Innocence of Memories: Orhan Pamuk’s Museum and Istanbul

There was a man named Kemal, who obsessively loved a woman, Füsun. Unable to keep her, he collected her in objects: hairbrushes, knickknacks, lipstick-laced cigarette butts . . . Out of this fictional fixation came Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, opened in 2012; there the visitor relives his 2008 novel of that name through “the magic of ordinary objects.” Ordinary magic is also in Pamuk’s relationship to his natal city, Istanbul, where the self-described flaneur habitually prowls, relishing its secret corners, its disorder, and its melancholy. As the old city comes down for the new, so stories are cut down with it. Hence, city as museum.