“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.” There is a precision to this moment, as there is to the rest of Kemal’s story-it happens “on the afternoon of Monday, May 26, 1975, at about a quarter to three”, as he enters his lover from behind, and nothing in his life will ever be the same again. It’s also an evocation of huzun, a meditation on the attractions and uses of melancholy. The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk’s first novel after he won the Nobel Prize for literature, is ostensibly about love and obsession. Instead of explaining Istanbul or Turkey, though, he reinvents and reimagines this world for an audience that could just as well be sitting in Istanbul’s cafes as Europe’s salons, or India’s metropolises. Unlike writers from the West, he must explain the culture his writing is steeped in. Unlike his contemporaries in Turkey, he gives himself the freedom to see his country with a clear, unsparing eye. Pamuk, the most celebrated of Turkey’s writers, has had to carve out an unusual path in his decades of writing. “What I am trying to explain,” Orhan Pamuk wrote in Istanbul (2005), “is the huzun (melancholy) of an entire city, of Istanbul.”
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