Like a Can Opener in a Worm Factory

Orhan Pamuk - The Museum of Innocence

As its title suggests, Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel is steeped in both nostalgia and a sense of place. The story of wealthy Kemal and the obsessive, tragic love he bears for his distant cousin and sometime mistress Fusun, it spans the years from the couple’s first meeting in 1975 to the present day, offering simultaneously an account of the couple’s fragmented connection and Istanbul’s increasingly Westernised history. At the same time, the novel graphically exposes the human cost of traditional expectations of masculine and feminine roles in Turkey, and the generational and cultural conflicts that stemmed from the influx of Western attitudes during the twilight years of the twentieth century.

Kemal encounters Fusun in the shop where she works, buying a handbag for his fiancee. Struck with her beauty, he engineers another encounter at a flat that used to be owned by his mother, and the couple’s trysts here provide the core collection for the museum Kemal spends the rest of his life developing. Unsurprisingly, in a culture that places so much weight on the concept of female virginity and sexual continence, their liaison essentially destroys not only Kemal’s relationship with his fiancee and the life he has planned out, but Fusun’s university and career prospects. After she vanishes, he dedicates his life to the memory of their affair, visiting her and her new husband for years on end and eventually founding the museum of the title in her memory. The objects surrounding their love, a dropped earring, a sticky cake, come to carry the meaning instilled in their relationship, replacing the genuine emotion Kemal was too heedless and selfish to act on when he could with a devoted veneration of relics. It’s a tragedy not just of separated lovers but of human potential, both on an individual and a national level.

Leanne Shapton – Important Artfacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Leonore Doolan and Harold Morris, including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry

Important Artifacts... is, at first sight, as confusing as its title. Taking the form of an auction catalogue, it’s somewhere between love story, social commentary and tragedy, a romance told in terms of the objects it leaves behind. We watch the unfolding relationship of New York Times journalist Leonore Doolan and travelling photographer Harold Morris from its fragile but enthusiastic beginnings at a Halloween party (Leonore as Lizzie Borden, Harold as Houdini, note self-conscious symbolism) to its painful dissolution under the combined pressures of  Harold’s commitment issues and inability to communicate, Doolan’s frustration and possible pregnancy, and the inevitable effects of regular separation and divergent aspirations. Its genius, though, and its poignancy, is not in the bald fragments of narrative we receive – emails, cards, scribbled conversations on the side of theatre programmes, marginal notations in tour guides and novels  - but in what’s left out, the lacunae that every reader fills in for themselves. I must’ve read it through about ten times by now (we take our work seriously here at the MJ, dontcha know) and still, every time something else falls into place. Sometimes juxtaposition of objects tells its own story. A passionate ‘unsent handwritten letter’ (‘Dear Hal...please be there...’) is followed by a flirtatious thank-you note from an ex-secretary Hal has taken to lunch, admiring his ‘spiritual outlook.’ Little clues gradually evolve into a complex, multi-dimensional narrative that asks its own philosophical questions – to give but a single example, what happened between Lenore and ‘ex-boyfriend Hugh Nash’ the night he ‘crashed’ at her apartment while Hal was away? If they had slept together, would it have mattered? Would this make Hal and Lenore’s love for one another mean any less? It’s a novelistic meditation on the realities and significance of love, told through its detritus: stuffed squirrels, toothbrush mugs, printed emails, folded polaroids, snippets of recalled conversations.

It’s also a brilliantly contrived character study. Lenore’s clothing, for example, and her presents to Harold, are vintage, quirky, somewhere between gauche and fashionable. Despite her passion for food (an inherited trait, we learn in an offhand reference to her restaurant critic grandmother), like the distressing stereotype of high-achieving New York women she records her food intake, often on the same scrap of notepaper as listing her lovers or Harold’s faults. Her ‘Cakewalk’ columns offer insight into her thoughts on their relationship (‘...when 4 o’clock rolls around...thoughts turn to what might have been...’) Hal is less likeable: self-absorbed, somewhat immature, perhaps best summed up ironically in ‘Lot 1234: Twenty photographs...of his feet in the bathtub.’ Often Lenore’s gifts go ‘unused’ or her notes unanswered. Thanking her for preparing a ‘gorgeous’ five-course Valentine dinner, he praises only the wine; at his friends’ parties, photos show an earnestly sociable, attentive Lenore, whereas at her equivalents, Hal is disengaged, ignoring the company and doing the crossword as Lenore’s hand rests disconsolately on his knee.  Nevertheless, the efforts he does make – conveyed through notes from therapy sessions, scribbled lyrics, that schoolyard staple the mix tape – are touching in their very scarcity. Important Artifacts... is fascinating, multilayered, and as original as they come, complete with a quirky, self-aware humour and a genuinely thought-provoking sadness. Shapton is primarily a visual artist, not a writer, but if all novels were this good, the world would be a happier – or at least more thoughtful – place.

Edmund White – City Boy

Since my teenage years, i’ve had what amounts to a minor obsession with gay men’s autobiographies. [This may explain both my academic career (‘Manliness and Beastliness: sex and the schoolboy novel’; ‘Fisting and Feasting: the body in BDSM porn’) and my sexual history/predeliction for bi-boys to everybody’s satisfaction, but Mark i suspect you should cut this sentence. :oP.] I blame Stephen Fry, whose Moab is my Washpot you should undoubtedly read should it have unaccountably passed you by. But the most immediately relevant upshot of this is that Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story is a longterm favourite of mine, and so when City Boy arrived on my desk, I got terribly excited. The directly autobiographical story of White’s years as a young gay man in 60s and 70s New York, it’s not only an account of his intriguing and complex personal life but also a vivid evocation of a ‘grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city’ nevertheless rich in art and culture. White’s friends work in the ‘delirious professions...literature, criticism, design, the visual arts, acting, advertising, media’, and Peggy Guggenheim, Susan Sontag, Jasper Johns, Jan Morris, Joseph Cornell, pop up unexpectedly, sharing meals or experiences or their perspectives on art, sex, identity. In-depth analyses of ballet performances and the development of Pop Art jostle with bodies in Central Park and complicated romantic entanglements for page space, and through it all White’s genuine warmth and love for his city, his work, his friends and lovers glows through. Quite apart from the name-dropping cultural commentary, though, it’s also passionately evocative. This New York is ‘the only place where everyone – young and old, straight and gay – cruised’, lawless, loud, leaking steam and spray, shrieks and sweat, sirens and semen. Nostalgic without the simplification that retrospect sometimes entails, City Boy is fascinating: anecdotal, vivid and as gossipy as hell. Definitely recommended.