Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence: Love, Obsession and Happiness

IT WAS the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.

 Orhan Pamuk (The Museum of Innocence) 

Pardon the way that I stare. 

There's nothing else to compare. 

The sight of you leaves me weak. 

There are no words left to speak 

Frank Valli (Can’t Take My Eyes off You)

You came along just like a song

And brighten my day

Who would have believed that you were part of a dream

Now it all seems light years away

Barry Manilow (Can't Smile Without You)

 

Just like a willow,

                        We would cry an ocean

If we lost true love

And sweet devotion

Your lips excite me,

      Let your arms unfight me

For who knows when

Well meet again this way 

Elvis Presley (It’s now or never) 

First of all, one has to acknowledge how well written this book is. It is evident that Pamuk devoted considerable time and attention diving into intricate details surrounding the love. For this reason, the novel can be regarded as one of the most powerful explorations of love, relations, and the nature of adoring someone wholeheartedly (or obsessively), no matter what it takes from your life, in our case, it is obsessive 9 years. The second is that the novel is not only about love, but also about the historical illustration of the life of the upper-middle-class of Istanbul, so-called high society, their experience of Western life, the portrayal of Istanbul, the story of the effect of small things in every day of our life.

Though the novel deserves here to be pen down for its review, my aim is not to do it. Neither I want to talk about the so-called taboos; woman’s virginity, the attitudes of society values toward sex before marriage and upper-middle classes' imitation of western cultures in terms of  ‘being freedom and modern’. Curious readers can look elsewhere. However, in order to help you to sail in the story of it, still needs to be written something up here. 

Our character Kemal who studied in the USA engaged with Sibel, fell in love with a beautiful shopgirl called Füsun. As noted by Larson first part is ‘a classic tale of reckless passion colliding with bourgeois convention.’, say Yeşilçam story. All the emotional upheavals in this part of the story are shattered and come to an end when Füsun, invited to the engagement, gets hurt and withdraws. Afterwards, Kemal can't cope with his obsession with Füsun, even though Sibel tries to help him, breaks the engagement and goes after the love he lost and hurt. The novel starts in 1975 and ends in 1984 and spans over 30 years. 

At the heart of every inclination toward love is how beautiful it is. Pamuk, on the other hand by avoiding this understanding or pedestal talking of love, shows us how painful the consequences can be. The way he takes the love, though not different from previous writers, has some differences. By his words, he does not want to glamorize or sugarize the love but describe what happens when we fall in love. Pamuk does not make us think of love as madness nor does he deride about it. He says he was very careful of not using the word obsession in this novel, though he does. His first and the last aim is to show psychologically the process of falling in love. The chapters follow as; F, City lights and Happiness, Love, Courage and Modernity, A Few Unpalatable Anthropological Truths, Jealousy, The Agony of Waiting, An Anatomical Chart of Love Pains, 

27. Don’t Lean Back That Way, You Might Fall

28. The Consolation of Objects

29. By Now There Was Hardly a Moment When I Wasn’t Thinking About Her

30. Füsun Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

31. The Streets That Reminded Me of Her

32. The Shadows and Ghosts I Mistook for Füsun

33. Vulgar Distractions so on and so forth.

Every person has its own unique experience of love they fall in. Every age embalms the pain of love in a different way. Every lover revitalizes and personifies its true half in their imagination based on their stock of information which makes a beloved some combination of expectation. Some come across a person in the fully crowded corridor of its school, some with a ‘brief encounter’, and for some, the manifestation of an unknown coincidence allows them to find their lovers. Though love is not inevitable nor do I reduce it into mere coincidence, but the happiest moment, together with the clash of overlapping passion and desire, lies at the essence of love. On the other hand, love can culminate in an incomprehensible and unavoidable end, where human feelings collide with the difficulties of being human. When this is the case, for the lover, love first presents itself as an irresistible desire, as expressed by Raif's Maria; yet when deprivation takes over his entire being, it turns into the irresistible anxiety of this lack, leading to the annihilation of his biological body. Rather than seeing love as a highly physical and process-based, rational phenomenon and as a subjectivity that is nothing more than a mere meaning ascribed to it, he wants it to be something one clinges with fear in this endlessly insecure environment. Because the person is incomplete and this incompleteness can be fulfilled by only the lover.  

Now, an excerpt from the chapter of 'An Anatomical Chart of Love Pains'. Please keep in my mind that the depiction here is not the feelings of a person when he falls in love, but the love and devastating pain of loss suffered born of the character's reckless mistakes as a result of the sudden departure of the person with whom he had a relationship for a certain period of time.

4,213 of Füsun’s Cigarette Stubs

''Let me explain to readers without access to our museum that the deepest pain was initially felt in the upper left-hand quadrant of my stomach. As the pain increased, it would, as the overlay indicates, radiate to the cavity between my lungs and my stomach. At that point its abdominal presence would no longer be confined to the left side, having spread to the right, feeling rather as if a hot poker or a screwdriver were twisting into me. It was as if first my stomach and then my entire abdomen were filling up with acid, as if sticky, red-hot little starfish were attaching themselves to my organs. As the pain grew more pervasive and intense, I would feel it climb into my forehead, over the back of my neck, my shoulders, my entire body, even invading my dreams to take a smothering hold of me. Sometimes, as diagrammed, a star of pain would form, centered on my navel, shooting shafts of acid to my throat, and my mouth, and I feared it would throttle me. If I hit the wall with my hand, or did a few calisthenics, or otherwise pushed myself as an athlete does, I could briefly block the pain, but at its most muted I could still feel it like an intravenous drip entering my bloodstream, and it was always there in my stomach; that was its epicenter.''

As Pamuk says, Kemal is aware that even in the times he is mostly in love, ‘one part of his mind knowing that he is behaving strangely and then there is always the same part of him which makes him the narrative reasonable’;

''Despite all its tangible manifestations, I knew that the pain emanated from my mind, from my soul, but even so I could not bring myself to cleanse my mind and deliver myself from it. Inexperienced in such feeling, I was, like a proud young officer ambushed in his first command, forced into a mental rout. And it only made matters worse that I had hope—with every new day, new dreams, new reasons that Füsun might appear at the Merhamet Apartments—which by making the agony bearable prolonged it.''

When this is the case, it is not difficult at all to change the extent of the pain. A platonic love is always easier to endure than unfinished love. Because when Halil falls in love with Meral's picture in Sevmek Zamani (1965), whose name he does not know, the anguish of love is constant. However, Kemal's unawareness of this loss, which he tastes with Füsun by making love as if it will never end, slowly carries these moments of madness to an endless process before reaching the saturation point.  And Pamuk by knowing this plays with Kemal's pain threshold perfectly; after nine years of waiting, though he was able to stay around Füsun, and when the pain reached a certain horizontal line, he conveys Kemal's anguish to the vertical line and creates a transcendent experience when their reunite breaking down by the tragic end.  

Orhan Pamuk (2008/2019), Masumiyet Müzesi, Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 28. Baskı

Orhan Pamuk (2016), Hatıraların Masumiyeti, Yapı Kredi Yayınları.

Orhan Pamuk (2019) Şeylerin Masumiyeti, Yapı Kredi Yayınları.

Hatıraların Masumiyeti - 2016 /Belgesel

Masumiyet Müzesi - 2026/Dizi

For further reading;

Orhan Pamuk: The Museum of Innocence | 92Y Readings

Conversations with History - Orhan Pamuk

Big Think Interview With Orhan Pamuk

Showcase: Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence , TRT World.

James Lasdun (2010), The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, The Guardian.