The Objects of the Exercise

Text by NEGAR AZIMI; Photographs by OLAF BLECKER

IN ISTANBUL, one hot, sun-soaked day this past summer, the novelist Orhan Parmuk leaned back in his chair, a writerly throne in an overfull study, and looked out the window. He trained his eyes on the unblemished vista before him, where the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn run into one another and emerge as a perfect muddle of turquoise. Today, he announced, he was depressed. “I am a writer. I have books to write. What am I doing building a museum?” His voice rose in a crescendo to escape being drowned out by folkloric music coming from a passing cruise ship. A stuffed bird, perched to his left, peered down at the bookish debris below, giving the impression that the writer was addressing the handsome, ill-fated gull.

Scattered around the room was the raw material of the museum-to-be: salt shakers, porcelain figurines, irregularly shaped doorknobs, lottery tickets, a quince grinder. The words “never forget the objects as you write” were written in Turkish in capital letters across a little yellow Post-it. He looked stressed. He had lectures to deliver at Harvard in the fall. He hadn’t gotten far into his next novel. He had dreamed of taking a vacation with his new love, the novelist Kiran Desai. The music from the Love Boat got still louder. He winced.

The story of how a Nobel Prize-winning novelist would come to open a museum begins some 10 years ago in this city. Pamuk, who had not yet attained the renown that would come with his Borgesian novel “My Name Is Red,” was preoccupied by a love story taking shape in his head, the tale of a man — Kemal — who would come to suffer terrible heartbreak. Like Pamuk — who makes a handful of cameo appearances in his new novel, “The Museum of Innocence” — Kemal, the book’s dolorous hero, is the scion of a bourgeois Istanbul family. He falls for a poorer distant relation, a young, former beauty-pageant contestant named Fusun. From there, Pamuk guides us through a multi-decade tale of loss that is equally a quasi-anthropological portrait of obsession, class and, because the author is Orhan Pamuk, ideas about East and West. By the end of the novel, Kemal, who has been collecting objects linked to Fusun, will, with monastic dedication, erect a monument to her in the form of a Museum of Innocence.

And like Kemal, Pamuk will also open a museum of objects, filled with 83 displays for each of the 83 chapters of the novel. “As I wrote this novel over the past 10 years,” Pamuk told me, “I encountered everyday objects that would make their way into the story. At other times, the story would demand an object to keep it moving, so I would bring one in. When I am stuck, I cast about looking for ideas from objects around me. My perceptions, or you can say my tentacles, are wide open to everything in shop windows, in friends’ homes, in flea markets and antique shops and so on. This is how the Museum of Innocence came about.” The photos shown here are of some of those objects, with explanatory captions taken from interviews with the author.

When the museum opens next year, in a narrow 19th-century building, admission will be free with a ticket printed in the book. Each chapter, whether “An Anatomical Chart of Love Pains” or “My Father’s Death,” will inspire displays of ephemera. Among the objects: 4,213 cigarette butts, 237 hair barrettes, 419 national lottery tickets and 1 quince grinder.

As Pamuk guided me through the museum-to-be one afternoon, we climbed to the top floor and looked down at the rubble of construction. In the semidark, the mood was a bit like the architecture, pregnant with possibility. But would anyone ever come to his museum?

“My mother used to say no one would read my novels,” Pamuk told me. “My novel honors the museums that no one goes to, the ones in which you can hear your own footsteps.” Over the years, he visited hundreds of these queer, lesser-known monuments to collecting — from the Chinese Traditional Medicine Museum in Hangzhou, China, to the Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, N.C.

His character Kemal visits museums, too — 5,723 of them, we learn from the novel. The similarities between Kemal and Orhan inspire a question that never fails to exasperate the author. He threw his voice, a complicated musical instrument, into the rhetorical query: “Mr. Pamuk, are you Kemal? Enough. No, I am not Kemal, but I cannot convince you that I am not Kemal. That is being a novelist.”

I scribbled the word “flustered” in my notebook. Suddenly he eased up. “I don’t want to give you the wrong idea,” he said. “I am happy. Tolstoy had his school. Another writer had his magazine, a third one had his movie dreams, and yet another one has his politics. This museum is my school, my magazine, my film, my politics. It is part of me.”

Negar Azimi is a senior editor at Bidoun, a cultural journal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/magazine/01Pamuk-t.html