Amongst this week's holiday reading, I packed a copy of The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk. I thought I should include at least one Turkish novel to to with my location. I had previously enjoyed "My Name is Red" by the same author (a clever murder mystery in which one of the narrators is the killer...without giving away his identity).
The Museum of Innocence is very different. I won't go into details or launch into a critique, there are plenty of those already available on the web, and I'm typing this on an Android touch screen by a very sunny swimming pool. I know. I suffer for my art. However, I was very taken with one particular chapter of this very fine novel.
To set the scene, our main character is a wealthy man who is completely obsessed with a girl with whom he had a brief affair. Through various twists and turns, and largely because of Turkish moral attitudes in the 1970s, he finds that the only way to even partially satisfy his obsession is to spend evenings with her family (with the girl, her parents, her new husband and a canary called Lemon). Our man spends literally thousands of evenings like this over many years (he counts them all).
Amidst this lengthy section of the book is a chapter entitled "Sometimes". The chapter is several pages long and consists entirely of short sentences beginning with the word "sometimes". It reads like a poem to banality. It lists, in no particular order, hundreds of incidents that may have occurred over the course of simple family evenings in front of a single-channel TV set. Of meals eaten, cigarettes smoked, comments made - and nestled among them all, tiny nuggets of joy or despair when the girl he loves lets slip something that might give or take his hope.
I'm still thinking about it now, days after reading it. I guess it may be better or worse on the original Turkish, but it's pretty affecting in translation.
Incidentally, since reading this novel I am now partaking of the occasional Raki. Well, I am on holiday.
