IN AN interview in Mumbai recently, Orhan Pamuk, 57, the author of The Museum of Innocence, said rather petulantly, "When Proust wrote on love, everybody read it as universal love; when I write about love, they call it Turkish love."

Having read both Proust and Pamuk’s novel, I felt a tinge of sympathy for the Turkish Nobel prize winner of 2006. But The Museum of Innocence is not Remembrance of Things Past, although both works are deep explorations of love through untiring attempts to recreate the lost past.

In Pamuk’s novel, a 30-year-old, wealthy Turkish playboy named Kemal begins an affair with his distant cousin Fusun, 18, a shop girl who is poor but beautiful. He does this despite the fact that he’s engaged to a woman educated in Paris, of his own social class, and westernised enough to sleep with him before marriage.

The conflict in this ménage à trois makes for a tantalising story to sustain the reader’s interest for some time. However, the author narrating in the first person through the voice of Kemal goes overboard needlessly to carry on the affair that takes on the complexion of an obsession.

Following his formal engagement to Sibel, 28, Fusun disappears. And Kemal pursues her with the zeal of a madman, out of his mind and out of control. His obsession for Fusun is so extravagant as to be unbelievable. For the next eight years, he’s collecting objects that have come into contact with Fusun — hair clips, salt shakers, dog ornaments and, check this, 4213 cigarette butts (a whole chapter is devoted to these stubs, about 1600 words). All these items would house his museum of innocence, a state akin to happiness in Kemal’s view, a neat conceit.

The first person narrative hinders the author to crawl inside the heart and soul of Fusun, for although we see her physically, we are denied access to her psychological state, her rages and her resentments. But the first person POV enables the author to get in on the story’s action towards the end by advising the reader that Orhan Pamuk himself has been retained to tell Kemal’s story of obsession and his search for the innocent (happy) past now lost. In this effort, Pamuk even brings in Proust to justify his obsessive desire to reclaim the past.

It’s a challenge to sustain the reader’s interest in a story of love’s obsession that goes over 500 pages. And Pamuk probably felt that he could do a Proustian take on love’s conquest and loss. However, as the story ends, the reader knows better and feels that he’s been taken on a long ride through the streets of Istanbul, joy rides on the Bosphorus, but as for recovering lost love, it seems like much ado about nothing. It’s a fantasy love that does affect certain men who seek to relieve the past. Kemal’s protestation of love for Fusun — such pain, such bliss — while in the company of his betrothed Sibel stretches the reader’s credulity; either he’s faking it or believes arrogantly he can enjoy them both, a wife and a mistress on the side. The inherent irony in this situation is charmingly sustained.

The lovemaking scenes are not explicitly described, but for the foreplay of kissing. Here’s a kissing scene between Kemal and Fusun, and a sample of Pamuk’s writing style.

"I think about you so much that there’s no room in my mind for mathematics," she said, laughing self-mockingly, as if what she’d said meant nothing, as if it were a stock phrase taken from a film, but then she turned deep red.

"Had she not blushed so deeply, and betrayed such sorrow, I would have gone along with the joke. We would have acted as if it hadn’t occurred to either of us that this was the day of my engagement party. …But melancholy inhibited our lovemaking and finally tainted it. At one point Fusun lay stretched out on the bed, as if she were a patient listening to her pain, and watching mournful clouds pass overhead.

"We shared a whiskey in a glass that once belonged to Ethem Kemal — my grandfather, who was her great-grandmother’s second husband — and we began to kiss. As I write these words I feel I should take care not to cause undue upset to those concerned souls who have taken an interest in my story, for a novel need not be full of sorrow because its heroes are suffering. …As always, we kissed each other gracefully, having become so proficient in this art. As our kisses grew ever longer, a honeyed pool of warm saliva gathered in the great cave that our mouths combined, sometimes leaking a little down our chins, while before our eyes the sort of dreamscape that is the preserve of childish hope began to take form.

"From time to time, one of us would, like a ravenous bird taking a fig into its beak, such upon the other’s upper or lower lip, as if about to swallow it, biting the imprisoned lip, as if to say, Now you’re at my mercy! And having enjoyed this adventure of lips, and the frisson of being at someone else’s mercy, and awakening, at that moment, to the thrilling prospect of complete surrender, not just of one’s lips but of one’s entire body to a lover’s mercy, we recognized that the gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region."

This tragic story is not a Turkish love story nor is it a universal love story. It’s a story that could only happen in a world of fiction, a world that Pamuk understands well. The author is obviously well acquainted with the bourgeois society of Istanbul, having grown up there in the 70s when the action in the novel takes place. Currently, Pamuk lives in Goa with his writer girlfriend Kiran Desai, 38, and is writing a new novel.

-Ben Antao