I can’t decide if this is just a story about an emotionally dishonest person, or this is an emotionally dishonest story about an emotionally dishonest person. Awake by Elizabeth Graver starts out as the book equivalent of a well-intentioned and relatively well-made disease-of-the-week TV movie. It’s told from the point of view of Anna, married mother of two boys, the youngest of whom is afflicted with a rare illness that is essentially a severe, potentially fatal allergy to natural light. Overly telegraphed plot developments early on suggest that someone has a penchant for the dramatic, but throughout the book, I tussled with whether this was Anna or Graver herself.

The story of a mother and a family coping with a sick child – including how all of the relationships within the family are affected, not to mention household routines – gets railroaded fairly quickly. Anna finds a summer camp designed especially to accommodate sufferers of her child’s disease and their families. The family’s first visit ostensibly gives all of them new freedoms they have never experienced before. We really only follow Anna’s personal pursuit of freedom, however. It would be acceptable to realize that this was really a story about Anna only and how she’s been affected and what she’s sacrificed and compromised and all the rest, but it all happens too quickly, both in the framework of the book and in presumed calendar time, to emotionally and realistically buy into it and accept the shift in focus. Essentially, the children and husband seemed to be dropped pretty precipitously and remorselessly.

To try to be sympathetic, perhaps Anna has become a bore *because* she has sacrificed so much for her family. But it still just makes for a tedious account of a person rationalizing her selfish, self-absorbed secretiveness, as her current behaviours morph into transgressions. However, when she starts to confess that she’s had a somewhat furtive and untrustworthy track record all along – and therefore her current family situation is not what is driving her to be dishonest for the first time – all sympathy goes out the tinted window.

At least Anna’s comeuppance has a bit of a twist to it. Sadly, that’s not enough to redeem the book or the character. I’ll try to give Graver some credit that she does think what her main character has done is irresponsible. However, it also feels like she cuts her a bit too much slack, lets her rationalize too much, and throws in a few convenient external excuses for her behaviour in the book’s rather perfunctory wrap-up.

Maybe Anna is really just ill-suited for the life of a mother and wife, and she should have stayed on the rootless artist path she seems to yearn for. Or maybe there is a more clinical explanation for at least her more recent personal inconsistencies and inconstancy – she’s just suffering from a variation of seasonal affective disorder, as she avoids the light almost as much as her afflicted child. But it doesn’t explain away some of her earlier duplicity, and ultimately doesn’t make for a sympathetic connection with the character and the book.

Before The Museum of Innocence, the only other Pamuk I’d read was Istanbul, his wistful and somewhat depressing memoir and cultural history of the city. I appreciated the craft of Istanbul, but it was ponderous going at times. There are definitely connections between Istanbul and The Museum of Innocence, and not just in the detailed portrait of the colourful and exotic city. At several points throughout the book, I was ready to conclude that The Museum of Innocence just might be the wistfulness and inwardness of Pamuk’s memoir taken to a verging-on-satirical extreme. Long after leaving the last page of this book, and probably when I revisit and re-read it, I suspect I’ll still be debating how satirical and self-absorbed versus heartfelt this book’s protagonist is meant to be.

Wealthy thirtysomething Kemal Basmaci is engaged to an accomplished woman his age. They are both members of prominent Istanbul families and travel in Westernized society circles. By chance, Kemal encounters a beautiful young shopgirl, Fusun, who is both a distant relative and at 18, at an almost Lolitaesque distance from him in age. He pursues her, they embark on a brief but passionate affair, and when they part, Kemal remains and in fact grows increasingly obsessed with and depressed about losing the young woman. After trying half-heartedly to reconcile with his fiance, he decides to abandon her and his high society life to attempt an unusual and protracted wooing of Fusun, venturing into her lower middle class neighbourhood and life and becoming intimately entangled in but also welcomed into her family’s day-to-day life.

Is Kemal heroically and self-effacingly devoted to Fusun, or unnaturally obsessed with some crazed notion of her as a romantic ideal? Is he passionately in love with the real Fusun, or is he just mired in a form of self-absorption in which Fusun is some wildly distorted romantic icon? Is his increasingly compulsive hoarding of any and all objects associated with his beloved a creative and all-encompassing tribute, or a warped form of romantic kleptomania?

The painstaking detail with which Kemal catalogues his devotion/obsession makes this over 500-page novel engrossing at times, wearying at other times. However, in its last scenes, Pamuk skillfully pulls the book together with an elucidating and validating refocus on Kemal’s obsession, along with a charming switch in voice.

The apotheosis of Kemal’s love for Fusun takes the form of a museum. To further inspire and inform his mission, Kemal wanders the world visiting and researching museums of every shape, size and subject matter, from the sublime to the ridiculous, perhaps skewed to the ridiculous. However, in even the most obscure and overwrought collections and forms of tribute, Kemal finds justification for his passion, and the account of his travels and explorations is surprisingly moving. When he gets to Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, England, I was convinced, having recently had the privilege to view firsthand a place in which obsession, obsessive collecting and curating, and uncommon passions are made so memorably and claustrophically real.

Perhaps the following is a spoiler … At the very end, Orhan Pamuk inserts himself in witty fashion as a character in the book. The change in voice is a bit of a relief after such a long, emotional journey with the protagonist, and allows the reader to step back with some measure of objectivity from this feverish story.

“One could gather up anything and everything, with wit and acumen, out of a positive need to collect all objects connecting us to our most beloved, every aspect of their being, and even in the absence of a house, a proper museum, the poetry of our collection would be home enough for its objects.”

See also:

April 29, 2012
Turkish Writer Opens Museum Based on Novel
by J. Michael Kennedy
New York Times

The arrogant, unreliable narrator is a bit off-putting initially, but I found the whole cast of colourful, quirky characters – especially the charming and literally self-effacing Concorde – really drew me in as the story unfolded. The book is a fascinating examination of fidelity and love and how it can turn into obsession, but also how love can just grow and endure.

The most riveting, stunning, compelling tour de force of an opening scene in a book – absolutely bar none, and utterly more stunning than anything that could be rendered cinematically, because it is rendered in horrifying detail in the reader’s mind. Amazing!

After such an explosive opening, no book could (or perhaps should) sustain that power for its entirety – it would be unbearable. The book is not exactly disappointing after that, but it does become a somewhat thorny read for the balance. It ventures into other types of intensity, but in a more clinical fashion, as contradictory as that might sound. But interestingly, that thorniness perhaps exemplifies the multiple meanings of “enduring love”.