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  • Orhan Pamuk interview

    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
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