A fragment on The Museum of Innocence

Orhan Pamuk's latest novel is the best kind of erotic writing: suffused with loss and painfully light, and reminiscent of both Proust and Kundera in its psychological acuity, in its chronicling of the desperation and anguish of longing (like those other two authors, Pamuk paints its stubbornness and perversity, but not its energy). Moreover, the novel's central conceit, of a narrator showing readers around a(n) (impossible?) museum (dedicated to the woman the narrator has loved and lost, and comprised of objects associated with her in the narrator's mind), and providing the very context that museum visitors are typically bereft of, perhaps does nothing so much as demonstrate the impossibility of ever fully accounting for any object, of completely exhausting its meaning and significance. And doubly so where the context is lust, love, the spectrum of the erotic -- each object is simply charged with too much meaning for one to do justice to it, and to the secret it testifies to...