Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence ****

In advance of our upcoming vacation in Turkey, I read the latest novel from the Nobel Prize-winner. The story takes place in Istanbul during (mostly) the 1970s, and the sense of the place is one of its finest features. The narrator Kemal has an obsessive love for his distant cousin, and over the years he collects countless mundane objects that relate to his beloved, such as the salt shaker she uses at dinner one evening.

I really enjoyed the first 150 pages, during which Kemal meets Füsun and begins his affair with her. Pamuk tells the tale with a great deal of specificity but also manages to make it a commentary about Turkey's conflicting desires for tradition and European modernity. After Kemal and his fiance Sibel's engagement party, though, Kemal's obsession kicks in and the book becomes far too repetitive. I am usually a fan of obsessive narrators —cf. Remainder, Theroux's An Adultery, Gombrowicz's Cosmos — but Kemal repeated the same thoughts rather than exploring his situation from all angles. Nonetheless, I remained engaged by the little details of the milieu like the outdoor cinemas where people eat pumpkin seeds while they watch Turkish melodramas. (The fact that I'd recently been pouring over Istanbul guidebooks surely factored into my enjoyment.) The plot resumes in earnest in the last 100 pages, and the book comes to a strong finish.

As I said in my review of his earlier book Snow, something about Pamuk's writing style reminds me of Paul Auster. The Museum of Innocence is a more traditional book than Snow, with rounded characters and less obvious parables, but the Auster-ity of it was underlined by the car accident that happens near the end. I couldn't help but think of The Music of Chance.

Otto Penzler (editor), Agents of Treachery ***

I am a fan of spy fiction. Many of its virtues -- compelling settings, ambiguous characters, complex conspiracies -- would seem to demand book-length narratives. This book, however, is a collection of short spy stories from a range of contemporary writers. Although they lack the depth of novels, most of the stories are entertaining.

My favorite writer was Stephen Hunter, whose story "Casey at the Bat" takes place during the late stages of World War II. I enjoyed his work both for its insights into the political climate (with the Russians, knowing that the Allies would win the war, supporting intra-group rivalries within the French Resistance to favor the socialist ones) and for its action sequence descriptions. Andrew Kalvin's story "Sleeping with My Assassin" had the best literary qualities. The weakest story was James Grady's "Destiny City." The ham-handed prose made me wonder what I'd find if I went back and re-read Six Days of the Condor. 

If you are a fan of spy fiction, Agents of Treachery is a nice beach read.