Museum cancels expo after Orhan Pamuk misses deadline

Frankfurt — The city of Frankfurt’s prestigious art museum, the Schirn, cancelled its plans for a literary art exhibition because Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk failed to write a book on time.

Pamuk’s forthcoming novel, The Museum of Innocence, is a love story told from memories excited by an assortment of everyday objects. In an art-meets-literature show, Pamuk was to exhibit all the objects in a museum gallery during the Frankfurt Book Fair.

However the Turkish author fell behind schedule with his manuscript, also delaying its German translation and holding up the German exhibition planners, who had wanted to open the show on October 18 and continue it until Jan. 18.

Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, with the Swedish judges commending his "quest for the melancholic soul of his native city," Istanbul.

Turkey is set to be guest of honour at the October 15-19 book fair, with Pamuk, its first Nobel winner, and 350 other authors beating the drum at the fair for worldwide exports of Turkish literature.

The Schirn said the novel and the collection of objects had not been available on time.

"In view of the serious delays in the completion of the novel Museum of Innocence and the assembly of the exhibition items in Istanbul, the timing for the exhibition of the same name cannot be sustained," the Schirn announced.

Carl Hanser Verlag, the Munich publisher bringing out the Turkish-language novel in German translation, said it had planned a mid-August launch, but now intended to publish the book on September 10.

It was not clear if Hanser had already received the Turkish manuscript. The company office was closed Friday afternoon.

The book describes how Kemal, a rich man and heir to an Istanbul fortune, recalls his passion for a lower-middle-class woman who is a distant relation of his. The Schirn said the novel took the form of a catalogue of the mementoes he has.

Pamuk had agreed to create a real-life collection of similar items. After the Schirn show, he would exhibit them in an Istanbul home that is the scene of the book. The Schirn said it would consider holding the exhibition at a later date.

DPA