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A review by brew_and_books
Музей невинности by Orhan Pamuk, Орхан Памук
3.0
The storytelling flair of Pamuk is probably manifested by the fact that despite hovering and tiring over this book for four long months, I suddenly didn’t want it to end when I was nearing the finish. I guess it's one humongous task to do justice to a story when it spans some 720 pages. I didn't love all bits of it; I was tired of the narrator's constant lamentations about lost love. It made me cringe, helpless, and downright irritated. I wanted to put sense into him, shake him off his suffering, and stir him to make something of his loss and pain. But then it got better and ended great, from the story and writing perspective.
The story starts simple, Kemal is engaged to her long-time beautiful girlfriend Sibel until he falls head over heels in love with a young lady (and his cousin), Fusun. What starts as one brief consummate affair slowly takes the form of this torturous, heart-wrenching, and disastrous obsession for Kemal. Following an awful separation with his fiancée and a fallout with Fusun (only to lose her to another man for marriage), Kemal is in the rock bottom pits of mania and obsession. Eight years of his life are consumed by his incessant grief-stricken heartbroken ruminations treading on lines of 'what-if' and an optimistic hope of a future together with Fusun.
It's an understatement if I say it was exhausting. One chapter, 'Sometimes,' has all the sentences starting from the word 'Sometimes' and spans ten pages, and they are all disconcerted ramblings. This 'eight years of Kemal's life' segment, all about deep philosophical ruminations, almost drained me out until Pamuk turned it around like the brilliant storyteller that he is. I got so immersed that I read the last 100 pages in one stretch giving up on all that passivity I felt before. The final form he carved of the story was stupefying, especially the last few pages and the ending paragraphs: the writing was just so good!
And in a way, it all made sense. All those trailing thoughts surfaced from the dark inner caverns of love and hopeless obsession, it did make sense, and it's enchanting and liberating. I almost disliked it and then loved it as in I never did want it to end (love-hate relationship, they say?).
The story starts simple, Kemal is engaged to her long-time beautiful girlfriend Sibel until he falls head over heels in love with a young lady (and his cousin), Fusun. What starts as one brief consummate affair slowly takes the form of this torturous, heart-wrenching, and disastrous obsession for Kemal. Following an awful separation with his fiancée and a fallout with Fusun (only to lose her to another man for marriage), Kemal is in the rock bottom pits of mania and obsession. Eight years of his life are consumed by his incessant grief-stricken heartbroken ruminations treading on lines of 'what-if' and an optimistic hope of a future together with Fusun.
It's an understatement if I say it was exhausting. One chapter, 'Sometimes,' has all the sentences starting from the word 'Sometimes' and spans ten pages, and they are all disconcerted ramblings. This 'eight years of Kemal's life' segment, all about deep philosophical ruminations, almost drained me out until Pamuk turned it around like the brilliant storyteller that he is. I got so immersed that I read the last 100 pages in one stretch giving up on all that passivity I felt before. The final form he carved of the story was stupefying, especially the last few pages and the ending paragraphs: the writing was just so good!
And in a way, it all made sense. All those trailing thoughts surfaced from the dark inner caverns of love and hopeless obsession, it did make sense, and it's enchanting and liberating. I almost disliked it and then loved it as in I never did want it to end (love-hate relationship, they say?).