The Museum of Innocence
by Orhan Pamuk
Alfred A. Knopf, 2009
I picked up this heavy tome knowing Pamuk has won the Nobel Prize and thought, I'll never be able to read this. I've tried other current Nobel Prize winners and found myself lost in strange imagery, stream of consciousness sentences, ideas way beyond my comprehension. I gave up every time.
I'm not going to do that this time. Pamuk has written in language clear as a bell -- although I don't know if this was written in English first. No, he wrote it in Turkish. Thanks to his translator, Maureen Freely.
And slowly I realized I was being taken through a museum. Pamuk was showing me artifacts from what he called in the first sentence "the happiest moment of my life." There's a menu and napkin from the restaurant where he used to go with his fiancee. He describes a handbag, a yellow dress. Sometimes he speaks directly to the reader as if showing them the napkin and menu. Other times the paragraph points to objects subtly, showing them as the story progresses.
It's a big museum and the artifacts are small. The memories seem to be both grand and the meaningless little stuff that remains with you because it really has meaning. I'm in Turkey though I don't quite know when it is yet -- modern time but which decade? So I'm in for a tour of the mundane as well as the exotic, everyday mixed with the life-changing.
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