The Museum of Innocence

After many months, I have finally finished reading The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, which I picked for fairly obvious reasons. My Name is Red is one of my favourite novels and helped form how I think about art, history and objects, so I had high hopes of this novel.

It is the first person narrative of a man living in 1970s-80s Istanbul, and Pamuk is at his best describing the social, cultural, and political atmosphere in which the rich, westernized Kemal Basmaci moves. After a whirlwind affair, Kemal spends the next twenty-five years grieving over and pursuing his lost love, Füsun, and obsessively collecting objects related to her, from which he gains solace. After her tragic death, he decides to turn this haphazard collection into a museum – the Museum of Innocence – and to do so he visits over 5,000 small, personal museums worldwide.

I found the book, overall, disappointing. The central character is not sympathetic, and I found myself getting irritated with his constant tragic whining. Where it gets compelling, however, is when the narrative reaches the establishment of the museum. Kemal’s visits to, and descriptions of, a wealth of personal collections (from Paris to Hangzhou) show a real feeling for the passions of the collector and the wonder that the visitor experiences in such small museums. At one point, he even discusses how objects in his ‘Museum of Innocence’ should be displayed, how visitors should experience the collection, and how the guards should interact with them. He starts to collect (you might even say meta-collect) ‘trinkets’ and signage from the museums he most likes.

The claimed conceit of the novel is, in fact, to act as a catalogue and narrative guide for all the objects in the museum, to show visitors the devotion and history behind each one. Ironically, then, most of the novel does not evoke these objects convincingly enough, but this sentiment does conjure up all that is best about small, personal museums. Supposedly, the museum actually exists, and the book will give the visitor entry to it, both physically and mentally. Pamuk gains his own voice in the final chapters explaining how he came to write the book as Kemal put the museum together.

Pamuk apparently has such a collection of his own, evoking Istanbul, which is to go on display this year in the very house he assigns to the fictional museum. I wait with baited breath for this collection to allow the Museum of Innocence truly to shine.