Word: kemalized
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Stripped to its essence, the plot is an old-fashioned tale of unrequited love. Kemal, a successful middle-aged Turkish businessman, walks into a boutique to buy a handbag for his fiancée and is immediately smitten with an 18-year-old shopgirl named Füsun, who happens to be a distant relative of his. Their affair—initially, a casual one—takes on a special gravity; despite its European affectations, 1970s Istanbul remains deeply wary of women who have sex before marriage. The two eventually do consummate their relationship, however, and the first...
This being a Pamuk novel, of course, that happiness is short-lived. While the unabashed descriptions of lovemaking can at times verge on clumsy, the descriptions of loss are etched in sharp relief. Kemal, much to his regret, ends things with Füsun, and the next 350-odd pages chronicle his devastating remorse and unsuccessful attempts to win her back. In the process, he alienates his friends, breaks off his engagement, sacrifices his stake in a distribution and export firm, and even starts a production company called Lemon Films Inc. to finance the absurd scripts of his ex-lover?...
...book moves slowly, as it’s meant to. Kemal preserves moments in his memory as meticulously as the objects in his museum, cataloguing them in careful and loving detail. Pamuk himself completed this novel over a period of six years, spending at least 10 hours each day alone writing in a flat overlooking old Istanbul, and the sense of that isolation drifts throughout his painstaking dissection of heartbreak. More than any other novelist today, Pamuk has laid claim to the dispassionate prose style and layered, self-reflective inheritance of Proust. At one point, he follows a numbered list...
...Born Kemal Amin Kasem on April 27, 1932, the son of a Lebanese grocer father and a Lebanese-American mother...
...Mustafa tells the story of Mustafa Kemal, who was born in 1881 in Thessaloniki, which is now in Greece but was then part of the Ottoman Empire. He became a soldier, and at 22, as a mere captain, he rebelled against the Sultan. The army banished him to faraway posts but couldn't quash him. A brilliant military strategist, he defeated the British at Gallipoli in 1915, and in 1919 he started a war for independence against occupying European allies that resulted in the founding of modern Turkey...