Real estate often makes for a good story, and Pamuk tells us in detail about his search for the right building at the right price. There is also an explanation of the long process that went into building the museum. The exhibition photos are accompanied by Pamuk’s lively, sometimes dazzling commentary, which ranges freely from personal anecdotes to meditations on aesthetics to whimsical ‘memories’ of his fictional protagonist (“Kemal once said to me…”). A single butterfly earring, a petrified glass of raki, an array of toy dogs, newspaper clippings, old photos, decorative hair combs, vintage watches and clocks (a lot of these), women’s shoes and clothes, and hundreds of other objects fill the vitrines. It is a squarish volume, filled with gorgeous photographs of the museum’s interior, including close-ups of the numbered display cases corresponding to chapters of the novel.

Pamuk did write his museum catalog in the end: The Innocence of Objects, recently published in its English language edition by Abrams Books. In fact, his original intention was for the novel to take the form of an annotated museum catalog, and he does not conceal his faint disappointment that he ultimately wrote what he calls a “classic novel” instead. Pamuk says he had the idea for the museum before he started the novel, which was largely written around and for the objects he gathered. Lest all this sound like an elaborate marketing scheme for the book, let me assure you that, if anything, the opposite is true: the novel is an elaborate ad for the museum. In real life, Pamuk calls himself the “chief promoter” of Kemal’s museum.

Pamuk himself makes a cameo in the novel as “Orhan Pamuk,” a novelist interested in telling Kemal’s story. Finished four years after the publication of the novel, this real-life Museum of Innocence houses objects ostensibly belonging to the novel’s narrator, Kemal, who amasses an enormous collection related to his dead beloved and to the era in which he loved her. The ticket is good for one free admission to the eponymous Museum-a real place, housed in a small building in the Çukurcuma district of Istanbul and curated by the author himself. There is a ticket printed in every copy of Orhan Pamuk’s 2008 novel The Museum of Innocence.

The museum of innocence by orhan pamuk