The Museum of Innocence

I found the novel frustrating on many levels, but the main problem was as follows:

In the other two Pamuk novels that I have read -- Snow and The Black Book -- there is a quest for the beloved. In the former, the protagonist, Ka, finds his quest is engulfed by the tumultuous political realm that is Turkey. There is an endless depth of characters who, like Ka, are propelled forward by the search for love; it is these collections of love stories that drive the plot forward. That motion is juxtaposed onto the circular, stagnant political story of the snowed-in town of Kars, in which forward momentum does not exist. Likewise, in The Black Book, the quest for the beloved is, again, engulfed in something much bigger. In this case, it is the essence of Turkey itself -- as well as a general exploration of "identity" -- and its relationship to the world.

Alas, in The Museum of Innocence there is no greater story to be told. Instead, the selfish ambitions of the protagonist, Kemal Bey, are laid bare for the reader over roughly five hundred agonizing pages of obsession and self-pity. It is because of this that the story lacks complexity. There is no relationship between Kemal's quest and some other, bigger story. There are merely two characters explored at any reasonable length: the lover and the beloved. Perhaps most importantly, there is no attempt to forge any sense of a relationship between Kemal and anyone else, be they characters in the novel or the novel's readers: you either "get it", or you are cast aside by an indifferent Kemal.

The primary reason that Snow is one of my favourite novels is the grand irony of this so-called "political novel": as the dolts who espouse radical politics and religion run around in circles baying at the moon, the sheer futility of their actions is exposed by the novel's lovers. As the city of Kars crumbles away to nothing, these characters press forward in their quest for the beloved, unabated. Ka's quest for the beloved is not crushed by the political crisis that surrounds it; rather, it is destroyed by his own ego. Snow is, in fact, a love story with a hint of politics, not the other way around.

The Museum of Innocence, on the other hand, is a novel about nothing. The love story disintegrates into nothing because it bears no relationship to anything else. But perhaps that is the point. The fact that the protagonist withers away into nothing when he turns his relationship with his beloved into one of objectification, and vaporizes all other relationships to other, bigger stories, may support this. If the project's only goal was to expose the sheer pathetic nature of Kemal's quest, however, then it only managed to do so at the cost of completely losing my interest.

08 Mar 2010, Luke Gill