Word: pamuk
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...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...
With that mindset wilts one potentially massive critique: Pamuk never writes his way out of Istanbul; the physical and mental geography mapped out in “Museum” is old hat. Lost loves and newspaper columnists, tea houses and Turkish-brand sodas recur in all his books, and the 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...
...Pamuk avoids claustrophobia by elevating his 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...
...tale of objects illuminated by the memories they evoke. “Museum of Innocence” may lack the tight construction of predecessors like “My Name Is Red,” but Kemal’s frustrated recollections resonate more intimately than anything Pamuk has written before...