“Life had taught me that remembering time is a source of pain for most people. Striving to imagine the line that unites individual instants or the line that unites objects that carry within them the memory of those instants, as in our museum, saddens us both because we sense its inexorable end, that is, death, and because, as we grow older, we painfully understand that the line itself is meaningless. Individual moments, on the other hand, can give us happiness that does not end for hundreds of years.”
I read this book last summer while I was in Granada volunteering at the Escuela de Solidaridad foundation while writing my dissertation. I would read in my downtime, often in the hammock on the terrace or in the shade of some tree in the small squares of the city. Even though it’s set in Istambul, in my mind I cannot separate this book from the scent of orange blossoms intoxicating the streets of Granada, the haunting and wonderful image of the Alhambra in the background, or the dry, breathtaking heat that enveloped these summer months.
1970s Istanbul. Kemal is a young man in his 30s to whom life seems to smile: he has a successful job, a close-knit family, and a girlfriend from a wealthy family. A rosy future seems to be ahead of him. One day he goes into a store to buy a handbag for his girlfriend, and there he meets Füsun, a distant 18-year-old cousin of his who works as a saleswoman and is preparing for the college entrance exam. He offers to help her with math, and the two begin meeting in a vacant apartment owned by Kemal’s mother. That place will witness an intense passion, a short-lived passion, but one that will change Kemal and Füsun’s lives forever.
Sometimes I feel that nowadays, the validity of love is judged only by the length of a relationship. Things that lasted little or outside the definition of “serious relationship” are often belittled and branded as a thing of little importance. Here, Kemal and Füsun’s relationship lasts for about a month, but for these unexpected and lost moments of happiness, he decides to sacrifice his whole life, throwing away his engagement and job, and collecting every smallest object that reminds him of her, in a desperate attempt to stop time, to dilate in eternity the happiness experienced in those now-lost moments, to take a photograph of love. With these small objects he collected, an earring, cigarette butts smeared with lipstick, small ceramic dogs, Kemal creates first a collection and then a museum, hence the title. What happens next is best left unsaid, because otherwise I’ll be accused of making spoilers. I will only say that after some time has passed they see each other again, but the situation is very different.
I think it’s impossible to finish this book without falling madly in love with Füsun, whose gestures, habits, dreams, and frustrations the author describes in a way that makes us see her as if she were right in front of our eyes. A beautiful girl, full of hopes, but who doesn’t fully succeed in living with full freedom. And who succeeds in this book and in life in general? Few people, perhaps by talent or perhaps by luck. I haven’t figured it out yet, and maybe I never will.
The third undisputed protagonist of this book is the city, Istanbul, with its streets, alleys, stores. I’ve never been to Turkey, I remember when I was in Chios I used to see Çesme across the sea, behind the mist, but this reading is somehow also a journey, a love letter to a city, captured in a specific era. Between the 1970s and 1980s. The portrait of Istambul’s wealthy society is stark, yet affectionate. A generation suspended between Eastern origins and the longing for the American Dream. A generation that has traveled, studied foreign languages and wants to feel modern and Western, through clothes bought in Paris and sexual mores that want to pass themselves off as “free,” “modern.” But after all, they continue to be Turkish to the core, this modernity (what does modernity even mean?) is more of a pose and besides, it couldn’t be otherwise, one cannot change what one is, get rid of one’s culture for fashion, wanting to take only the merits of the West, but without fully knowing its limits. In this restless but at the same time calm Istambul, a woman’s virginity at marriage is still an important value, seen as a fortress to be conquered, Kemal himself after all keeps repeating the expression “going all the way” to refer to penetrative sex, as if there were a goal to be reached.
The affair between Füsun and Kemal is the result of deep passion and closeness, but it’s also polluted by what people think, by the idea of possession, by society’s mores. Neither she nor he ever really gets to experience what they really want, and so she tries to move on in some way, while he, who perhaps could really leave it all behind, being favored as a man in society, decides instead to throw it all away and cling to the one moment of true happiness and honesty he has experienced.
“It was the happiest moment of my life, and I didn’t realize it. If I had realized it then, could I have preserved that moment and things would have been different?”
“Emancipating oneself from the sense of Time, transcending Time: that is the greatest consolation of life.”
The two words that perhaps occur the most in this novel are “time” and “happiness,” and these are perhaps the narrative’s leading themes. We are confronted with the tale of a love that becomes an obsession, an obsession with a person one cannot forget and with a happy moment one doesn’t want to lose, for fear of seeing one’s whole identity sink into grayness and oblivion. Perhaps with some degree of shame, I see myself a lot in Kemal and what he says, I see this inability to let go of those special moments that I lived without waiting for them because I’m afraid that nothing like that will ever come back, that having felt alive was just an illusion. We live in a world that rewards those who can move forward without hesitation, those who never really get attached to anything and always manage to be productive and positive. I don’t dispute that maybe it’s a way of life that brings with it less pain, and maybe many times I wish I could have been like that too, but I can’t. I feel that the moments of true happiness must be honored and cherished because we never really know how many are in store for us, maybe writing them down, remembering and recounting them is the only way to make them survive, to not waste my life. Of course, without letting the new happy moments slip away when they come, but without sinking into the trap that says that nothing really mattered and that we should always just think about the future, make plans and projects, without really living fully in the present.
Kemal probably cannot find a balance between honoring the past and still living his life, in fact he decides to turn his life into a museum of memories. But at least this is his attempt to be happy; it’s his attempt to stop time and oblivion. It’s probably a losing battle, but at least he finds a purpose to his life, and that’s no small thing. Not everyone succeeds in this. How many people can really find something worth throwing everything away for and pursue it with passion and conviction? How many people can say they really loved someone for real?
“I would like future visitors to our museum to remember these trips and dinners as happily as I do, so I will provide some details. Isn’t the purpose of the novel and the museum to share, with utmost sincerity, memories with other individuals, so that we can turn our happiness into everyone’s happiness?”
*Since I read this book in Italian, all the quotes were translated into English by me.
