Pamuk’s Latest, a Leisurely Meditation on Love, Time, Memory, Loss and Obsession

Obsessive love between older men and young women and collecting are subjects that have attracted other accomplished novelists. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, Lolita, created a storm when it was first published in 1955. It, too, was the story of an older man, obsessed with a young girl, but in Nabokov’s tale, the age difference was greater, which made it shocking. And Nabokov’s couple went on the lam, whereas Pamuk’s characters conduct their relationship in the very midst of the society of which they are a part. Some readers may also recall the work of the English novelist, John Fowles, The Collector (1963), which tells the story of a lonely butterfly collector who imprisons a young woman with whom he has fallen in love. Are Fusun’s butterfly earrings perhaps an echo of this earlier fiction? And of course, Nabokov was an enthusiastic lepidopterist.

Pamuk’s novel takes on the issue of sex before marriage and especially the subject of a young woman’s virginity. Fusun is a virgin when she gives herself to Kemal, whereas Sibel, who has studied in Paris, is not, but because she comes from the upper class and is engaged to Kemal, she basically escapes censure.

Although the surface of the novel deals with the love story, Pamuk subtly interweaves the warp of deeper concerns and themes through the woof of the novel. His canvas is the ever-changing city of Istanbul, which he knows and loves so well. Over the eight or so years of the story’s time line (1975-1984), fashions change, buildings are torn down, parking lots and commercial buildings replace the old apartments, and there are military coups. People die in the streets, there are assassinations, although these events are noted at a distance by Kemal, who travels always in a chauffeured car, protected by his position as the scion of an old, respected and wealthy family.

As Kemal himself acknowledges, the act of collecting can be seen as an attempt to stop the passage of time by preserving objects that trigger memory. As Kemal becomes more and more desperate, he absconds with more and more objects from the Keskins’ shabby apartment, the china dogs that sit on top of the television, cigarette butts, thimbles and other flotsam and jetsam. His visits there take him from Nisantasi, the comfortable, affluent district where his family has always lived, to a far shabbier, darker world. The description of Kemal’s cataloguing of Fusun’s discarded cigarette butts, which he carefully labels and dates, verges on an anatomy of true mania.

Fusun has married a young, fattish aspiring film director, Feridun, and Pamuk spends a good part of the novel, describing the fledgling auteur’s efforts to produce a film that will pass the censors and star his beautiful wife. Because there are many, many subjects which the Turkish government considers unfit as subjects of films — including the Armenians — although Kemal provides financial backing for the film, it is never made.

One of the most poignant images in the novel is that of Lemon, the Keskins’ canary, “aging slowly” in his cage, a symbol, perhaps, of all of Turkish society, imprisoned in its limitations, its restrictive laws, unable to change as the years pass by.