The Museum of Innocence - Orhan Pamuk



It is 1975 in Istanbul. Kemal, thirty, from an upperclass family, is engaged to a girl of like background when by chance he encounters a long-lost relation: Füsun is a shopgirl, an eighteen-year-old beauty who stirs all the passion denied him in a society where sex outside marriage is taboo. Their incandescent liaison will flicker and die when Füsun learns of Kemal's engagement. But Kemal cannot forget her: he breaks up with his fiancée to pursue Füsun, only to lose her to another man.

For nine years Kemal finds excuses to visit Füsun's impoverished, conservative marital household, playing the kindly cousin, hoping to lure her back. But Füsun's heart is hardened. From his visits Kemal will take away nothing but odd personal effects, possessions he will collect and cherish, in the private religion his adoration becomes. His hoard will make him famous - and a laughingstock - in Istanbul society. And when a final chance at happiness is ripped away, all that remains to him is his museum, this map of a society's rituals and mores, and of one man's broken heart.

A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment and the strange allure of collecting, this is Orhan Pamuk's greatest achievement.

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