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K Magill
, February 27, 2011
(view all comments by K Magill)
Persistence pays off; for the first 500 pages, I was not convinced that this was Pamuk's finest work, but the last soaringly tragic chapters convinced me otherwise. Although the meandering melancholy of the narrator, a lovesick thirty-something from Turkey's upper crust, may at first come off as self-indulgent, Orhan Pamuk is too skilled to craft a simple sad tale of obsession gone awry. In The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk mines deep into every vein of obsession, love, lust, infidelity and fidelity that he can find--in the end, turning on their heads our common notions of virtue, success, and life well lived. Reading, I couldn't help but recall some lines by Sam Beam on the newest Iron & Wine album: "We bricked up the garden and oh, what it means,/ and we've all kissed a virgin as if she were clean."
Moreover, Pamuk's ability to bring myriad minute details together into a moving whole is staggering. Not only is this a story of romance between human beings, but of the romance which grows between people and inanimate things. I go through my days now reflecting on the everyday objects that shape me, each one a defining piece of who I am. Pamuk has subtly shifted the way I think about materialism. More Iron & Wine: "I saw strangers stealing kisses,/ leaving only their clothes, only their clothes."
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