But as I kept reading, I couldn’t help but root for this forbidden love.Įvery fiber of my being wanted to sympathize with Sibel, the unsuspecting fiancée, and curse Kemal for playing with two lives at the same time. After I read Kemal’s confession of the above mentioned fact, I was grossed out. He never washes the sheets they made love on, just so that he can be close to the smell. Things like handkerchiefs, earrings, tissues touched by his paramour are coveted by him with such ferocity that he reduces young kids who try to take these objects away from him, to tears.Īfter Fusun’s marriage, he finds solace in these small things around him. Kemal takes to stealing small things which Fusun touches in the course of their love making sessions. He cannot bear to see her with anyone else let alone talking to or standing beside another. His urge to possess Fusun- both emotionally and physically- drives him crazy with lust. He is obsessed with Fusun, to say the least he is stalkerish at times. Our narrator, Kemal Bey, has a peculiar habit. There is an accident and Fusun passes away, leaving Kemal look forward to years of despair and melancholy in the future. After a blissful night in a hotel room in Paris, the longtime lovers, now engaged, decide to go on a drive. Feridun cheats on his wife leading to a much talked about divorce and finally there is hope for the couple.īut providence has other plans for them. Day turn to night, and night to day and eight years pass in the blink of an eye.
When Kemal realizes that his love for Fusun is undying and that it is not another ‘summer fling’, he rushes to Fusun’s house only to meet her husband and family.
It results in Sibel finding out about her intended’s affair and eventually breaking up the engagement after she tries to cure the love-struck Kemal, only to fail miserably.įusun, who realizes that she cannot possess a man who is promised to another, is married off to a money less film maker- Feridun. Kemal Bey and Fusun rendezvous in Kemal’s apartment and he ends up falling madly in love with her. On the surface Pamuk tells us the story of a man named Kemal who cheats on his fiancé Sibel with an eighteen year old distant relative Fusun. This is a novel on love, on loss, on long lost love waiting to be replenished, on war, on politics, on forgotten things that evoke memories of the past, on Istanbul. But the matter became clear to me after reading Orhan Pamuk’s ‘The Museum of Innocence.’ Tragedies are the best love stories- someone had once told me.
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