Museum of Innocence

“Our happiness or unhappiness depends mostly not on our lives themselves, but on sense we make of them.  Investigating this is my life’s work.”  This sentence, which Orhan Pamuk used in his acceptance speech for the Frankfurt Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2005), briefly encapsulates the charisma, truthfulness, clarity and worldliness of his literary work.

The novels and essays of Orhan Pamuk always centre on the question of identity: of an individual and/or a people and the conflict between traditional and modern, past and future, private and public.  The people in his stories operate in the zone of tension created by the meeting of Orient and Occident – magnificently portrayed in his many descriptions of his beloved home city Istanbul.

Orhan Pamuk’s books demonstrate “a dense and textured web of black humour, mercurial intelligence, sensual and strongly visual description, a detective’s powers of deduction and a romantic’s longing in the face of the prosaic nature of reality,” according to Joachium Sartorius in his Peace Prize laudation “and are influenced by the rich narrative tradition of Islamic Sufi poetry.”