“I have been reading novels for forty years. I know there are many stances we can adopt toward the novel, many ways in which we commit out soul and mind to it, treating it lightly or seriously. And in just the same manner, I have learned by experience that there are many ways to read a novel. We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fiber of our being.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (DEC 20, 2010)

The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist, a collection of the 2009 Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard by Orhan Pamuk, is best described as a celebration of “our journey in this world, the lives we spend in cities, streets, houses, rooms, and nature, [that] consists of nothing but a search for meaning which may or may not exist.” More specifically, Pamuk takes his subject as the novel – the art of the novel – for “each sentence of a good novel evokes in us a sense of the profound, essential knowledge of what it means to exist in the world, and the nature of that sense.” While this may sound overwrought to some, to those of us who, like Pamuk, read voraciously, “even ecstatically,” there’s comfort in such passion; for us, this book is like having a drink with a long-missed friend.

The conceit of the book is a typography of temperaments borrowed from Friedrich Schiller’s essay, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry. According to Pamuk’s gloss on Schiller, naïve poets write “spontaneously, almost without thinking, not bothering to consider the intellectual or ethical consequences of their words” while the sentimental poet–and here we should note that sentimentalisch encompasses a much broader conceptual range than the English word, sentimental, and so Pamuk wisely takes to renaming this type sentimental-reflective – is “thoughtful” and “troubled” and “exceedingly aware of the poem he writes, the method and techniques he uses, the artifice involved in his endeavor.”  What’s important here is not so much whether the poetry (or for Pamuk’s purposes, the prose) flows from the pen in an uninterrupted stream of inspiration or whether the writer painstakingly deliberates over every word. The point is that the naïve novelist never doubts that words can adequately represent his fictional universe because meaning is immediate and incontrovertible for him. The sentimental-reflective novelist, on the other hand, is a bit of a brooder; he doubts not only validity of the meaning he invests in his world, but also his ability to express it at all.

However, I’d argue the distinction is really just a matter of perspective. Schiller, himself a sentimental poet, envied Goethe for, what seemed to Schiller, the ease with which Goethe was brilliant and at home in the world. Yet, I wonder if Goethe saw himself that way or if he was just as tormented and reflective as Schiller. But, no matter: Pamuk is only concerned with these distinctions in so far as they can inform us as to what happens when we read a novel. And while Pamuk, ever the sentimental-reflective novelist, admits to a similar envy of the light burden borne by naïve novelists, by the end of the book, he sounds much like a naïve novelist himself.

Novel reading involves a precarious triadic relationship between protagonist, author and reader. How these three pillars affect how a novel is experienced is loosely explored in the first three lectures: What Our Minds Do When We Read Novels; Mr. Pamuk, Did All This Really Happen To You? ; Literary Character, Plot and Time. While the details of a novel’s landscape are representations of a protagonist’s psychology – what T.S. Eliot called the “objective correlative” –the particular way of depicting those details are peculiar to an author and his or her personal experience (or imaginative capacity). At the same time, a reader encountering this author-protagonist shaped world must rebuild the world in her mind’s-eye and the shape of that world will hang on her own personal experience (or imaginative capacity). And if it wasn’t enough that the experience of a novel depends on three psychologies, different readers will have different experiences of the same book. And yet, amid all this subjectivity, the experience of a novel is hung on a perceptible, if somewhat elusive, essence that Pamuk calls the novel’s “center.”

However, before exploring the center of a novel and its relationship to the protagonist-author-reader triad, Pamuk devotes much of the fourth lecture (Words, Pictures and Objects) to consideration of the fascinating phenomenon of ekphrasis, the representation of visual art – paintings, sculptures etc. – through words. In the age of Internet, we take for granted that most people know what the Mona Lisa looks like even if they’ve never stood behind that velvet rope with the cellphone-camera waving crowds at the Louvre. But before the wide-spread distribution of photographs, and before travel became relatively fast, people relied on verbal descriptions (and perhaps rudimentary sketches) of masterpieces by those that had gone before them. The question becomes: is it actually possible to translate visual experience into words? And if so, what is my mind’s-eye visualization in relation to the original visual experience? Is something lost in the visual-verbal-visual transmission, like photograph digitized and then printed again?

Pamuk doesn’t set out to answer (or even really raise) these questions because this is a subject close to his heart; here we see him in his naïve aspect, content to assume that those distinct, irreducible moments (analogous to landscape paintings) that, according to him, make up a novel can be adequately painted with words. For Pamuk, the creative urge, itself, comes from “the thrill of expressing visual things with words.”

Here, I have to question the primacy Pamuk places on the visual. Pamuk argues that visual writers, writers who “impress us by filling our mind with indelible images, visions, landscapes and objects,” influence and effect us more than verbal writers, writers who impress us with “words, with the course of the dialogue, with the paradoxes and thoughts the narrator is exploring.”  Yet, some of the writers that have affected me most powerfully – Milan Kundera, Jose Saramago, Jean-Paul Sartre, along with Pamuk’s own example, Doestoevsky – could only be considered verbal writers. On the other hand, I have never read anyone (and still read!) as ecstatically as I read Tolstoy, a quintessentially visual writer.

Perhaps, the most interesting aspect of Pamuk’s fascination with objects and their descriptions is explored in his fifth lecture (Museums and Novels). Here, he describes his search for the real-life objects featured in The Museum of Innocence (interestingly, Pamuk is working on establishing an actual museum in Istanbul to house these objects). It seems like a strange undertaking at first glance, but as he describes the heart-breaking insufficiency that accompanies the unsettling realization that a novel we devoted much mental energy to is imaginary – and the “more powerful and persuasive the novel, the more painful the insufficiency” –his museum starts to look less like a self-indulgent, meta-fictional, art installation and more like an admirable attempt to reduce the suffering of his readers; by exhibiting the objects featured in the novel , readers can be reassured: at least some it actually exists.

But as we fill our homes with objects in order to give the meaning we invest in our lives tangible representation, The Museum of Innocence objects sublimate the experience of that novel, and its meaning, into something palpable. The sixth, and final lecture (The Center), sets out to describe this mysterious meaning of a novel. Of this center, he writes: “The center of a novel is a profound opinion or insight about life, a deeply embedded point of mystery, whether real or imagined.” While a novel’s center is as difficult to describe as it is to find, Pamuk tells us it is the “intuition, thought or knowledge” that motivates the creation of the novel. It’s born of the mystery the author wishes to explore before he sets outs. And just as the real pleasure of writing is pinning down an emerging novel’s ever-shifting center – figuring out really what it’s all about, for as E.M. Forster said, “How can I know what I think until I say it?” – the real pleasure of reading is the search for this center. But, as in life, the novel doesn’t readily give up its mysteries, and so part of the thrill of reading (and re-reading) is that the reader’s never sure to figure it out.

Chock full of literary examples and written with a real love and respect for the power of books to enhance and inform our lives, The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist is a must-read for anyone interested in the art of the novel. Conversational in tone, The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist is less comprehensive than Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster, less gruff than The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, and less microanalysis than How Fictions Works by James Wood. However, The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist is well-deserving of a spot on the shelf beside these indispensable classics on the art of the novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harvard University Press; First Edition edition (November 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Orhan Pamuk
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our reviews of: The Museum of Innocence another of The Museum of Innocence Snow And another look at reading novels: 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley

Bibliography:

• Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982)
• The Silent House (1983; October 2012)
• The White Castle (1985; 1991)
• The Black Book (1990; 1995)
• The New Life (1995; 1997)
• My Name is Red (2001)
• Snow (2004)
• The Museum of Innocence (2009)

Nonfiction:

• Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005)
• Other Colors: Essays and a Story (2007)
• The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (2010)
• The Innocence of Objects (October 2012)

“Happiness means being close to the one you love, that’s all.”

Book Review:

Review by Helen Ditouras  (OCT 7, 2010)

I don’t know why I resisted Orhan Pamuk all of these years, but one thing’s for sure – I now can’t live without him. I remember the critical acclaim that followed Pamuk in 2005 after the release of Snow, but even with a Nobel Prize under his belt, I was hardly swayed. That may have had something to do with my obsessive relationship with Philip Roth during that time – after all, I’m a loyal gal. And this Pamuk guy was not going to take me away from the legendary Zuckermans and Kepeshes of modern Jewish fiction.

This was all before a few months ago when I stumbled across a review of Pamuk’s literary masterpiece, The Museum of Innocence. The premise of the novel immediately had me fixated: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy spends the next eight years of his life…sitting in a living room with girl, her husband, and her parents, watching Turkish serials and the evening news, night after night. Now that’s what hooked me: the utter devotion and sacrifice that boy made just to see his beloved, day after day, for eight torturous years, with hardly any affirmation from his object of affection.

Speaking of objects, what Kemal, our love-struck narrator of this brilliant, 560-page novel does manage to do, is become a collector of sorts. Unable to recapture the love of his beautiful, distant-relation, Fusun, (who incidentally marries another man after severing ties with our narrator), Kemal begins to secretly collect items from Fusun, ranging from an earring, to a cigarette butt. And this collection begins to grow into a private, perpetual museum which Kemal cherishes and worships like a Marian shrine.

If I seem evasive, it’s because I don’t wish to give away too much of this melancholy tale of love and obsession in Turkey, circa 1970s. And how could I, anyway? This novel is a grand accomplishment for Pamuk, who allegedly worked on this project for ten years. Filled with images of modern Istanbul, with references to Turkish film, fashion, and soda pop, each page is a tender, nostalgic homage to a city now utterly transformed. Pamuk’s desire to seize these memories go well beyond the confines of his novel: this year, at some undisclosed date, the official Museum of Innocence will open to the Turkish public in the town of Cukurcuma, where much of the story unfolds. Fans of his novel will have an opportunity to visit the museum, and see first-hand, the very objects that Pamuk meticulously records throughout the book. For a sneak peak of these objects, see this slideshow.

As this review comes to an end, I have a confession to make. I can’t get over The Museum of Innocence. I think about it…all the time. It haunts me – like Wong Kar Wai’s similar magnum opus, the movie In the Mood for Love. Filled with lingering reminiscence, clandestine love, and most importantly, an era now vanished, the two works are almost companion pieces. There is something cinematic about Pamuk’s novel that begins on the front dust jacket and ends on the final page. I remember holding this giant of a book for the first time and being completely enthralled by the image before me: a group of young, Turkish adults, in a 1950s convertible car, all smiling. And I knew at that moment that this image was akin to a Lynchian smoke-screen – these were not happy people on a joyride. As you soon discover within the first chapter, the main characters of this novel are tormented but hopeful, destitute but euphoric, all because of a few moments of bliss that forever mark their lives.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 64 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Helen Ditouras
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Orphan PamukWikipedia page on Orhan Pamuk
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and ExcerptMore on the physical  Museum of Innocence
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Snow Our 2009 review of The Museum of Innocence And our review of: The Naive and Sentimental Novelist

Bibliography:

• Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982)
• The Silent House (1983; October 2012)
• The White Castle (1985; 1991)
• The Black Book (1990; 1995)
• The New Life (1995; 1997)
• My Name is Red (August 2001)
• Snow (August 2004)
• The Museum of Innocence (October 2009)

Nonfiction:

• Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005)
• Other Colors: Essays and a Story (2007)
• The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (2010)
• The Innocence of Objects (October 2012)

“ I would go to the Merhamet Apartments, and, reflecting upon the happy hours Fusun and I had spent there, I would lose myself in daydreams, admiring my slowly growing “collection” with ever renewed wonder. As these objects accumulated, so did the manifest intensity of my love. Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (DEC 14, 2009)

“Irresponsible, spoiled and bourgeois.” One of the characters in The Musuem of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, uses these labels to describe a segment of Istanbul’s young adults. These same descriptors could specifically apply to 30-year-old Kemal, the novel’s protagonist. Kemal, part of Istanbul’s upper class, spends his time managing a portion of the family business. He has the privilege of an education in America and as the novel opens, is about to be engaged to Sibel, the daughter of another wealthy family in the city. It’s slated to be a marriage between equals.

One day, Sibel’s eye catches a designer purse in a local shopping boutique and later, Kemal decides to buy it as a surprise for his soon-to-be fiancée. It is here that he meets 18-year-old Füsun—a distant cousin who will become the obsession of his life. Over the following weeks, the two often meet at an apartment owned by Kemal’s family, which now lies largely abandoned. Füsun gives up her virginity to Kemal and their lovemaking extends over many lazy afternoons. All this time Füsun is torn knowing that she will eventually lose Kemal to Sibel. Nevertheless she hopes the power of their love will be enough for Kemal to stop his upcoming engagement to Sibel.

That doesn’t happen however and Kemal and Sibel get engaged in a lavish ceremony at the Hilton in Istanbul. Istanbul’s crème de la crème attend and Füsun is crushed. At this point, selfishly, Kemal still believes he can have it all—a beautiful wife in Sibel and a mistress on the side.

Having waited long enough for Kemal to come around, however, Füsun decides to call it quits and leaves him hanging. Totally devastated, Kemal ends up breaking off his engagement to Sibel—but this act turns out to be a tad late. When after many months, Kemal does run into Füsun in one of Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods, she is married to a struggling screenwriter Feridun. Now Kemal doesn’t know of any way to stay close to Füsun except by offering to finance one of Feridun’s scripts and in doing so, turning Füsun into a star. Day after day, month after month, for seven years, Kemal visits the Keskin family in their tiny apartment. He shares meals with them and lives on the tiniest slivers of hope that Füsun might some day actually be his.

Over the years, Kemal slowly collects small items that form part of a big collection—these are all items touched by Füsun or connected to her in some way. It is hard to write much more about the story without giving it all away but doing so wouldn’t dilute the fun either. For early on in the story, you can see that this just might turn out to be a modern-day version of Laila-Majnu the story of the ill-fated lovers of Arabia.

The Museum of Innocence is more than just a love story however. In its many layers, it explores various aspects of Turkish life and the country’s history. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has always used his work to showcase a Turkey caught between tradition and Western values. In his earlier novel, Snow, he used the headscarf as a motif for this struggle with change. Here, too, his characters are caught in the tide. Kemal’s young friends all consider themselves “modern” and alcohol flows freely at their parties. They are even beginning to explore intimacy before marriage. Still it is mostly understood that a woman gives up her virginity only to a man she knows for sure, she will marry. This problem haunts Sibel as she decides whether or not to break off her engagement to her straying fiancé. “Sibel knew full well that no matter how high she held her head, no matter how “European” her friends were in their outlook, this affair would not be seen as a love story if we did not marry. It would become the story of a woman whose honor had been stained,” Kemal recounts.

The change that Turkey has to grapple with can be found in the most unexpected places. For example, towards the beginning of the novel, Kemal’s friend Zaim launches a new soda called Meltem. To attract the urban market, he uses a leggy German model to market the product. After a few years though, as the product loses its cachet with the urban rich, Zaim has to rely on a Turkish film actress who can sell the product to the “provincial masses.” This gradual falling out of Meltem to be replaced by Coke and Pepsi is one change that creeps up slowly but is perhaps indicative of the country’s larger struggles with the impact of globalization.

The Museum of Innocence starts off in the early 70s and the political upheaval of the 70s and 80s simmers in the background. That Kemal chooses not to dwell on this discontent too much shows not just how his obsession with Füsun takes precedent over everything else but how a rich kid like him can afford to live comfortably above it all. “I have no desire to interrupt my story with descriptions of the street clashes between fervent nationalists and fervent communists at that time, except to say what we were witnessing was an extension of the Cold War,” Kemal says.

As the story begins, as Kemal goes out with both Sibel and Füsun, he emerges as a selfish and vain person, someone the reader cannot immediately empathize with. Even at his engagement party, Kemal looks forward to “partaking of all the pleasures of a happy home life with a beautiful, sensible, well-educated woman, and at the same time enjoying the pleasures of an alluring and wild young girl—all this while I was still in my thirties, having scarcely suffered for it, or paid a price.” It is to Pamuk’s credit that as the story goes on, Kemal matures into a tragic character, someone the reader can feel sorry for.

Pamuk’s new novel describes many of the neighborhoods—Beyoglu, Taksim, Tophane, Fatih, Edirnekapi—he visits in his wonderful non-fiction work, Istanbul: Memories and the City. Especially as Kemal visits with the Keskin family night after night for dinner, he makes his way around Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods and Pamuk beautifully describes these.

Pamuk has always been a fan of well-honed literary devices and here he narrates Kemal’s story through the individual items in his collection of everyday objects stored at the Museum of Innocence. Many a chapter ends with the cataloging of seemingly mundane objects—which nevertheless have some resonance for Kemal. “I have here the clock, and these matchsticks and matchbooks, because the display suggests how I spent the slow ten or fifteen minutes it took me to accept that Füsun was not coming that day,” Pamuk writes in one such instance.

These objects are as disparate as they can get but they are all bound by one unifying thread—they are all touched by Füsun or somehow associated with her. A quince grater, a vast collection of cigarette stubs, a lost earring, a ticket to a movie—together they paint a complete set of memories for the lovelorn Kemal. This endless cataloging of objects can start to wear down on the reader occasionally but Pamuk is skilful enough to know just when to accelerate the pace a tad. Besides, one realizes, love is full of mundane moments mixed in with the sublime.

As Kemal spends endless hours in the Merhamet Apartments with his collection, wallowing in his memories, it becomes obvious that while the objects offer him some measure of relief, they also stifle him in many ways. After all, no collection of objects can really substitute for the warm touch of a loved one. Kemal seeks solace from the fact that even if they might not be the real thing, from their association with his lover, they are enough to offer some kind of daily sustenance.

The Museum of Innocence reminds us that unlike love, which can be ephemeral, objects can be more easily possessed. And, when all else fails, the memories they evoke can be enough to last an anguished lifetime. (Translated by Maureen Freely.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 64 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; 1 edition (October 20, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Official website for Orhan Pamuk Wikipedia on Orhan Pamuk Nobel Literature Prize
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Official site for The Museum of Innocence
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Snow Read another review of The Museum of Innocence And our review of: The Naive and Sentimental Novelist

Bibliography:

• Cevdet Bey and His Sons (1982)
• The Silent House (1983; October 2012)
• The White Castle (1985; 1991)
• The Black Book (1990; 1995)
• The New Life (1995; 1997)
• My Name is Red (August 2001)
• Snow (August 2004)
• The Museum of Innocence (October 2009)

Nonfiction:

• Istanbul: Memories and the City (June 2005)
• Other Colors: Essays and a Story (September 2007)
• The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (November 2010)
• The Innocence of Objects (October 2012)