The Museum of Innocence Audiobook

Quotes

• “[An] enchanting new novel of first love painfully sustained over a lifetime…Part of the delight in The Museum of Innocence is in scouting out the serious games, yet giving oneself over to the charms of Pamuk’s storytelling…Freely’s translation captures the novelist’s playful performance as well as his serious collusion with Kemal. Her melding of tones follows Pamuk’s agility to redirect our vision to the gravity of his tale…What’s on show in this museum is the responsibility to write free and modern.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “Spellbinding…A resounding confirmation that Orhan Pamuk is one of the great novelists of his generation. With this book, he literally puts love in our hands.”

  — Washington Post

• “Mesmerizing, brilliantly realized…Deeply and compellingly explores the interplay between erotic obsession and sentimentality…There is a master at work in this book…Istanbul—its sounds, its smells, its history—permeates everything.”

  — Los Angeles Times

• “Stunningly original…Engrossing and sensual…Granular and panoramic, satirical and yet grounded in reality…Great writers have made the failed love stories of desperate, self-involved men pulsate. A master, like Pamuk, makes the story feel vital.”

  — Associated Press

• “Pamuk has created a work concerning romantic love worthy to stand in the company of Lolita, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina…[Pamuk] is as accomplished an anatomist of love as Stendhal or Hazlitt in Liber Amoris…Kemal’s narrative crosses decades, assembling a fascinating social world of families, friends, and dependents, a rich palimpsest of the lives and mores of Istanbul’s haute bourgeoisie.”

  — Financial Times

• “Enchanting…A tour de force…Museum digs deep into memory, and the inescapability of the past. And just as Dostoyevsky did in critiquing a Russia that looked outward to Europe rather than inward to find its soul, Pamuk portrays an upper class that takes its cues from the West, while threatening to dislodge itself from its native culture…Pamuk’s triumph is that you wish Kemal would stay a while longer.”

  — Philadelphia Inquirer

• “[The Museum of Innocence] grabs and compels us, in prose that is deliberate, thoroughgoing, meticulous…What clarifies breathtakingly by book’s end—perhaps its secret heart—is the inverse story that is Füsun’s: the quiet indictment of a culture locked into ancient mores that suffocated women to death.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

• “[Pamuk’s] most accessible novel and his most profound…Following the spirit of Marcel Proust or another Turkish writer, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, the novelist’s art is to accumulate detail in ‘a “sentimental museum” in which each object shimmers with meaning.’”

  — Economist

• “A world-class lesson in heartbreak and happiness…Pamuk’s own presence in this wily narrative is as surreptitious as passion itself.”

  — O, The Oprah Magazine

• “A charmingly old-fashioned love story whose principal interest lies in the author’s warm-hearted evocation of his milieu: Istanbul is Pamuk’s city like Dublin was Joyce’s or Chicago Bellow’s.”

  — Denver Post

• “A virtuoso comment on East and West.”

  — Cleveland Plain Dealer

• “[Pamuk] once again distinguishes himself by creating this romance that in its magnitude and ingenuity reaches the level of literature’s greatest romances…Beyond the brilliant story line and the exquisite writing and imagery lies the soul of a man laid bare, a man who we should find at best intolerable (and at worst possibly despicable) but who yet finds such joy in this single-minded love that we cannot help but admire him…It is in this duality that we glimpse Pamuk’s genius.”

  — Chattanooga Times Free Press

• “A belletristic banquet…Pamuk describes Kemal’s decline with operatic drama and painterly flair…His writing [is] lush, grand, and masterful.”

  — Louisville Courier-Journal

• “An alluring story—big in every way in Pamuk’s hands.”

  — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

• “Pamuk’s sensual, sinister tale is a brilliant panorama of Turkey’s conflicted national identity—and a lacerating critique of a social elite that styles itself after the West but fails to embrace its core freedoms.”

  — Vogue

• “An enthralling, immensely enjoyable piece of storytelling…The large-scale social portraiture of The Museum of Innocence is beautifully assured; lightly satirical but also affectionate; a very tender evocation of Istanbul’s moment of dolce vita.”

  — Guardian (London)

• “Exquisite…An expansive, delicate, and deceptively straightforward romance…Against the backdrop of a shifting, evolving city, attracted to, yet skeptical of, the West, Pamuk gracefully, at times teasingly, pursues his themes of memory, custom, and sacrifice.”

  — Daily Mail (London)

• “This is the greatest novel of the new century…In its sensuousness of the life observed, its Olympian insight into the clashes of classes and professions, and its fearlessness in tackling the great themes of human existence without dilution by showiness, tricks, or superficiality, it evokes the great novels of love and obsession by Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Mann.”

  — New Leader

• [An] enchanting new novel of first love painfully sustained over a lifetime....The city is on exhibit: the romantic touch of decaying wooden houses, the sturdy apartments of the nouveaux riches, postcard views of the shimmering Golden Horn, Soviet tankers on the Bosporus and a Frenchified restaurant once in favor....Part of the delight in The Museum of Innocence is in scouting out the serious games, yet giving oneself over to the charms of Pamuk’s storytelling….Freely’s translation captures the novelist’s playful performance as well as his serious collusion with Kemal. Her melding of tones follows Pamuk’s agility, to redirect our vision to the gravity of his tale....What’s on show in this museum is the responsibility to write free and modern.

  — Maureen Howard, New York Times Book Review

• A Startling original. Every turn in the story seems fresh, disquieting, utterly unexpected...spellbindingly told....The genius of Pamuk’s novel is that although it can be read as a simpel romance, it is a richly complicated work with subtle and intricate layers. Kemal’s descent into love’s hell takes him through every level of the social order, past countless neighborhoods of sprawling Istanbul, in a story that spans 30 years.

  — Marie Arana, The Washington Post

• Pamuk...is that rare thing, a creator of sophisticated, intensely literary fiction, who is also his country’s bestselling writer....in part...because of his work’s accessibility and his willingness to adapt conventionally popular genres, like historical and detective stories, into multilayered, character-driven novels....mesmerizing, brilliantly realized...[with] marvelous and transporting evocations of Istanbul…and fascinating insights into a society living very much on the unstable borders of contemporary life between the Islamic and Western worlds....[This] engrossing tale....deeply and compellingly explores the interplay between erotic obsession and sentimentality—and never once slips into the sentimental. There is a master at work in this book.

  — Timothy Rutten, The Los Angeles Times

• Pamuk looks at Europe’s great tradition with a fascination and devotion that few contemporary Europeans would muster…and in doing so, he catches instantly his own—along with his country’s and much of the developing world’s—uneasy position between the indigenous ways they are determined to hold on to and the globalized world they long to belong to. The Museum of Innocence may be Pamuk’s most intimate and nuanced exploration of these stresses yet....Pamuk unfolds a classic, spacious love story a little like a Nabakovian version of Love in the Time of Cholera [and] The Museum of Innocence develops, therefore, into something of a rich and almost-modern Age of Innocence, translated to a confused world that doesn’t know quite how modern it wants to be....[N]o one has given us so unsparing and precise a sense of mock-sophisticated Istanbul society, and no writer has immersed us so passionately in a backward-looking monochrome depiction of Istanbul in its neglected traditional corners....[Pamuk] has given voice to nearly every society in the world torn between the longing to be global and to be itself....[Here he] manages to tell a very straightforward story of a dreamer in love—rendered lucid and fluent and human in Maureen Freely’s translation—that is, beneath its romantic surface, strikingly exact.

  — Pico Iyer, New York Review of Books

• While this is a broadly familiar tale, it is also, in so many ways, a stunningly original work…granular and panoramic, satirical and yet grounded in reality. This is a twisted love story, engrossing and sensual in its own right. But Pamuk being Pamuk, it is so much more than that. There is something casually anthropological about Pamuk’s writing. He manages to make a story with stern lessons about class conflicts and…the Eastern versus Western divide, feel both light and weighty. Pamuk is a puckish storyteller…who crafts scenes worthy of the cinema. Vignettes large and small feel vivid….Great writers have made the failed love stories of desperate, self-involved men pulsate. A master, like Pamuk, makes the story feel vital.

  — Henry C. Jackson (Associated Press Writer), San Francisco Chronicle

• Pamuk’s sensual, sinister tale is a brilliant panorama of Turkey’s conflicted national identity—and a lacerating critique of a social elite that styles itself after the West but fails to embrace its core freedoms.

  — Vogue

• a world-class lesson in heartbreak and happiness....Pamuk’s own presence in this wily narrative is as surreptitious as passion itself.

  — O Magazine

• pulses with the hopeful melancholy of an aching heart.

  — Entertainment Weekly

• Curious and demanding….The author examines Kemal’s twisted devotion with impressive cunning and inventiveness; inevitably, we think of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert and his Lolita, but to Pamuk’s credit, the comparison does not diminish this novel’s eloquence or impact. Suggestions of a tradition-bound haute bourgeoisie unable to let go of passing traditions and values feel honestly earned, and the narrative consistently engages and surprises....Another richly women tale suffused with life and color from one of contemporary fiction’s true master craftsmen.

  — Kirkus (starred review)

• a soaring, detailed...mausoleum of love....a masterful work.

  — Publisher’s Weekly