its sounds, its smells, its history—permeates everything.”— Los Angeles Times “Intimate and nuanced…. A classic, spacious love story.”—Pico Iyer, The New York Review of Books “Stunningly original. . . . Engrossing and sensual. . . . Granular and panoramic, satirical and yet grounded in reality. . . . Great writers have made the failed love stories of desperate, self-involved men pulsate. A master, like Pamuk, makes the story feel vital.”—The Associated Pressxa0“Pamuk has created a work concerning romantic love worthy to stand in the company of Lolita, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina . . . . [Pamuk] is as accomplished an anatomist of love as Stendhal or Hazlitt in Liber Amoris . . . . xa0Kemal’s narrative crosses decades, assembling a fascinating social world of families, friends and dependents, a rich palimpsest of the lives and mores of Istanbul’s haute bourgeoisie .”— Financial Times “Enchanting. . . . Maureen Freely’s translation captures the novelist’s playful performance as well as his serious collusion with Kemal. Her melding of tones follows Pamuk’s agility, to redirect our vision to the gravity of his tale.”— The New York Tim... A "New York Times "Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year"Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Kansas City Star" “Spellbinding. . . .xa0A resounding confirmation that Orhan Pamuk is one of the great novelists of his generation. With this book, he literally puts love in our hands.”—"The Washington Post" “Mesmerizing, brilliantly realized. . . . Deeply and compellingly explores the interplay between erotic obsession and sentimentality . . . . There is a master at work in this book. . . . Istanbul—its sounds, its smells, its history—permeates everything.”—"Los Angeles Times" “Intimate and nuanced…. A classic, spacious love story.”—Pico Iyer, " The New York Review of Books"xa0“Stunningly original. . . . Engrossing and sensual. . . . Granular and panoramic, satirical and yet grounded in reality. . . . Great writers have made the failed love stories --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Orhan Pamuk is the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature. Amongst his other achievements in literature, his novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. Orhan Pamuk lives in Istanbul, in the building where he was raised. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Bookmarks Magazine Turkey's most prominent and best-selling novelist, Orhan Pamuk is the rare author who creates highly literary works that also enjoy popular appeal. The Museum of Innocence is no exception. Critics described it as a beautiful, moving love story—not only between Kemal and Fusun but also between Pamuk and his beloved Istanbul. And while the critic from the Cleveland Plain Dealer found Kemal's long-term devotion tedious at times, she also called the story "surprising" and "moving." The major complaint came from the Miami Herald , which cited a lack of momentum and of appealing characters. But without question, fans of star-crossed lovers and exotic locales will find much to delight in here. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2009 : The story of Kemal, the half-hearted industrialist who is the hero of The Museum of Innocence , Orhan Pamuk's first novel since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a deeply private one, built around an often inexplicable obsession that he attempts to justify to the reader. In honor of Füsun, the poor, beautiful cousin he had a short affair with when he was 30 and engaged to another, he has hoarded a museum of relics, both of their time together and of the much longer time when, like Gatsby drawn by the green light on Daisy's dock, he hovered at the edge of her life, held in check (but yet held nearby) by the proprieties of Turkish society. From Kemal's passion Pamuk constructs a masterful meditation on time, desire, and possession, saturated with the details of the city of Pamuk's youth: the brand names, the film stars, the streets, the intricate social relations between classes and between modernity and tradition. It's as if the museum of the title was built in honor not of Füsun but of Istanbul, circa 1975. --Tom Nissley --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Nobel laureate Pamuk's latest is a soaring, detailed and laborious mausoleum of love. During Istanbul's tumultuous 1970s, Kemal Bey, 30-year-old son of an upper-class family, walks readers through a lengthy catalogue of trivial objects, which, though seeming mundane, hold memories of his life's most intimate, irretrievable moments. The main focus of Kemal's peculiar collection of earrings, ticket stubs and drinking glasses is beloved Füsun, his onetime paramour and longtime unrequited love. An 18-year-old virginal beauty, modest shopgirl and poor distant relation, Füsun enters Kemal's successful life just as he is engaged to Sibel, a very special, very charming, very lovely girl. Though levelheaded Sibel provides Kemal compassionate relief from their social strata's rising tensions, it is the fleeting moments with fiery, childlike Füsun that grant conflicted Kemal his deepest peace. The poignant truth behind Kemal's obsession is that his museum provides a closeness with Füsun he'll never regain. Though its incantatory middle suffers from too many indistinguishable quotidian encounters, this is a masterful work. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 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 Füsun'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.xa0Outside 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.xa0When 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."xa0"Please bring it tomorrow. Don't forget," Füsun said, her eyes widening. "It is very dear to me."xa0"All right."xa0Füsun 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. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. From AudioFile To write a very long book about obsession is something of a parlor trick, since no matter how thoroughly the story's narrator explains the reasons for and symptoms of his obsession, the reader may marvel but cannot share it. Pamuk creates a richly detailed portrait of Kemal, a wealthy young Turkish man pathologically in love with beautiful shop girl Fusun, his distant poor cousin. The narrative pace is leisurely as the years pass and nothing happens between them, and John Lee works quietly but deftly to bring Kemal sympathetically to life. The portrait of Istanbul in the '70s drawn by Pamuk and Lee is a marvelous carpet for the claustrophobic space in which the story plays out, but while masterfully imagined and beautifully performed, it has its longeurs. B.G. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Read more