Inevitably, it is not to be. From briefly having both women, it is but a short step to having neither. Obsession is ignited in all its destructive force as the younger girl walks away from their intoxicating daily liaisons, soon to be married to a poor would-be filmmaker. The engagement with Sibel sadly stutters.

It takes a certain kind of love to subject oneself to eight years of almost daily humiliation. Kemal takes to dining with Füsun and her husband and family several times a week. Minutely charting the contact with his elusive lover, he counts the 1,593 suppers shared during a period of 2,864 days. 

Sprinkled steadily through the text are the notes of artefacts regularly culled from her house to feed his memory and preserve, in his own, apparently delusional mind, his happiness, objects which are destined for the museum of the book's title (Pamuk will be opening a real Museum of Innocence next year). 

Some are fairly predictable: panties, film ticket stubs, a telephone token. Occasionally, the sheer weirdness of this compulsive pillaging of memories pulls the reader up with a jolt. There are the 4,213 cigarette butts Kemal harvests, their crumpled forms methodically analysed as indications of Füsun's mood at the time, her discarded olive pits and, strangest of all, a neighbour's artificial hand.

Kemal describes himself as the "anthropologist of my own experience" yet like so many of the great narrators of literature — for some reason the ageing lawyer Louis in Le Noeud de Vipères by Mauriac, another Nobel laureate, springs to mind, albeit without the rancour, as he surveys the wilderness of a wasted life — he is deeply flawed.

How innocent is a love and attachment so intensely painful that it sends "acid-filled grenades" exploding in his "blood and bones", not to mention almost ruining one woman and going a long way to killing the other?