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The Museum of Innocence
by Orhan Pamuk

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The Nobel laureate's latest is a rare book. Pamuk weaves this tale of an obsessive affair with such density of detail and such precision that you might find yourself dwelling in its pages a few days longer than you'd expected to. It's the story of an aristocratic young man's relationship with his teenage cousin, and its progression over some years in Istanbul – during which the main character calls off his engagement to another woman and suffers through his cousin Fusun's marriage to another man. Pamuk manages to slyly thread into the plot a very honest look at the relationship between the genders and between East and West. The author frames the narrative around a number of objects that its narrator has collected over the years, things that remind him of his love and which he has opened an actual museum in dedication to. I was completely captured by the story's minute intricacy, and the ways in which every last emotional fact of the characters is cataloged plainly. It's a story that very much seems to occur in physical space, and in which the representation of time by physical space is a very evident theme. You somehow feel as if you have lived every ticking second of the book's eight-year expanse; an accomplishment impossible by any less gifted a writer.
– Chantal James