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The Museum Of Innocence (2008)

by Orhan Pamuk(Favorite Author)

3.67 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0307266761 (ISBN13: 9780307266767)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

Knopf

review 1: This book revolves around the life of Kemal, a Turkish man whose family is Istanbul’s richest. The book starts at the part of Kemal’s life where he is soon to be engaged to his beloved girlfriend, Sibel. However, right before the engagement and out of the blue he meets a distant relative, Füsun an 18 years old girl. He falls in love with her and engages in an affair. SPOILER ALERT:-Honestly speaking, I really hated the book. I’ll start by pointing out the things I liked (which is why I opted for a 2 stars rating over 1). 1-The fact that I’m Egyptian, really made me feel the similarities between our culture and Turkey’s. I can easily describe Turkey as a Western-Arab hybrid.2-At some parts of the book I really enjoyed the author’s descriptions of the environmen... moret in which Kemal was involved in. 3-I only kind of enjoyed the plot from the beginning until the engagement party. The BAD:-In this part of the review, I’ll talk about each character alone. Kemal: The main character. Let me summarize his personality. 1-Cheater.2-Selfish. 3-Weak.4-Pathetic.5-Creepy. Ok, this man, cheated on his girlfriend and started an affair with an 18 years old relative. She leaves him, gets married and for more than a decade he is mourning over her loss and can’t get over her. MAN UP. It starts before his engagement party with Sibel, he invites Füsun to the party and right after it she disappears, he is so miserable that she walked out on him that he confesses to his fiancée, she breaks up with him. Yet, all he cares about is how he’ll find Füsun, months later she shows up and invites him to meet her parents, he goes at her place all excited, only to know that she got married to a film director. He doesn’t give up and spends 7 years (yes, you read that, S E V E N Y E A R S) trying to start a relationship with her. Despite the fact he knows she’s using his money to produce her huband’s movie. He doesn’t care. Now off to the unbelievably creepy part. Each time he sees Füsun he collects anything she touched (a can of soda, a cigarette, etc) and stores it in an apartment that is meant to be a museum of everything Füsun touched. So he has this entire apartment that has an olive seed which she ate, bed sheets where they made love and so on! When he gets super depressed, he’d go to his museum and sniff all those things he collected. Finally, at the end of the book, she tells him she thinks he ruined her life because he didn’t want her to become an actress so she wouldn’t be more successful than he is. They get onto his car and she drives. She crashes into a tree and dies. In the last page another twist is revealed, Kemal is not the one who is speaking himself, instead he is speaking to Orhan Pamuk and telling him his story. The book ends where Kemal tells Orhan ‘’Tell everyone that I’ve lived a very happy life”. Huh? Happy? You lived an alcoholic running after a girl you know was using you for more than a decade. FüsunI depise her. She ruined Kemal’s marriage, walked out on him, used his money to produce her husband’s movie. Sibel My favorite character just because she gave Kemal a lesson he DESERVED. Orhan Pamuk: The author’s voice doesn’t really impress my taste. I hated his uber descriptive style. Basically, a page could have only one line that adds to the dialogue and the rest would be memories of, for example, where Kemal used to dine with his father when he was a child, when one time his uncle asked him to buy him wine, etc. Otherwise, the lines would be filled with descriptive text of how light had entered the room in which Kemal was in, how the scent of the room was distinctive. Don’t get me wrong, I like descriptions but Orhan really goes past limits at least to me.All in all, books taste differently to everyone. Others could view this book as an oh so tragic story cry their eyes out while reading it. However, I simply couldn’t sympathize with Kemal, not even for one page.
review 2: I don't usually review the titles I add to Goodreads. After all, how presumptuous to "review" a book by a nobel laureate. But I am so amazed by this book that I couldn't resist. Maybe because I visited the actual Museum of Innocence in Istanbul--twice, as I found it immensely intriguing--but this seems like one of the most ingenious, creative and unusual, and moving books I have ever read. Although parts of the book do become somewhat hard to read, with Kemal's unending obsessiveness over Füsun, and the minutia of his collections, catalogues, and chronologies, overall, it is this incredible detail that gives the book its unique power and gravity. Much in the same way that Joyce commented that if Dublin were to disappear from the Earth it could be recreated from Ulysses, so too could Istanbul be recreated from this novel. It is a love affair with that city just as much as it is between Kemal and Füsun. But most of all, this is a love story, at once sad and joyous, starring lovers who are by turns infuriating, flawed, and endearing, in short, human. In the strange way that this book moves in and out of a physical reality with its real-life companion museum, the reader/museum visitor contemplates the way that the totality of objects with which a person interacts in their life defines both the person and the world in which they have lived. Finally, it should be noted that this book was written after Pamuk won the Nobel Prize. When other writers might rest on their laurels, Pamuk created this complex and multifaceted achievement--stunning by any measure. less

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