However, the persistence of Kemal’s desire outweighs the conventional happiness he seems to have set up with Sibel. In the next chapter, Kemal is having dinner with his fiancée, not Füsun but the Sorbonne-educated Sibel, who represents the standard quasi-arranged mate for an upper-class Turk like Kemal. The story begins with the happiest moment in Kemal’s life, just after he makes love to Füsun, his 18-year-old distant cousin. Aristotle’s distinction between time (a line connecting all moments in the present) and single moments of the present is ever-present in the book, suggesting that we need to stop thinking about a linear conception of experience: “sometimes these moments we call the ‘present’ can bring us enough happiness to last a century, as they did if Füsun smiled.” “Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space,” declares Kemal, the main character of the novel, after he has seemingly lost everything-save the mementos of his beloved Füsun that comprise what he calls his Museum of Innocence.

Petersburg and the romanticism of Proust’s Paris. What results is an urban portrait recalling the grimness of Dostoyevsky’s St. The book also proffers a profound depiction of Istanbul, a city whose identity is symbolized by the Bosphorus-a bridge between the Middle East and Europe, Muslim and Christian, traditional and secular.

The latest novel (now in paperback) from Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk is The Museum of Innocence, a tragic story of a wealthy, Istanbul man who goes against his societal code and chooses a deliberate life governed by passion. Translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s new museum, named for and based on his 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence, has opened in Istanbul.

The museum of innocence by orhan pamuk