Orhan Pamuk's museum

Negar Azimi in the NYT:

The story of how a Nobel Prize-winning novelist would come to open a museum begins some 10 years ago in this city. Pamuk, who had not yet attained the renown that would come with his Borgesian novel “My Name Is Red,” was preoccupied by a love story taking shape in his head, the tale of a man — Kemal — who would come to suffer terrible heartbreak. Like Pamuk — who makes a handful of cameo appearances in his new novel, “The Museum of Innocence” — Kemal, the book’s dolorous hero, is the scion of a bourgeois Istanbul family. He falls for a poorer distant relation, a young, former beauty-pageant contestant named Fusun. From there, Pamuk guides us through a multi-decade tale of loss that is equally a quasi-anthropological portrait of obsession, class and, because the author is Orhan Pamuk, ideas about East and West. By the end of the novel, Kemal, who has been collecting objects linked to Fusun, will, with monastic dedication, erect a monument to her in the form of a Museum of Innocence.

And like Kemal, Pamuk will also open a museum of objects, filled with 83 displays for each of the 83 chapters of the novel. “As I wrote this novel over the past 10 years,” Pamuk told me, “I encountered everyday objects that would make their way into the story. At other times, the story would demand an object to keep it moving, so I would bring one in. When I am stuck, I cast about looking for ideas from objects around me. My perceptions, or you can say my tentacles, are wide open to everything in shop windows, in friends’ homes, in flea markets and antique shops and so on. This is how the Museum of Innocence came about.”

The rest here.