Hard to say why I found this long novel quite so exasperating. Maybe it's because for all it spans a lifetime, very little of substance actually happens. The story concerns Kemal, a rich man-about-town, who is engaged to the wealthy and beautiful Sibel when he meets Füsun, a childhood friend. He falls in love, or perhaps more accurately falls prey to an obsession that defines and ultimately devastates his life.
As a love story for me this failed utterly. The narrator, Kemal, seemed self-absorbed beyond belief and I pitied the object of his affection, Füsun, her options as a woman in traditional Turkish society circumscribed and at the mercy of her lover's wealth and whims. Unable to be with her, Kemal begins to collect objects that belong to her, finding in them some transference of the emotions he feels in her presence. This behaviour seems, quite frankly, more than a little weird, and it is increasingly hard to identify with Kemal in any way as the novel goes on and he accumulates enough little objects such as salt-cellars and cigarette stubs to bring them all together as a museum collection. But the innocence he so idealises was not, to my mind, ever present. Instead there was just a man who exploited a young girl for sexual gratification and jeopardized her future, hardly acts of love.
But perhaps the central relationship was never the point of this novel, the love-letter in fact being written to the city of Istanbul. Reading this, I felt I lived and breathed life in that city, both as she once was and as she is, the modern, bustling city of today. Aware as I was reading it that Pamuk has in recent years been exiled from Turkey, I read this as a lament to a much-loved place, and the doomed relationship as a metaphor for feelings of loss and sadness that the author feels for the city of his past. And on that level, I'd have to say I rather loved this novel. Plus, hand-in-hand with the book is pleasing idea of an actual museum, and it all starts to seem far more remarkable.
