🦋 So many years later
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 Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
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