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The Museum of Innocence tells of Kemal Bey's obsessive love for his beautiful distant poor relation Füsun. Set in Istanbul between the late 1960s and the present day, Kemal's narrative begins with "The Happiest Moment of My Life" and ends with "Happiness."
While the story of his love knows two brief periods of intense fulfillment, the eight years bracketed by those flashes are composed of patience, incomprehension, and the unconscious hoarding of every physical trace of every waiting moment. And after? Kemal traveled the world, acquiring anything associated with his extended moment of true feeling.
Toward the end of his life, the wealthy Turk contemplated framing his collection with a story: "I would dream happily of a museum where I could display my life—the life that … everyone else thought I had wasted—where I could tell my story through the things that Füsun had left behind, as a lesson to us all." So he hired prominent novelist Orhan Pamuk to write the catalogue of this Museum of Innocence, where, "wherever one stands inside it, it should be possible to see the entire collection …. Because all the objects in my museum—and with them, my entire story—can be seen at the same time from any perspective, visitors will lose all sense of Time. This is the greatest consolation in life."
A man as interested in happiness as Kemal Bey sowed a lot of passing misery along the way. In a country where a woman's putative virginity is in most cases all the goods she brings to the cultural table, Kemal took Füsun's proffered virginity on her 18th birthday, weeks before the party announcing his formal engagement to Sibel, the perfect wife. When his cousin asks Kemal if he's having sex with Sibel, he denies it. A lie. They've been doing it in his office on the leather divan. After the engagement, avoided by Füsun, he cohabits with Sibel, who wonders at his newfound impotence. Is something wrong? Is there someone else? Will he visit a psychoanalyst? No, no, and yes: all lies.
The perfect marriage doesn't happen.
Kemal tracks down Füsun. She's been married off to a fat boy. They live with her parents. Nearly every day for eight years, Kemal goes to their apartment for dinner and sits up with the family until the TV signs off, a patient suitor for a married woman's hand. He takes the family to dinner at restaurants, and issues an invitation in a narrative aside: "I would like every visitor to our museum to find these outings as pleasant as I did, so I shall go into some detail here. After all, isn't that the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?"
Kemal's mother takes a different view. He can't find happiness with Füsun, or he'd have found it by now. He responds with a smile. Angered, she declares: "In a country where men and women can't be together socially, where they can't see each other or even have a conversation, there's no such thing as love …. By any chance do you know why? I'll tell you: because the moment men see a woman showing some interest, they don't even bother themselves with whether she's good or wicked, beautiful or ugly—they just pounce on her like starving animals. This is simply their conditioning. And then they think they're in love. Can there be such a thing as love in a place like this? Take care! Don't deceive yourself."
If there can't be love in a place, can there be happiness? If there is only avowed sincerity to prove or disprove the existence of happiness, or love, what to make of the avowals of a confessed liar?
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