The Museum of Innocence First Edition First Printing Signed

First UK edition, first printing hard cover, with unclipped dust jacket, both in very good condition. From the collection of Dr. Coline (Kitty) Covington, (1953-2023), a distinguished Jungian psychoanalyst and former chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council. Minor shelf and handling wear, including light wear to DJ edges. Pageblock tanned, light tanning to page edges. Boards in fine condition, pages tightly bound and content unmarked. CN

Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2009: 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. --Tom Nissley