The Museum of Innocence is the latest novel
written by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, published on Aug 2008
Pamuk has been working on the novel for many years and it has been hinted by himself in many interviews during this period. “The story, which takes place in Istanbul between 1975 and today, is about obsessive passion and the great question: What is love, really?” says the writer, in a Spiegel interview back in 2007.
Orhan Pamuk is also trying to establish an actual museum based on the novel, in Cukurcuma - Istanbul, to exhibit several objects mentioned in The Museum of Innocence
It's getting late in the Istanbul of Orhan Pamuk's new novel (his first since winning the 2006 Nobel prize), late in almost every sense of the word. Not dead, far from that, but the hours are small and time itself seems to be running down, as though the whole city were a memorial to its own better days. Though when was that? Under Ataturk, maybe? Or possibly before, in the Ottoman past that lies all around but of which the book's characters can hardly ever speak. It is an old city, so old that in 1975, when this stately and intricate novel begins, its principal narrator, Kemal Basmací, still drives a 1956 Chevrolet. Yet paradoxically, that's also a sign of its youth, for Pamuk's Turkey itself has come late to a modernity that its citizens identify with the west
