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367 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
"I amused myself with mental games in which I changed the focus, deceived myself, forgot altogether what had been troubling me or wrapped in a mysterious haze. We might call this confused, hazy state melancholy, or perhaps we should call it by its Turkish name, üü, which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private. Offering no clarity, veiling reality instead, üü brings us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when a teakettle has been spouting steam on a winter's day. Steamed-up windows make me feel üü, and I still love getting up and walking over to those windows to trace words on them with my finger. As I shape words and figures on the steamy window, the üü inside me dissipates and I can relax; after I have done all my writing and drawing, I can erase it all with the back of my hand and look outside. But the view itself can bring its own üü. It is time to come to a better understanding of this feeling that the city of Istanbul carries as its fate."
"All my life, starting in childhood, I've always lived on hills overlooking the Bosphorus—if only from a distance and between apartments, the domes of mosques, and hills. To be able to see the Bosphorus, even from afar—for İstanbullus this is a matter of spiritual import that may explain why windows looking out onto the sea are like the mihrabs in mosques, the altars in Christian churches, and the tevans in synagogues, and why all the chairs, sofas, and dining tables in our Bosphorus-facing sitting rooms are arranged to face the view."
"Whenever I find myself talking of the beauty and the poetry of the Bosphorus and Istanbul's dark streets, a voice inside me warns against exaggeration, a tendency perhaps motivated by a wish not to acknowledge the lack of beauty in my own life. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too."
"What is important or a painter is not a thing's reality but it's shape, and what is important for a novelist is not the course of events but their ordering, and what is important for a memorist is not the factual accuracy of the account, but it's symmetry."
"It was in Cihangir that I first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives - a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what - but an archipelago of neighborhoods in which everyone knew each other."
"When you see a beautiful woman in the street, don't look at her hatefully as if you're about to kill her and don't exhibit excessive longing either; just give her a little smile, avert your eyes, and walk on."
“When there is not a breath of wind, the waters sometimes shudder as if from inside and take on the finish of washed silk�
خاطرات مثل رودخانها� هستند که مدام در حال جریان هستند. ما نمیتوانی� آنها را متوقف کنیم، اما میتوانی� مسیر آنها را تغییر دهیم.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 was awarded to Orhan Pamuk "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures"
The inspiration for the Museum of Innocence came to Pamuk in 1982, while he was having dinner with the last prince of the Ottoman dynasty. Exiled after the formation of the Turkish republic, the prince ended up in Alexandria and worked for decades at the Antoniadis Palace museum, first as a ticket collector and then as director. Now, back in Istanbul after a fifty-year exile, he needed a job. The guests discussed the delicate subject of employment for the straitened septuagenarian prince of a defunct empire. Someone said the Ihlamur Palace museum might need a guide: who better than the prince, who had lived there as a child? Pamuk was immediately taken by the idea of a man who outlives his era and becomes the guide to his own house-museum. He imagined how the prince would greet visitors � ‘Ladies and gentlemen! Seventy years ago, in this room, I sat with my aide-de-camp and studied mathematics!� � before crossing the velvet cordon to sit once more at his childhood desk, demonstrating how he had held the pencil and ruler.
Ten years later, Pamuk came up with an insane plan: to write a novel in the form of a museum catalogue, while simultaneously building the museum to which it referred. The plot of the novel would be fairly straightforward: over many years, an unhappy lover contrives to steal a large number of objects belonging to his unattainable beloved, after whose untimely death he proceeds to buy her family’s house and turn it into a museum. You might think that Pamuk’s first step, as a writer, would have been to start writing. In fact, his first step was to contact a real-estate agent. He needed to buy a house for his future heroine, Füsun. During the 1990s, Pamuk visited hundreds of properties, trying to imagine Füsun and her parents living in them. It was beyond his means to purchase a whole building in Nişantaşi, the posh neighbourhood inhabited by Kemal, the hero of the novel. He could afford a single floor in a stone building in the old Ottoman commercial centre of Galata, but then the remodelling would be difficult...
For the next ten years, writing and shopping proceeded in a dialectical relationship. Pamuk would buy objects that caught his eye, and wait for the novel to ‘swallow� them, demanding, in the process, the purchase of further objects. Occasionally an object refused to be swallowed, as happened with some carriage lanterns and an old gas meter. Pamuk published The Museum of Innocence in 2008. It resembles less a museum catalogue than a 600-page audio guide. A ticket printed in the back of each copy grants one free entry to the museum. By that point he had already acquired nearly all of Füsun’s belongings, so the museum could, in theory, have opened the next day. But Pamuk was worried about the example of Edouard Dujardin, the French writer sometimes credited with pioneering, in a largely forgotten text called Les Lauriers sont coupés, the stream of consciousness. Pamuk didn’t want to be Dujardin. He wanted to be Joyce. It wasn’t enough just to build the world’s first synergetic novel-museum. The museum had to be a thing of beauty. He hired a team of artists and curators and worked full time in the museum for several months, taking naps on Kemal’s bed in the attic.