From Dylan Suher’s review of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence at The Front Table:
Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, The Museum of Innocence, has three epigraphs. His last major work of fiction, Snow, has four epigraphs. His novel My Name Is Red also has three epigraphs. Pamuk’s love of epigraphs is significant; they are emblematic of Pamuk’s curiously humanist brand of postmodernism. Pamuk’s novels are, at their core, composed of tiny fragments of significance: short episodes, two page chapters, key actions, key phrases, even key words, each with tiny gleams of meaning that stand alone but are amplified when those fragments come in contact and resonate with each other. These fragments are collected by Pamuk and stitched together in his distinctive voice. All of Pamuk’s novels are museums; not only museums of epigraphs, but of stories told through the collection of wondrous things.
I’ve never read Pamuk, but this reminds me of Melville: both the tiny fragments of significance and also the interest in front matter. I wonder if that translates to actually finding the reading experiences similar.
I don’t know that I’d say the experience of reading Pamuk can be compared to that of Melville. But I would say that both authors surpass their peers in what they do. For Pamuk, I recommend My Name is Red to start, if you’re interested.
I’m pretty sure Pamuk included Melville in the list of writers he read voraciously as a teenager. And then he would have re-encountered a lot of Melvillish ideas through Borges.
Pamuk is Bolaño’s cousin is that sense – both are Borgesians.