The story of Kemal, the half-hearted industrialist who is the hero of The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk`s first novel since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a deeply private one, built around an often inexplicable obsession that he attempts to justify to the reader. In honor of Füsun, the poor, beautiful cousin he had a short affair with when he was 30 and engaged to another, he has hoarded a museum of relics, both of their time together and of the much longer time when, like Gatsby drawn by the green light on Daisy`s dock, he hovered at the edge of her life, held in check (but yet held nearby) by the proprieties of Turkish society. From Kemal`s passion Pamuk constructs a masterful meditation on time, desire, and possession, saturated with the details of the city of Pamuk`s youth: the brand names, the film stars, the streets, the intricate social relations between classes and between modernity and tradition. It`s as if the museum of the title was built in honor not of Füsun but of Istanbul, circa 1975