Category: Culture/Art

Istanbul: Journey to Another World

by Julian Loose

A Trip to the Museum of Innocence

For many readers, a first visit to Istanbul can seem an oddly familiar experience, reminding us at every turn of the writing of Orhan Pamuk; we recognise the great mosques and the old wooden buildings, the ships on the Bosphorus and the hectic modern streets.

The Bosphorus

Pamuk says he became the unofficial laureate of Istanbul almost by accident, simply by recording the world he knew. Certainly his spectacular success has given him emblematic status, with all the mixed benefits this brings. But grand comparisons to other city writers – to Joyce, Proust, Dostoyevsky – have not daunted his ambition to push his association with Istanbul even further. Last week saw the opening of the ‘Museum of Innocence‘ – the culmination of a project that has shadowed his novel of the same name from the very start.

The museum is the result of years of planning and hard work, attention to detail and creative argument on the part of Pamuk and his team of artists and designers. From this week, you can walk through the door of an unremarkable house in a back street of Istanbul’s Nişantaşı district – and enter the world of his novel. Orhan is surely the first writer to push an entire house through the membrane that usually separates imagination and reality.

The Museum of Innocence is a very unusual love story. For all its great melodrama and set pieces, this is a novel which excites the reader most during the long periods where nothing much happens, and we are treated instead to rich digressions on countless aspects of bourgeois Istanbuli life. It is a kind of time machine which transports us back to the seventies, to an Istanbul which is a poorer, more isolated and more individual city than that of today.

To visit Turkey now is to witness a dynamic country increasingly confident in its new leadership role, boosted by an economy growing faster than most of Europe. In Istanbul itself, countless Starbucks and even a Trump Tower shopping mall are just a small part of the construction boom that is reshaping the city. Turkey’s writers and artists have evidently assumed a new cultural confidence too, thanks in no small measure to Orhan Pamuk’s international recognition.

The museum takes part in this modern resurgence, but at the same time turns its back on it. Once inside, we are surrounded by the ephemera of a lost and undervalued period: the glasses of linden tea, the salt cellars, the football cards, the newspapers with their adverts and gossip columns, the food, the shoes, the clocks, the movie kisses, the kitsch ornamental dogs, children’s dolls and tricycles, the quince graters and cigarette butts. Most of these objects are placed within ‘vitrines’ or cases, one to each chapter, and all set beautifully within the larger casement that is the house itself. By their placement and associations, and with their superb titles (’57: On Being Unable to Stand Up and Leave’), the objects generate the magical electrical field of a Joseph Cornell box.

It is difficult to distinguish the success of this museum from the novel that is its twin. Each lends the other both substance and an air of intangible melancholy. Indeed, the novel was itself originally conceived as a museum catalogue, although this proved impossible in narrative terms. Pamuk will, however, be publishing a catalogue to the museum proper, later this year. Again, this will not be a straightforward exercise. The museum is – quite deliberately – left unfinished. Some boxes are not yet arranged to the author’s satisfaction, and are shielded with curtains like miniature theatres. And Orhan has talked playfully of adding to the museum, although it is not clear whether this means he will also be adding to the book.

The official museum website suggests that visitors do not necessarily need to be familiar with the novel. What would it be like to climb up through the floors of this memory palace without having first read the book? The boxes and displayed artefacts suggest an obsessive love, although it might not be clear if the object of devotion is the mysterious woman Fusun (who never shows her face) or the city of Istanbul (which certainly does, in a thousand details). A casual visitor would remain unaware that some of the documentary material in the displays is itself a fiction – that the splendid ‘Jenny Colon’ handbag is a kind of double fake, that the yellowing newspaper articles are in truth recently printed, or that the vintage clip of the advertising film for the drink ‘Meltem’ features a young German model currently working in Turkey.

But for the reader of Orhan’s book, the effect is more than uncanny. To follow the map in the front of the Museum of Innocence up the winding street of Çukurcuma Caddesi, to present a copy of the novel to the guard for his official stamp and for free entry to the museum – exactly as you are urged to do by the story’s hero Kemal Basmaci – is to complete an extraordinary circuit, and to feel that you have arrived at an essential destination.

via Istanbul: Journey to Another World : The Thought Fox.

A Kaleidoscope of Charms

By ANDREW FINKEL

Orhan Pamuk reflected in a display at the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul on April 27.Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesOrhan Pamuk reflected in a display at the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul on April 27.

ISTANBUL — “We are all diminished by the success of our friends” is a saying that lies at the bedrock of the politics of envy. If true, it means that I, along with fellow squad members of my high school junior-varsity basketball team, have every reason to feel just a few centimeters high. Only one of us, Orhan Pamuk, has gone on to win a Nobel Prize.

That I manage to keep my own envy under control is the result of having watched Orhan swim in a sea of resentment far deeper than I could possibly imagine.

In December 2005, I used those long-dormant basketball skills to elbow my way through the crush of an Istanbul courtroom to watch him answer charges of “publicly denigrating Turkish identity.” The trial was like an absurd scene from one of his novels, the result of an off-the-cuff remark to a Swiss reporter that no one in Turkey spoke of the deaths of a million Armenians or of 30,000 Kurds.

This was enough to turn him into a hated figure for the Turkish right and a pawn in the ultranationalist game to alienate Turkey from Europe. Yet in many ways far more shocking than this mob fury was the assumption that made the rounds at polite dinner parties that Orhan was a rebel with only one cause: that all the fuss, even the death threats, was being stage-managed to impress his foreign critics.

Last week I braved another crowd on Orhan Pamuk’s behalf. This time it was to attend the opening of a museum he sponsored and curated. It bears the name of his novel “The Museum of Innocence,’’ a tale of tragic and obsessive love.

The book was originally conceived as a museum compendium of everyday objects —mementos that the narrator purloins from his former mistress over a series of years, from an earring to the charred ends of the cigarettes she smokes. Though the finished novel took a different form, its author set about collecting the endless bric-a-brac of which he writes, plundering flea markets around the Cukurcuma, a neighborhood of Istanbul where he had bought a small house.

He became determined to tell the story twice, first with words, then with objects.

Alongside the publication of the book, he set out to create an actual museum very different from the ones with columned porticos that narrate the history of nations. This one would be located in the backstreets of the human psyche, tease our memories and test, as Orhan put it at the press conference opening the museum, “our reactions to reality.”

The narrative begins in the 1970s, and the objects, lovingly and thematically arranged in display cabinets for each of the book’s 83 chapters, are a catalogue of the kaleidoscopic charms of Istanbul’s bourgeoisie: soda bottles, newspaper photos of “shamed” women who defied the strict sexual mores of the time, with a black line to conceal their eyes, toiletries that adorn a wet sink. Near the entrance is a stunning tableau of 4,213 cigarette butts pinned like butterflies to a board, the legend of each one annotated by hand.

It is manic, an example of art imitating art, but at the same time it is breathtaking, perplexing, thought-provoking and everything that conceptual art aspires to but so rarely succeeds at.

“It is the first museum based on a novel,” Orhan said at the press conference. It is not intended as a tribute to his book but meant to work independently. Being a first, he added, is not enough. “Like literature, art should make the familiar look strange, the ordinary look beautiful.” Packing this all into a small house was no less complex than “designing a submarine.”

It took years and cost the $1.5 million winnings of a Nobel Prize. So why did he do it?

“It makes me happy,” he said. And I know what he means. It made me feel happy, too, and happier still to discover you can’t feel happy and envious at the same time.

Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. He is the author of the book “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

via The Success of Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence – NYTimes.com.