Orhan Pamuk interveiw
Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel prizewinner, talks to Tom Leonard about
why his new novel avoids politics in favour of exploring obsessive
unrequited love
By Tom Leonard
daily telegraph/uk
Published: 5:30AM GMT 01 Jan 2010
The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk Unrequited love makes fools of
many of us. Even so, is it normal behaviour to collect 4,213 of your
beloved’s cigarette butts – to say nothing of 237 hair clips, 419
lottery tickets and hundreds of other items you have surreptitiously
looted from her family home, which you’ve been visiting every other
night for dinner and polite conversation for nine years? And then to
build a museum to house all your mementos?
At best it’s eccentric, at worst it’s creepy – but Orhan Pamuk won’t
hear a word of it. The Nobel laureate’s reluctance to condemn Kemal,
the love-struck narrator of his latest novel, is understandable. For
if Kemal’s behaviour is odd, what does that say about a novelist who
is building a real museum in Istanbul to recreate the imaginary one in
his book?
Turkish ‘plot to kill Nobel Prize winner’Pamuk – animated, garrulous
and jovial in person, his eyebrows shooting up expressively with every
other pronouncement – insists he should not be confused with the moony
protagonist of The Museum of Innocence, his eighth novel and first
since winning a Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. Still, they seem
to have more in common than the fact that both turned their backs on
bourgeois Istanbul upbringings.
Sprawled on a leather sofa in his office at Columbia University in New
York, where he spends four months of the year lecturing, Pamuk, 57,
clearly enjoys being asked to discuss spurned lovers and collecting
mementos. Given that in 2008 some fellow Turks were accused of
plotting to kill him and, five years ago, prosecutors wanted to
imprison him for `insulting Turkishness’, it’s a step forward for this
controversial writer.
`So many women readers in Istanbul have asked me, their eyes shining:
`Is Kemal you?’,’ he says, grinning. `To an extent, clearly yes, all
lovers behave like this. And when women ask this, I think their tender
smiles suggest they’re happy about their power to make men fall in
love.’
The Museum of Innocence is about sexual power and one man’s inability
to cope with rejection. It is 1975 and Kemal, a wealthy young
businessman, has an affair with Fusun, an impoverished distant cousin
and shop girl, just as he is getting engaged to his more socially
suitable, Paris-educated girlfriend. When Fusun ruins his hopes of
keeping her as a mistress by marrying an aspiring film-maker, Kemal
becomes obsessed with winning her back. Ditching his fiancée and
giving up his pretentious friends, he finds pleasure socialising with
Fusun and her parents at their modest family home, hanging his hopes
on her every word or glance. She gives little in return for his
devotion, so Kemal makes up for it by collecting everything he can
find that reminds him of her.
It is a refreshingly original take on unrequited love. Pamuk says he
wanted `to write about love in a deep way without putting it on a
pedestal’. Having focused in previous books on subjects such as
East-West political tensions (My Name Is Red and Snow) or identity
(The Black Book), he says The Museum of Innocence is his `most
intimate’ book. It is also his most profound and moving – though it is
let down by a middle portion that drags. Possibly in the interests of
understanding the depths that Kemal’s obsession has reached, the
reader has to wade through 200 or so pages of ballast (do editors dare
say no to Nobel laureates?) as our narrator humiliates himself ever
more pathetically, while rhapsodising tediously over each new
Fusun-touched bauble for his collection. When he mentioned the 4,213
cigarette ends, I feared we were going to get a character study for
each of them.
Pamuk wants the reader to sympathise with Kemal, but surely his
character’s behaviour is obsessive-compulsive? Pamuk says he is a
novelist rather than a doctor. `I don’t think he’s obsessive, he’s
normal,’ he says. `We all behave like this but we hide it.’
Even allowing for something getting lost in translation from the
original Turkish, this seems an extraordinary claim. Pamuk clearly
thinks I am being too hard on his protagonist – `I don’t like these
adjectives… I don’t judge my characters,’ he says when I accuse Kemal
of selfishness. Instead, he says Kemal deserves credit for rejecting
the easy, moneyed `fake society’ of upper-class Istanbul and `becoming
an individual’. It is not hard to see why Pamuk admires this sort of
behaviour, as he did exactly that himself.
Pamuk – who has been divorced since 2001 from his wife, a historian,
and has a daughter, now studying at Columbia – spends half of his time
in Turkey. But the first Turk to become a Nobel laureate for
literature is hardly a source of national pride at home.
In 2005, he stirred up trouble when he complained in a series of
interviews that Turkey had been responsible for the massacre of a
million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds. Turkish prosecutors charged him
under a law that makes `insulting Turkishness’ a crime. The charge was
eventually dropped following an international outcry, but he remains a
hate figure for Turkish nationalists.
While Pamuk says he doesn’t want to talk about politics, he admits
that police still guard his two homes in Turkey and he has bodyguards
whenever he is there.
And so he was delighted when, with The Museum of Innocence, fellow
Turks finally found a Pamuk book they could like. `It washed – whoosh
– all my political problems away, at least for the time being,’ he
says. `Generally I get bad reviews in Turkey. This time, they were
good.’
Pamuk is working on a new novel – he still writes in Turkish, still
using paper and pen – about an Istanbul street vendor who loses his
job. Winning the Nobel Prize has made his life `busier’, he says.
Doris Lessing, who won it the following year, has since complained
that the award had been a `bloody disaster’ for her writing career.
`There is a tendency, I unfortunately see it in Doris Lessing, she’s
complaining all the time, crying all the time – I don’t like it.’
Pamuk jokes that he is sufficiently `superficial’ to like winning
awards, but he clearly believes it is ungracious to whinge.
Taking up rather more time than he would like is his museum project.
He says he got the idea for a permanent museum at the same time he
thought of the book. He bought an old building in Istanbul 11 years
ago. Like Kemal, he has visited hundreds of small museums around the
world and says his new novel is a tribute to those empty places. The
museum, which is due to open this year, will be divided into 83
sections based on the book’s 83 chapters. Pamuk – founder, curator and
supplier – is still collecting the 1,500 or so exhibits (the
cigarettes, for instance, count as one) and shows me `Kemal’s father’s
shaving brush’ which he has just bought in a New York flea market.
People have told him nobody will come, but he insists he will not
`feel defeated’ if that happens.
When I ask whether anyone has suggested that the idea of a museum full
of objects belonging to non-existent people is a little eccentric, he
smiles. `They’ve said it’s original, interesting, not eccentric!’ And
could the word be applied to him? There is a long pause. `Maybe some
people call me that, but I don’t want to be self-aware of it, just as
Kemal would not be happy if someone called him an obsessive person.’
He pauses again. `I call myself more an outspoken person.’
The Museum of Innocence is published next week by Faber & Faber at
£18.99, and is available for £16.99 plus £1.25 from
books.telegraph.co.uk or by calling 0844 871 1515