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The Museum of Innocence
by Orhan Pamuk
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Istanbul, 1975. Wealthy businessman Kemal is preparing to marry Sibel when he begins an affair with Füsun, a distant and poorer relative. What he treats as a private departure from social expectation becomes an obsession after Füsun disappears. Kemal breaks his engagement and searches for a way back into her life, regardless of the humiliation imposed by his family and class.
For years he visits Füsun’s household and secretly collects objects associated with their meetings: earrings, glasses, cigarette ends and ordinary domestic possessions. The collection turns memory into a physical archive of desire while Istanbul changes through the late 1970s and 1980s. Kemal’s museum preserves both his personal version of love and a social world divided by wealth, gender, reputation and changing ideas of modernity.
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