In a neat trick played at the end of the novel, Kemal uses those objects to form the nucleus of a real-life museum, and hires an old acquaintance, the writer Orhan Pamuk, to write his story. And, in an even neater trick – and the reason, beyond creative sleight-of-hand, that the museum has received such recognition by the academic community – the objects of Füsun and Kemal provide a rarely seen slice-of-life look at 20th-century Turkey.
As I sought out the museum, a blood-red, Ottoman-style wooden house on a back street in the hilly Beyoğlu neighbourhood of Çukurcuma, I noted ruefully that I perfectly fit the novel’s description of the museum’s eventual visitors: “the single women who end up in the museum having lost their way in the street”. When I finally arrived, I marvelled for a moment. I knew the house wasn’t really the house of Füsun’s family, as the book said it was. But it looked just as I’d imagined.
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- The Museum of Innocence – Turkey’s most creative, daring idea, Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 05:53