The order of the entries and their accompanying texts would all be planned and manipulated meticulously, producing a catalogue that could be read and enjoyed as a postmodern sort of novel. Museums should focus on the lives and belongings of ordinary people, just as modern novels doīack in the mid-1990s, when I first began to work on this idea, my dream was to open the museum on the same day the novel was published. Finally, as we learn at the end of the book, he takes all of these objects from daily life – postcards, photographs, matchsticks, saltshakers, keys, dresses, film clips, and toys, mementoes of his doomed love affair and of the Istanbul of the 1970s and 80s whose streets he wandered with his lover – and displays them in the Museum of Innocence. In fact, I conceived the novel and the museum simultaneously, and explained the complex link between them in the novel: a young man from a wealthy, westernised Istanbul family falls in love with a poor distant relation, and when his love goes unrequited, he finds solace in collecting everything his beloved has ever touched. The museum was not just some idea I chanced upon after the success of the book, nor was it a case of the success of the museum begetting the novel – as when certain blockbuster movies are transposed to book form. I wrote The Museum of Innocence thinking of the museum, and created the museum thinking of the novel.
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