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“[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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“[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
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“[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
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“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
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“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
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“A virtuoso comment
on East and West.”
— Cleveland Plain Dealer
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“[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
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“A belletristic
banquet…Pamuk describes Kemal’s decline with operatic drama and painterly flair…His
writing [is] lush, grand, and masterful.”
— Louisville Courier-Journal
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“An alluring
story—big in every way in Pamuk’s hands.”
— Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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“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
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“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)
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“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)
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“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