The Museum of Innocence: the double project of Orhan Pamuk.

cristiancaicedo (65)in #books • 6 years ago

A writer creates, with words, a world that later someone else accesses, through reading. But many times the vision of one and the other differ and the reader asks "is this how I imagine it?". From there arises the desire of readers to know, to visit, the places where the events of the novel they've read and have come to imagine occur; Places that don't always exist beyond the pages of a book. But this is not the case.

A nice Edition in English

The award-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, fulfilled the dream of many readers to conceive a great idea (which he then carried out): write a novel that revolved around a place and build that place in the real world. "The Museum of Innocence" is the name of the first novel that Pamuk wrote after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006 and whose tragic story is evident from the opening sentence of the book:

“It was the happiest moment of my life and I did not know.”

It's the story of a love obsession, or an obsessive love, as one wants to see. Kemal, a young bourgeois in the Turkey of the seventies, meets Füsun, a distant middle-class relative whom he had not seen since childhood, and his life turns around, changing radically: he falls deeply in love with her, breaks with his fiancée, loses friends, loses his job ... even, at one point in the novel, he loses her. Devastated, Kemal begins to miss her unspeakably and in his abandonment, seeks comfort in all objects, even the most trivial, that have some kind of connection with Füsun. Able to treasure a bottle of soda only because his beloved's lips touched her, or to change the remaining liquid from his bottle to hers to kiss her for transitivity by drinking from the latter, Kamal gets to count the days when he visited her and the time between visits, a time that stretches over years in which, perseveringly, Kemal endures everything in order to have a new opportunity with the woman he loves. He even gets to befriend the man she married, just to be close to her.

The Museum of Innocence

During those years, the objects that he gathers manage to calm him at the beginning, as if it were a kind of therapy. But then time passes and the mountain of souvenirs begins to grow and grow disproportionately until to gather that cluster of things that only sharpen their obsession, he decides to buy a house and transform it into a museum of memories: an earring, menus of a restaurant , a napkin, the sign of a boutique where she worked, ads for a soda, a cotton handkerchief with flowers, a belt, an inkwell, a flashlight, cigarette packs, ashtrays, the cup of tea where she was drinking, a sea shell, postcards, stockings, a broken porcelain heart and among many other objects, exactly 4,213 butts that she smoked.

But as background of this intense and unforgettable love story is Istanbul, the capital of Turkey. So many of the actions that take place in the novel and many of the objects that Kemal collects, are also the testimony of an era, of a society and the socio-cultural changes of a country throughout almost fifty years of history.

Orhan Pamuk at his Museum

And this, more than the young lovers, was what Pamuk wanted to honor when he founded the Museum. In the spring of 2012, four years after the book was published, in the Çukurcuma neighborhood of the Beyoğlu district in Istanbul, opened its doors "The Museum of Innocence".

It is a medium-sized construction of three floors (including the ground floor) where people can meet what the characters in the novel used, heard, saw, collected and dreamed. All the articles are exposed with an impeccable order in 83 numbered showcases (which correspond to the 83 chapters of the novel) and although it is not essential to have read the book to enjoy the museum, or to have been there to delight in the novel, it's clear that those who have done both, read the novel and visited the museum, will better understand both the exhibits, and the actions taken in the pages of the book. This is the link to the official website of the Museum:

The Museum of Innocence in Istambul

And some images of what can be found inside the place:

Link	Link	Link

As additional information is that the Museum of Innocence received the Prize for the Best European Museum of 2014, achieving not only jump from the pages of fiction to reality, but also being recognized, as well as the author of the story that gave life to the place. He also put most of the money necessary for its construction. The Museum of Innocence is a rare example that, sometimes, reality imitates fiction and that the imagination of the author and the reader can come to life outside the pages of a book.

Redacción: @cristiancaicedo