🦋 Note toward a review of Museum of Innocence
The proper way to read Pamuk's novels is to identify fully with the characters. It is easy to get off the right track and see this book as being a moral indictment of Kemal but better to sink into the warm bath of hypocrisy and self-deception which is his mind. In chapter 67 Feridun is suddenly coming into himself as a character rather than a prop, and is making a movie based (unspokenly, partly) on Füsun's affair with Kemal and with reference to a novel by Halit Ziya -- I believe the novel in question is Kırık Hayatlar -- and the complexity and cross-purposes of the various layers of self-deceit both are practicing here are pretty stunning. ...An allegorical reading of Kemal's story, in which he is striving to throw off his cosmopolitan self and return to true Turkishness, might be part of the story he is telling about himself -- a way to distance himself from responsibility for his actions and obsessions.
 Here's something very strange -- it looks like Kırık Hayatlar was made into a film about 15 years before Kemal and Feridun started working together. It seems a little weird that Kemal is not mentioning this, it's not the kind of detail I would expect him to elide.
posted evening of Friday, November 6th, 2009
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