David ShashaReview by David Shasha
 
Back in 1990, English-language readers were introduced to the work of Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk.  With the publication of his brilliant novel The White Castle we got our first glimpse of a truly extraordinary literary talent.  Pamuk’s writing at that time was closely linked to the post-modern historical novels of Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie, and Umberto Eco whose work hearkened back to the fantastical fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Such writing took seriously the realities of history, but placed them into new and challenging contexts, creating what the critic Christine Brooke-Rose has called “palimpsest history.”

The Museum of Innocence: your purchase in part benefits Levantine Cultural CenterIn Pamuk’s White Castle the reader was transported back to Ottoman Turkey in its engagement with the European world. The story broached for the reader many of the themes that would become staples of Pamuk’s writing in the future: The struggle between East and West; the fragile and permeable nature of human identities; the division between economic classes; the weight of tradition and social convention in a modern age; and, most importantly, the tricky status of the Double—that doppelganger that creates inversions and transformations which makes identity confused and unstable. The novel was spare, but elegant; a truly mesmerizing piece of fiction.

The two protagonists in The White Castle become inverted mirror images of one another and eventually change places; the Italian who is captured by the Turk and becomes part of his household at the end of the tale becomes a Turk, the process completing a complex set of arrangements that has been working itself out over the course of the novel. The White Castle was set in a time when the Ottoman Empire was still a going concern and delved into a cultural history that saw Europe and the Muslim world interacting in ways that have today been mostly forgotten.  With the eclipse of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, an ascendant Europe sought to overrun the Muslim world; a reality that has led us to the many difficulties that we face today.

Pamuk followed The White Castle with two contemporary novels, The Black Book (1994) and The New Life (1997), both of which were more stylized domestic dramas involving protagonists in and out of love, searching in present-day Istanbul for their partners and trying to make sense of love’s confusion. Both novels were again highly stylized works that partook of the post-modern ethos. Information was kept to a minimum and the reader was caught in a labyrinth as the minimalist plot unfolded.  Bringing to mind the post-Noirish work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, these novels valued style over plot and character, but continued to examine the nature of Turkish life—this time in a more current setting.
 
With his epic novel My Name is Red in 2001, Pamuk returned to palimpsest history. The story this time involved a murder mystery that took place among a group of painters, known in Ottoman culture as “miniaturists,” whose work was seen as controversial in Muslim circles for the ways in which it sought to represent reality.  As is known, pictorial representation is frowned upon in Islamic law.

My Name is Red returned to the Calvino-like brilliance of The White Castle, bringing the reader back to an Ottoman past redolent with the sights, smells, and textures of a world now gone. It dazzled the reader with its overlapping narratives and numerous narrators. It was a fractured text that, once again, was less concerned with the development of its characters and more concerned with the literary effects that could be generated by the stylistic virtuosity of the prose. It was a tour-de-force for Pamuk and yet another great step forward in his literary project.

Author Orhan Pamuk: winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for LiteratureIn the long shadow of the 9/11 attacks, Pamuk published his 2004 break-out novel, Snow; a work that brought him international recognition and a Nobel Prize.  Snow combined the social domesticity of The Black Book and The New Life with a contemporary flavor.  The story concerned a young poet coming back to Turkey from his sojourn in Germany in order to write a newspaper article about a spate of suicides involving some young girls who were finding it difficult to wear head-scarves.  You see, a central part of modern Turkish culture, in the wake of the Ottoman collapse and the emergence of Turkey under Kemal Ataturk, was the forced secularization of the society.  In Snow we see the toxic effects of this process and the cultural confusion that was created by the removal of religion from public life.

Snow was a huge step forward for Pamuk as it showed a serious development in his writing. Plot and character were now fleshed out in ways that had not been the case in his previous novels.  His literary style was still dazzling, but he hunkered down and really drew out his story and those populating it with a real depth of feeling and human intimacy.  The elements of the post-modern reflexive novel were not relinquished, but were integrated into a more realistic story-telling whose muscularity resonated among a larger reading audience.  Snow became a huge international success and brought Pamuk the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In the wake of his father’s death, Pamuk published his Istanbul: Memories of a City which looked back not only on his family history and his own personal biography, but to the wider context of the city in which his novels took place.  In Istanbul Pamuk reviewed his own life and the life history of the city in which he lived.  It was a deeply rewarding examination of the Turkish national character told in the idiosyncratic manner that had by then become Pamuk’s signature.

Reviewing centuries of history and the way in which history is situated in our daily lives, Istanbul continued the project of laying out the Turkish story in an elegant and insightful manner.  It provided the reader with a portrait of Pamuk’s background as a writer of fiction, but allowed us to better understand the concerns that informed his novels.  Central to these concerns was the concept that in Turkish is called Huzun, a melancholy that permeates a culture that once loomed large on the world stage, but had now become a shadow of its former self.

In the wake of Pamuk’s many successes over the past few years, we now have a new novel that ties together so many of the elements that have been central to his writing.

The Museum of Innocence (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) is perhaps Pamuk’s most brilliant work to date and discusses the pitfalls of love over the course of a quarter century in Istanbul society.

Returning to the heady fusion of the present and the complexity of the multi-faceted culture of Istanbul, its social classifications and its internal struggles, The Museum of Innocence successfully merges the contemporary Western novel of manners with the concerns of an older set of cultural values that Pamuk takes from the classical Islamic tradition.
 
You see, the basic literary pattern of The Museum of Innocence superimposes the tale of Layla and Majnun upon a modern love story. The story of the novel is deceptively simple: A young and very rich scion of a prominent Nisantasi family is engaged to an ideal young woman but falls in love with a cousin of his who is from a less privileged background.
 
The protagonist Kemal is a wealthy free spirit who one day is walking down the street with his beautiful fiancée Sibel doing some window shopping. Espying a nice pocketbook in a shop window, Sibel triggers Kemal to return later that day to the shop to buy it for her.  Kamal enters the shop and is struck by the beauty of his cousin Fusun who is working there as a clerk.  After giving the bag to Sibel, Kemal is told that it is a fake and that he should return it.  Coming back to the shop the next day, Kemal begins to figure a way to seduce Fusun and get her to visit a spare apartment that he has in order have sex with her.

Premarital sexual relations are still stigmatized in 1970s Turkey, so Kemal’s seduction of Fusun, a young girl whose previous claim to fame was her participation in a national beauty pageant—a fact that made her less than worthy as a proper Turkish girl, leads to great difficulties.

Engaged to the “ideal” girl Sibel, Kemal’s sexual dalliance with Fusun is bound to create all sorts of problems for him.  But being free and unfettered—and rich—Kemal does not think of the consequences of his actions.  He plunges into the sexual liaison with Fusun which turns him mad. All he can think of is the Fusun and the passion he is sharing with her.  He cannot seem to process how all this is going to play itself out over the long run.

Early in the novel, as the sexual dalliance is progressing, Kemal has a chat with his father.  During the talk, Kemal learns that his father once had a very young mistress that he loved deeply.  Ignoring the possible negative consequences for his marriage, his passions got the better of him.  But the story of this affair ends miserably with the eventual estrangement and death of the mistress.  Kemal’s father remains obsessed with his past love and warns Kemal of the dangers inherent in such a dalliance.
 
But, of course, Kemal—a headstrong young man—remains oblivious to the possible consequences of his actions.  He is too besotted with the carnal pleasures that he is having with the voluptuous Fusun.

In the first part of the novel, we see Kemal’s personal life beginning to disintegrate.  He cannot have both Sibel and Fusun and begins to sink in a sea of woman trouble that permeates all aspects of his daily life.  In this process Pamuk expertly presents the social details of Istanbul’s class-based culture and shows us the way in which Kemal is moving from his upper-class life to the middle-class life of Fusun.  The changes start off subtly, but eventually turn into a huge existential break that creates unbearable tensions in Kemal’s life.

Over the course of the novel Kemal becomes more and more unhinged.  Like the mythical character Majnun in the tale of Layla and Majnun, Kemal completely loses his mind.  What is so striking about The Museum of Innocence is that it seamlessly brings the classic Arab myth of Majnun into the contemporary present.  Beyond this, the story is told through the literary device that is alluded to in the novel’s title: Over the course of time, Kemal collects thousands of artifacts that will eventually comprise a museum dedicated to his great love for Fusun.

As the novel progresses, we are made to see Kemal in two ways: On the one hand, we are intimately tied to his lust and obsessive love.  As he has sex with Fusun the reader is right there with him and feels the things that he feels.  Yet, on the other hand, we are forced to take a step back and assess the madness that Kemal is developing.  He neglects his business affairs and his social life in order to pursue Fusun.

We also come to see Fusun in two ways: First, we see an innocent young girl who gives her highly-prized virginity to Kemal and seems to reciprocate his love.  Yet on closer inspection, Fusun may well be using her overpowering sexuality to entrap Kemal.  Fusun has already been shown to us as a social climber and a gold-digger, so it is not so hard to characterize her having sexual relations with Kemal as a means to force him into a socially-advantageous marriage.

But, as in the story of Layla and Majnun, there will be no happiness for the lovers.  Kemal continues on the path to marry Sibel and Fusun forsakes him.  The bulk of The Museum of Innocence tells of Kemal’s great desperation to get Fusun back.  In this process, over the course of the novel, Pamuk continues to deploy the binary scheme of Kemal as completely delusional against Kemal the noble lover who would do anything for that love.
 
I recently read a review of The Museum of Innocence in Commentary magazine where the reviewer began her discussion with a comparison between the novel and Edith Wharton’s classic The Age of Innocence; another novel of love gone wrong.  I found it telling that a Western critic would seek to tie Pamuk’s novel to a classic of Western literature, ignoring the larger cultural overtones presented by the Layla and Majnun paradigm.  Seeing Pamuk as a Muslim writer is inconvenient in some quarters, as it was in the case of Salman Rushdie.

But the truth is that Pamuk, like his Levantine predecessor Naguib Mahfouz, has successfully fused the model of the modern Western novel with a serious engagement with the Islamic tradition.  Rooting his work, again like Mahfouz, in the contemporary reality of his society, Pamuk remains extremely cognizant of history and its many cultural riches.

So the comparison with Edith Wharton is only one side of the coin. Indeed, a good deal of Pamuk’s literary concern has to do with the whole project of Westernization and its effects on Turkish society.  In his many books he continues to explore what it means to be a Turkish citizen in the modern world.  He carefully parses the institutional demands of Ataturk and the way in which the enforced secularization of Turkish society has played a significant role in the moral development of the culture.  Like Mahfouz, he explores the stories of young people who are navigating their way in the labyrinth of modernity and of class culture that often overwhelms them.

In this sense, Orhan Pamuk is not only the most prominent and artistically successful writer in the contemporary Middle East, he is more specifically the heir to the master Naguib Mahfouz who was also concerned with many of the same issues.  Tackling the complex themes of tradition and modernity, West and East, Pamuk finds in history a critical model for the understanding of the present. 

In a lengthy excursus that appears towards the very end of the book, Kemal explains in great detail the way in which his Museum developed.  Central to his concerns is the role of Time in our lives.

In a post-modern twist that has become typical of his writing, Pamuk has Kemal approach him—Orhan Pamuk—to write the story of his life as a catalog for the Museum.

As Kemal explains to Orhan:

Because all the objects in my museum—and with them, my entire story—can be seen at the same time from any perspective, visitors will lose all sense of Time.  This is the greatest consolation in life.  In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart’s compulsions, we are consoled by not finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.  Please write this in the book, too.  Let us not conceal the way in which I had you write it, or how you went about your work.  When it is done, please give me all the drafts and your notebooks, so that we can display them too. (p. 520)

In this passage is a capsule poetics of Pamuk’s literary project. There is the obsessive concern with Time as a central factor in our lives; as is the case with Kemal’s hero Marcel Proust, the French writer whose explorations of memory and “lost” Time have become prominent in Western culture.  Kemal wants to “lose” Time and yet he is completely entwined with it.  He cannot relinquish Time, because Time is the mark of his the lost love he had with Fusun.  He collects all the artifacts associated with Fusun in order to recapture Time and inscribe his memories of that past in the present.
 
This museum is thus, like Wharton’s fiction of 19th century American society, not “innocent” at all.  There are no “innocent” readings here.  We are embroiled in the harsh realities of life in all its brutal complexity.  Love is fleeting and it is enmeshed with the social and class-based machinations that mark our individual personalities and our place in the culture.  Kemal loses Fusun and obsessively tries to win her back.  This process turns him pathetic and mad and yet the signs of this amour fou, with its echoes of Layla and Majnun, are all he has.  It is in the creation and building of the museum in which the story can find its home.
 
This contentious struggle between West and East is not an opposition for Pamuk, but a way of soldiering through the complexity of Middle Eastern life at the present moment.  Knowing all too well that the historical culture of Ottoman civilization was always a series of negotiations between different cultures, Pamuk provides his readers with a richly configured assemblage of intertwined worlds that are eventually housed under the rubric of the museum.  The museum thus tells the story of love and of culture and of civilization as it fuses the past, present, and future in a post-modern bricolage set in the form of a classic realist novel.

The great dexterity of Orhan Pamuk’s writing is in its power to collapse the various oppositions and generate a more flexible fiction that embraces both the Ottoman-Muslim past through the classic tales of the tradition, like Layla and Majnun, as well as the conventions of the modern European novel.  Like his predecessor Mahfouz, Pamuk’s novels are richly constructed universes that merge dream and reality.  He has drawn for us characters with great depth and pathos. Kemal is endearing even as he acts boorishly and insensitively.  Others may see him as having lost his mind, but over the course of more than 500 pages, the reader is tied to his every thought and action.  We root for him to win, even though we know all too well how such love stories go. 

The Museum of Innocence is the work of an expert writer who keeps improving his craft.  Looking at the long line of books that began for the English-speaking audience with The White Castle, we see an author who continues to grow and whose gifts are clearly expanding.  Amazingly, his work has improved after winning the Nobel Prize, just as he has ignored the perquisites of literary stardom which often cause sloth and a resting on past laurels.  As a writer he continues to hone his perennial themes and find new and exciting ways to present some fascinating characters and stories to us.  In this new novel we are guided through the present by adopting the perspective of the past.  In this sense, Pamuk is a wonderful example of the Radical Traditionalist; an artist whose work is contemporary but completely informed by the classic texts of the literary tradition.

The Radical Traditionalism of Orhan Pamuk is the perfect model for those of us who seek to better understand the multivalent nature of the world we live in.  And as we navigate the complexities of Middle Eastern history and politics, such a stance is immensely valuable to see culture and humanity as they truly are.

Based in Brooklyn, David Shasha writes for The Huffington Post among other publications. This review originally appeared in the Sephardic Heritage Update of March 2010.