By Charles R. Larson
Think of all the great stories that have dealt with frustrated love—unrequited, lost, unacknowledged, unfulfilled, one-sided; painful, agonized, obsessive–so many unhappy characters you’d think there wouldn’t be the need for one more. I’m referring to the characters we’ve invested our reading lives in: Romeo and Juliet, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, Gatsby, Molly Bloom, Tom Jones, Emma Bovary, Pip in Great Expectations. The list goes on forever, not only in fiction but also in epics and drama, even poems. That said, it’s difficult to recall a literary character as obsessive and fixated on another as the hero of Orhan Pamuk’s devastating and astonishing new novel, The Museum of Innocence.
Kemal is thirty years old at the beginning of the story and twice that by the end. The rollercoaster ride he takes us on–relentlessly recording the minutest details of his inability to let go of his lost love–is related in the first-person, though there’s a caveat about that narration that I will reveal later. But, first, it’s necessary to provide a couple of basic facts necessary about the novel.
Chapter one begins: “It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it. Had I known, had I cherished this gift, would everything have turned out differently?” Though that second sentence is an ominous question, the rest of the initial paragraph explains Kemal’s happiness. It’s May 26, 1975, and he’s making love to his distant cousin, eighteen-year-old Füsun, from the poorer side of his extended family. Kemal is thirty, and in three weeks everyone who is important in Istanbul will attend a party to celebrate his engagement to Sibel (from another prominent family) at the newly-opened Hilton Hotel.
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