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Monday, October 26th, 2009
Sometimes I felt that my happiness issued not from the possibility that Füsun was near, but from something less tangible. I felt as if I could see the very essence of life in these poor neighborhoods, with their empty lots, their muddy cobblestone streets, their cars, rubbish bins, and sidewalks, and the children playing with a half-inflated football under the streetlamps. My father's expanding business, his factories, his growing fortune, and the attendant obligation to live the "elegant European" life that befit this wealth -- it all now seemed to have deprived me of simple essences. As I walked these streets, it was as if I was seeking out my own center.
I am growing more confident about this reading: dissolute Kemal is the cosmopolitan, westernized Turk; his longing for Füsun is a longing for his Ottoman roots, what he imagines to be his authentic self. This is very interesting coming from Pamuk, who self-identifies as European, who has said repeatedly that Europe is Turkey's future. The longing for Füsun is destroying Kemal, that's clear enough. But she is herself a character, with her own needs and desires; how does her identification as authentic Turkishness play into her character? And does that make Sibel (also a full character in her own right) a personification of Kemal's cosmopolitan identity? Is Kemal being presented as dissolute because he cannot fully embrace that identity?
(Like with Snow a couple of years ago, I want to draw an easy parallel to American cultural identities. But again it seems like that is too easy and risks missing the point.)
posted evening of October 26th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, October 24th, 2009
During the break between songs, we came alongside Celâl Salik the columnist again. "I've worked out something love has in common with a good newspaper column, Kemal Bey," he said. "What is it?" I asked. "Love, like a newspaper column, has to make us happy now. We judge the beauty and the power of each by how deep an impression it makes on the soul." "Master, please write that up in your column one day," I said, but he was listening not to me but to his raven-haired dance partner.
I have started to notice a heavy focus on defining and referencing definitions of love and happiness in Museum of Innocence. On almost every page I see both words, see Kemal's insistence on declaring whether and how he was happy in each moment of his narrative; and part of his means of introducing each character is to have the character talk about what love is, and how it can be attained. I wonder how much this is Pamuk's project as well, I remember a lot of this type of discussion in Snow.
posted evening of October 24th, 2009: Respond
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"Please bring it tomorrow. Don't forget," Füsun said, her eyes widening. "It is very dear to me." Chapter 17, "My Whole Life Depends on You Now," is the end of the first major cycle in Museum of Innocence -- it ends with the same words as Chapter 1, completing the flashback/exposition that began in Chapter 2.The pace of the book has been very even through this first piece of the narrative, not dragging nor rushing. The sense of Kemal leading me through his exhibit is palpable... There is a lot of room left for the story to escape from his control, which I am hoping for -- being led this way could start to feel stifling if I am not given more freedom to roam the museum looking at what I want to look at. (It does not feel stifling at this point, alls I'm saying is I could see that developing at some point...)
posted afternoon of October 24th, 2009: Respond
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First explicit mention of Leyla and Mecnun comes near the beginning of Chapter 24, "The Engagement Party." Kemal is talking with his sister-in-law, Berrin, about the prospects for romance between Sibel's friend Nurcihan (who lives in Paris and has had romantic liaisons there) and Kemal's college friend Mehmet (who comes from a conservative family but does not want a marriage arranged by his parents). Berrin does not think Mehmet has any chance with modern (i.e. sexually liberated) women, because "they know if they go gallivanting around town with him too much, a man like this will secretly begin to think of them as whores."
"But the reason that Mehmet couldn't fall in love with them was that they wouldn't let him get close enough, because they were conservative and frightened.""That's not the way it works," said Berrin. "You don't have to sleep with someone to be in love. The sex is not what matters. Love is Leyla and Mecnun." (Also in this chapter is the first mention of Kemal's parents' friends the Pamuks...) I am getting a slightly anthropological-ish feeling from the first part of this novel, from Pamuk's narrator explaining carefully the customs and mores of 1970's Istanbul. (I happened on a really good example of this last night but I'm not finding it now...) On the one hand this is not something I would necessarily expect from a memoir-writer -- but it seems somehow totally in character for Kemal, the obsessive documentarian of his obsession with Füsun, to leave nothing unsaid -- the obsession with Füsun becomes an expression of his obsession with his society and his place in it. Possibly this could be expressed by saying, Kemal (a bit like Ka in Snow, though the parallel is far from exact) is a neurotic cosmopolitan searching for Authenticity.
posted morning of October 24th, 2009: Respond
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Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
I pass by these walls, the walls of Layla
And I kiss this wall and that wall
It's not Love of the houses that has taken my heart
But of the One who dwells in those houses-- Qays ibn al-Mulawwah
Thanks to Ayse Papatya Bucak of Reading for Writers, for pointing out the connection between Museum of Innocence and the Ottoman story of Layla and Mejnun -- Ms. Bucak calls Pamuk's book a rewriting of the old story, which tells how Mejnun goes obsessively mad after being refused by his love-object.Interesting! I had never heard of that story but some quick experimentation with Google will demonstrate that its influence is very broad in the Islamic world. The New York Turkmen Institute has put online Sofi Huri's translation of Fuzûlî's version of the story, which appears to be the primary Ottoman version -- it was made into an opera by Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov (produced in NYC just this past Spring by Yo-yo Ma) -- Here are Erkan Oğur and İsmail H. Demircioğlu performing "Leyli Mecnun" from that opera:
posted evening of October 22nd, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
I wonder when the narrative present of The Museum of Innocence is. The novel is rooted very firmly in time -- in the first few pages we see that the high point of the narrator's life was on May 26th, 1975 (a few weeks past my fifth birthday), and that his involvement with his distant relation Füsun had started a month previous to that, on April 27th (when I was still four years old) -- when is he speaking though? In chapter 4 he says, "As I sit down so many years later and devote myself heart and soul to the telling of my story..." -- I hope (and expect) his road to the present moment will be as much a part of the story as are the events he is narrating. Kemal was 30 at the time of the happiest moment of his life, so was born in 1945, the same age as my uncle. So he could well be narrating in my present moment, as a 65-year-old. Pamuk is 57 years old now, perhaps his narrator is his age, in which case he would be speaking in 2002. Or maybe something else. The excerpt that appeared in the New Yorker this summer under the title "Distant Relations" was adapted from chapters 2 through 6 -- I thought at the time that it would work much better in the context of a longer novel than as a short story, and I was right -- instead of getting to the end and thinking "well, then what?" you just turn the page and keep reading...
 Update: The narrative present has to be after 2007; when Sibel leaves him in 1976, Kemal says "I would not see her again for 31 years." He opened the museum in the mid-90's -- there is a reference to him doing this "twenty years later."
posted evening of October 20th, 2009: Respond
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I am happy: The Museum of Innocence was published at long last today, the first novel Orhan Pamuk has published since I fell in love with his voice back in 2007. I have been anticipating this since last August when I saw it mentioned in McGaha's Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk... I'm wondering idly -- only read a few pages this evening, they are nice -- they have the same beguiling prose quality I remember from the opening of The Black Book -- how well the metaphor of strolling through a museum will work for the experience of reading this book. Will I linger over certain images, walk briskly past others which are not as engaging? Will I want to stay past closing time or will I find myself wanting to go home early, when I have not even gotten to see the exhibit on the third floor?... I'm usually a bit intimidated by museums, I have not yet felt even a bit intimidated by Pamuk's prose* -- its inviting affect is the thing I love most about it. Well; we'll see. Here are the epigraphs to this book: These were innocent people, so innocent that they thought poverty a crime that wealth would allow them to forget. (from the notebooks of Celâl Salik)[Celâl Salik? Is that Celâl from The Black Book? I sort of think so but not sure. Did the Black Book character have a last name? ...and, yes! the columnist in The Black Book is named Celâl Salik.] If a man could pass thro' Paradise in a Dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, and found that flower in his hand when he awoke -- Aye? and what then? (from the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge) [This is very nice, and definitely calls to mind the opening of The Black Book.] First I surveyed the little trinkets on the table, her lotions and her perfumes. I picked them up and examined them one by one. I turned her little watch over in my hand. Then I looked at her wardrobe. All those dresses and accessories piled one on top of the other. These things that every woman used to complete herself -- they induced in me a painful and desparate loneliness; I felt myself hers, I longed to be hers. (from the notebooks of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar)
 *Oh wait, sorry, I am forgetting about The New Life. So make that "have not in most cases".
posted evening of October 20th, 2009: 1 response
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Thursday, September 10th, 2009
This is kind of confusing: the New Yorker published a piece of fiction by Orhan Pamuk this week under the title, "Distant Relations" (translated by Maureen Freely) -- there is no sidebar to the effect that "Orhan Pamuk's new novel, Museum of Innocence, will be published in English next month; this piece is an exerpt" or something like that; but that is what the piece appears to be. It seems strange to publish it as a short story without any explanation of that; and it doesn't really work as a short story -- it does work pretty well as a teaser, though.
posted evening of September 10th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, May 10th, 2009
I just made a fun, pleasant discovery; looking back at the Orhan Pamuk interview I was reading last night, I wanted to check whether the Paris Review had published a copy of it on the web. Turns out they did [PDF], and what's more it contains reproductions of a few pages of Pamuk's manuscript notes for The Black Book. Beautiful!
posted morning of May 10th, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, May 9th, 2009
In the Paris Review interview of Pamuk (from 2004):
Pamuk: I was [in Snow] underlining the clerical nature of the novelist as opposed to that of the poet, who has an immensely prestigious tradition in Turkey. To be a poet is a popular and respected thing.... After Western ideas came to Turkey, this legacy was combined with a romantic and modern idea of the poet as a person who burns for truth.... On the other hand, a novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.
Interviewer: Have you ever written poetry?
Pamuk: ...I did when I was eighteen and I published some poems in Turkey, but then I quit. My explanation is that I realized that a poet is someone through whom God is speaking. You have to be possessed by poetry. I tried my hand at poetry, but I realized after some time that God was not speaking to me. I was sorry about this and then I tried to imagine -- if God were speaking through me, what would he be saying? I began to write very meticulously, slowly, trying to figure this out. That is prose writing, fiction writing.
At Orbis Quintus, paledave links to a bunch of other Paris Review interviews.
posted evening of May 9th, 2009: Respond
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