MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE

And so begins the new novel from the universally acclaimed author of Snowand My Name is Red, his first since winning the Nobel Prize.It is a perfect Spring in 1975, Istanbul. Kemal, heir to one of the town'swealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, from anotheraristocratic family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl, and adistant relation.As they break the taboo of virginity, a rift opens between Kemal and hislovingly described world of the westernized families of Istanbul withtheir opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, dining-room rituals,picnics, their mansions on the Bosphorus infused with the melancholy ofdecay.For nine years Kemal will find excuses to visit the other Istanbul, ahouse in the impoverished backstreets that Füsun shares with her parents,enjoying the consolations of middle-class life at a dinner table in frontof the television. His love for his distant relative will take him to theseedy film circles of Istanbul, cheap bars, sad hotels, a society of smallmen with big dreams and bitter failures.It will make Kemal a compulsive collector of objects that chronicle hislove story and his obsessive heart's reactions: his anger and impatience,his remorse and humiliation, his miscalculated hopes of recovery, and hisdaydreams that transform his Istanbul into a city of signs and spectres ofhis beloved with whom he can only exchange meaning-laden glances, stolenkisses in cars, movie houses and park shadows.All that will remain to him, certainly and eternally, is the museum hecreates, a map of a society's rituals and mores, and of one man's brokenheart.A stirring exploration of the nature of romantic attachment, and of themysterious allure of collecting, The Museum of Innocence plumbs the depthsof an Istanbul half western and half traditional - its rituals, itsmorality, its vast cultural history. This is Orhan Pamuk's greatestachievement.Selected edition: HardbackPublished: 24.12.2009No of pages: 560