Word: kemal
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...Istanbul's Akaretler Row Houses were once regarded as a symbol of change and modernity. The 33 elegantly neoclassical dwellings were designed by a Paris-educated, Ottoman-Armenian architect as accommodation for military staff based in the nearby Dolmabahce Palace. Modern Turkey's founder and onetime army officer, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, lived for a time in No. 76 with his mother...
...emphasis on B-movies and the world of cinema in particular strongly echoes the more metaphysical treatment afforded them in his novel “The New Life.” These themes could easily grow as worn as the belongings of Füsun’s that Kemal so often caresses...
...repetitions into a self-referential body of work as complex as that of Nabokov, Barth, or Bolaño. Just as with those writers, the relationship between author and fiction remains intriguingly fluid. Many of Pamuk’s fictional landmarks are recognizable from his non-fiction memoir; Kemal even meets a character named Orhan Pamuk at his engagement party...
...book’s final pages, the lines between Kemal, the narrator, and the “real” Pamuk blur to the point of indistinguishability—all three men come to seem interchangeable with each other, as well as with any of the narrators in Pamuk’s other books. These tiny, invisible connections unspool gradually to spin out a place both intricate and familiar, the nostalgia-saturated inverse of the fast-paced modern city: turning the first few pages of the “Innocence” feels like nothing more than coming home...
Having taken to long, solitary swims in the unsuccessful attempt to forget Füsun, Kemal remembers that “Later, when I had swum back to shore and lay exhausted under the sun with my eyes closed, I would entertain the hopeful thought that all serious and honorable men who happened to fall passionately in love went through the same things as I did.” Like the anise-flavored raki that characters drink together to take refuge from their individual disappointments, “The Museum of Innocence” can be a bitter draught?...