Tearless Sepia

The Nobel-Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk devoted his entire life to the art of the novel. He was also gifted at drawing and painting to which, however, he was unable to give his unstinted attention. And that had always bothered him.

So he decided to build a museum and also write a novel that was going to tell the story of the objects in it one by one and how the museum came to be! The last line of the novel, "Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life", might as well be applied to the Nobelist, who recently inaugurated his ' Museum of Innocence' in Istanbul after publishing the eponymous novel in 2008.

The idea for the double project came to Pamuk way back in 1982, your columnist learnt while transiting recently through Istanbul. That was when the writer had been seated next to the youngest grandson of the Ottoman Sultan, Murat V. The former prince had lived at Ihlamur Palace before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The encounter made a deep impact on Pamuk who began to fantasise about the prince taking people around the palace like a museum guide and also about the possibility of deliverance through such a task of a reconsidered life among one's beloved objects.

That's the core idea of the Museum of Innocence, which aims at returning the world-weary visitor to a life of innocence through the power of nostalgia shorn of its bitterness.

"When the Museum was finished, I realised that I had the happiest experience of my life," Pamuk told an interviewer. His trick was to convert the regret for an unlived life into a labour of love that stands!