Orhan Pamuk's new novel. Reader reviews at themuseumofinnocence.com. The Globe and Mail has a podcast of Pamuk reading from and discussing Museum of Innocence.
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
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 ➳ More posts about Orhan Pamuk
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 Snowa 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 ➳ More posts about Readings
I was exuberant at the thought of beginning anew, and greatly soothed by the consolations of life in a yalı, so much so that during the first few days I convinced myself that a rapid recovery was in prospect. No matter what amusements we'd partaken in on the previous evening, no matter how late we'd come back, and no matter how much I'd had to drink, in the morning, as soon as the light began to stream through the gaps in the shutters, casting its strange reflections of Bosphorus waves onto the ceiling, I would throw open the shutters, each time amazed at the beauty that rushed in, that almost exploded, through the window.
It suddenly struck me this evening that Pointe-Courte has a lot in common with this portion of Museum of Innocence. I'm wondering now how much a comparison of Noiret's character with Kemal would work, how much provincial France in the 50's "is like" Turkey, the provinces of Europe, in the 70's. I'll be watching Pointe-Courte again on Thursday (Mark and Woody are coming over!), will keep that thought in mind.
In this week's NY Times Magazine, Negar Azimi takes a look at the Museum of Innocence Orhan Pamuk is constructing in Istanbul. Pamuk says, "My novel honors the museums that no one goes to, the ones in which you can hear your own footsteps."
(Today Isabella of Magnificent Octopus has a review up of Museum of Innocence -- a positive and thoughtful one, and she mentions this blog in a complimentary light, which makes me feel flattered and happy -- take a look!)
I would like every visitor to our museum to find these outings as pleasant as I did, so I shall go into some detail here. After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness we all can share?
This line (from chapter 60) works on a couple of levels. Yes it is a purpose of novels and museums (not "the purpose", but of course Kemal is single-minded) to establish a collective consciousness, and a collective happiness is one facet of that. But this novel is not about Kemal's happiness, it's about his un-happiness, his fixation on becoming happy and becoming authentic, which fixation is leading him farther and farther away from happiness and authenticity. So when he says he wants us to appreciate the pleasure he felt from the outings with the Keskins, behind that is what role these outings play in his unraveling.
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.
Looks like a pretty fun movie actually... too bad about the subtitles. Director and screenwriter is Halit Refiğ.
The book is written in 1901, censored and not published until 1923, then filmed (in reality) in 1965 and (fictionally) in 1981. (Filming began on May 17, the day before my 11th birthday!)
posted evening of November 6th, 2009: Respond ➳ More posts about The Movies
I struggled for a long time to convey for the Museum of Innocence this sensation of being caught in a dream. The condition has two aspects: (a) as a spiritual state, and (b) as an illusory view of the world.
(a) The spiritual state is somewhat akin to what follows drinking alcohol or smoking marijuana, though it is different in certain ways. It is the sense of not really living in the present moment, this now[*]. At Füsun's house, as we were eating supper, I often felt as if I were living a moment in the past. Only a moment before we would have been watching a Grace Kelly film on television, or another like it; true, our conversations at the table were more or less alike, but it was not such sameness that invoked this mood; rather it was a sense of not abiding in those moments of my life as they were occurring, experiencing these moments as if I were not living them.
Kemal's desire to paint his life as an allegorical failure, to excuse his behavior as part of a symbolic quest, is becoming more and more a forefront element of the novel. Chapters 67 through 72 are where we finally see him enunciating it. Here Kemal and Faridun are filming Broken Dreams, Füsun and Faridun are splitting up, Kemal is teaching Füsun to drive...
Also nice, from chapter 68 -- Chico Marx makes a guest appearance:
Some stains on a few of the straighter butts come from the cherry ice cream Füsun ate on summer evenings. Kamil Efendi, the ice cream vendor, would trundle his three-wheeled pushcart through the cobble-stone streets of Tophane and Çukucurma on summer evenings, shouting "Eye-es Gream!" and ringing his bell; in the winters he would sell helva from the same cart.
* (Though contrast that with a few pages back, "Sometimes I would forget Time altogether, and nestle into 'now' as if it were a soft bed," where he also is trying to conjure this "spiritual state.")
It was a lot of fun, and enlightening, listening to Orhan Pamuk reading from Museum of Innocence last night at the 92nd Street Y -- he seemed a little nervous at the opening of the reading but was soon in his element. The big news of the evening came after the reading, when he and George Andreou (his editor at Knopf) had a short conversation about his books and about writing; he indicated, with reference to the lecture series he just got done with delivering at Harvard, that he was planning to publish the lectures as a short book on the art of the novel.
With respect to the art of the novel, one of the points he made -- this was in response to a question about his judgement of the upper-class Istanbullus' consumerist "Westernization" which Kemal is reacting against -- was that "Ethics in novels is a dead end.... Novels do not operate properly if we are strongly interested in passing ethical judgement," which seems to tie in nicely with my idea that this novel works much better as a character study than as an indictment of Kemal. (Along these lines he had noted while reading from chapter 43, that he had responded to a journalist's query about Kemal's "obsessive" behavior by noting that he had never used that term in the book, because "Writing a novel is going inside a person and rejecting labels, is making everyone seem normal," only to be looking through the book later and spot the line, "After that night we had both become resolved to the fact that I was never going to get over my obsession.")
All of the passages he read were from the first half of the book, and were only the past-tense storytelling with the present-tense curating edited out. He mentioned this during the interview portion of the program, without (it seemed to me) really justifying it -- he said something like he did not want to confuse the audience with that -- whatever... He also made no mention, nor did Andreou, of the museum he is building in Istanbul. This all seemed strange to me. He closed the reading with a passage from chapter 56 about "the first Islamic porn films," in which "the 'love scenes'... mixed sex with slapstick, as the gasping and moaning proceeded with ludicrous exaggeration, as the actors assumed all the positions that could be learned from European sex manuals bought on the black market, though all involved, male and female alike, would never remove their underpants."
When he was reading from chapter 44, in which Kemal roams the back streets of Istanbul searching for Füsun, while "it never crossed my mind that I would remember these hours as happy ones," Pamuk made reference to a Turkish literary tradition of the "East-West novel", which plays out between traditional Islamic culture and modernized, cosmopolitan culture -- I was glad to hear him talking about this since it's been in my mind a lot as I read this book -- however it was also a useful counterweight to hear him saying, as he did several times over the course of the evening, that Museum of Innocence is primarily "a book about how it feels to be in love," though not a romantic novel.
On today's Leonard Lopate show, Orhan Pamuk talks with Lopate about Museum of Innocence. They cover much of the ground that Pamuk and Andreou were talking about on Monday, and go into a bit more detail -- Lopate is the better interviewer. Lopate asks about the choice of the term "Innocence", which is something I have been wondering about myself. They also touch on Pamuk's cameos in the novel (he calls them "Hitchcock-like roles"), and on the museum Pamuk is building.
Pamuk will be reading and signing books this evening at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square.
Very nice to hear: the subject of Pamuk's next novel will be a street vendor in Istanbul.
Looks like a pretty fun movie actually... too bad about the subtitles. Director and screenwriter is 
