Surnames being introduced in Turkey in 1934, and people basing them on their apartment buildings and vice versa. Ataturk raki stuffed zucchini and fried eggplant and yoghurt, baclava and halva Galata Bridge and Galata Tower and Kadikoy and Beyoglu leftists and rightists killing each other and coups imposing curfews the poverty of the nation. Mixed throughout the novel’s exploration of universal human nature (love), are many exotic details of Turkish (Istanbul) culture.
“I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness.” It was a mixture of algae, sea, burnt caramel, and children's biscuits, and every time I inhaled it, a surge of optimism would pass through me.” And he revels in the agony of lovesickness, for him a physical pain like acid radiating from his stomach, eating his organs, and shooting up to his head or down to his feet.
Kemal likes details (“The smallest detail demanded the most exacting examination”), especially sensual ones, like “I embraced her with all my strength and breathed in the scent of her neck. (Though if you’re unable to sink into his loving minutia, you may be bored.) The novel relates his relationship with Füsun, what happened when he lost her after his engagement party, what happened after he found her again, and how those things affected his relationships with his fiancée, friends, and family, his love dominating his life and leading him to collect (or pilfer) objects relating to her (berets, quince graters, salt shakers, cigarette stubs, china dogs, etc.) and to hit on the idea of making the Museum of Innocence. However, he is so frank in his account of his helpless and obsessive love and luxuriates so bittersweetly in his memories that he gained my sympathy. That in 1975 Kemal was a wealthy thirty-year-old member of Istanbul bourgeois society and Füsun a poor eighteen-year-old shop girl does not speak well for him.
“All these years later,” the Istanbul businessman narrator Kemal is recounting the time in Istanbul when, despite having had a compatible cosmopolitan fiancée named Sibel, the happiest moment in his life (though he didn’t know it at time) was when he was entering his distant relative (or in-law) Füsun from behind and biting her ear and losing her earring, which accessory “is the first exhibit in our museum.” It must be the Museum of Innocence, but what kind of museum is it? And what kind of “innocence”? And who is “our”? Memories, Museums, Objects, Time, Love, and Istanbul
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