my special bookshelf

A pause to confirm the excellence of Orhan Pamuk's latest book. It has now been placed on my special bookshelf, whose unofficial title could be 'shelf for the best books I've read and own'. It sits, collecting its first precious dust particles, next to if on a winter's night a traveler (italo calvino), a moveable feast (hemingway), 2666 (roberto bolaño), history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters (julian barnes), confederacy of dunces (john kennedy o'toole), and the bell jar (sylvia plath) among others....not bad company.

So what's the fuss, what enables the 532-page novel to claim such exclusive company? In Museum of Innocence Pamuk continues weaving his interconnect Istanbul world, this time through the eyes of the obsessed Kemal. Kemal's two-month affair with his distant, distant relative stops his current life dead in its tracks and sustains him for almost a decade until happiness flits by him once again. Kemal runs in wealthy socialite circles, and Pamuk explores this world in his ever-luscious detail, with words piling up on each other in sentence after sentence. The eyes of a German model on a soda billboard follow Kemal around for ten years, reminding us of his Gatsby-esque upbringing and potential fate. This book is far-reaching in its plumbing of cultural mores and pieces of Istanbuli history, collecting them as avidly as Kemal collects every particle of his existence with Fusun. If the museum conceit was a bit strained in the more action-packed middle of the novel, it proved its worth as the end approached. The tragic end.

It was every bit as good as those bookkeepers promised me. Perhaps I will thank them as I am returning this weekend to New Orleans...

please read this!

Oh, and quickly I feel I must say Maureen Freely (translator) is amazing at what she does.