In his Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk writes that the defining characteristic of the city and its inhabitants can be captured by the Turkish word huzun: a type of deep, melancholic nostalgia, a “state of mind that is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating”. His fat, satisfying new novel, The Museum of Innocence, is suffused with just such a feeling.

The book starts with a bang: in the dusty bedroom of a hitherto-uninhabited house in mid-Seventies Istanbul, the upper-class, 30-year-old Kemal is making ecstatic love to Fusun, a “poor distant relative”. In retrospect, Kemal, the narrator, says that this “was the happiest moment of my life”. Shortly after, this heir to the fortunes of a thriving distribution-and-export firm breezily tells us that he’s engaged to another woman, Sibel, an alliance more in keeping with his social standing.

Kemal’s attraction towards the 18-year-old student and shopgirl Fusun deepens and grows, and he finds himself helpless in the face of his desire. The initial relationship lasts for barely a month-and-a-half, but after it, he’s racked with anguish, driven to break off his engagement and then spends nine years trying to win Fusun back. It’s an obsession that brings to mind Florentino’s passion for Fermina in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. The fixated Kemal is often caddish and duplicitous, but earns a degree of empathy with his fanatical quest.

He also lovingly details another fixation: that of collecting objects to fill his “museum of innocence”, each one enshrining a memory associated with his beloved. An earring, a doll, a piece of wallpaper, a hotel key, a bell, restaurant menus, photographs, an ashtray, hairclips, a paperweight and much more — these, like Proust’s madeleine, are his gateways to the past. In them, he finds the intersection of “desire, touch and love”. This transformation of moments into mementos also holds the book together at a structural level, with its succession of short chapters.

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