🦋 A book about how it feels to be in love
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.
posted evening of Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
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