The Museum of Innocence may be Pamuk's most intimate and nuanced exploration of these stresses yet. Pamuk looks at Europe's great tradition with a fascination and devotion that few contemporary Europeans would muster (it's hard to imagine Ian McEwan or Michel Houellebecq earnestly citing Sir Thomas Browne or Montaigne, as Pamuk does) and in doing so, he catches instantly his own - along with his country's and much of the developing world's - uneasy position between the indigenous ways they are determined to hold on to and the globalized world they long to belong to. Most of all, Proust showed him how to create elaborate fantasies out of his memories, and how to find a universe of feeling in even the smallest detail. Nabokov taught him how to caress every detail of the time-stopped, sensual world of his privileged boyhood. Dostoevsky offered him the precedent of a ferociously energetic writer, just outside the boundaries of Europe, who turned his raging eye on the issue of how European - or otherwise - his country should become. Pamuk made himself up, in other words, by living in foreign books.
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