Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, “The Museum of Innocence”, tells the story of Kemal, the son of a wealthy Istanbul businessman, and the forbidden affair that derails his life, which is relatively standard stuff. What is fascinating, though, is that Kemal’s obsession with the affair leads him to collect an assembly of objects from around Istanbul which memorialize the affair, and that Kemal then houses those objects in the titular Museum of Innocence, a small and melancholy place which Pamuk describes in an interview as feeling as though “there was investment to preserve the past, but now no one is inside, except sleepy museum guards,” at once “timeless” and “ephemeral”. The twist is that Pamuk has been collecting the objects described in the novel for ten years — “I collected the objects first, then I described them in the novel” — and will open Kemal’s Museum of Innocence — a “melancholy place, but of course with some humor as well, just like the novel” — in July of 2010. What a wonderful commission for the architect: build this novel.

[via NPR]