Exhibition at the pictures: Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence on screen

His story of unrequited love in 1970s Istanbul was conceived as both a novel and a collection of related objects. Now, Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence has inspired a film that explores his memories of the city

I wrote The Museum of Innocence thinking of the museum, and created the museum thinking of the novel. The museum was not just some idea I chanced upon after the success of the book, nor was it a case of the success of the museum begetting the novel – as when certain blockbuster movies are transposed to book form. In fact, I conceived the novel and the museum simultaneously, and explained the complex link between them in the novel: a young man from a wealthy, westernised Istanbul family falls in love with a poor distant relation, and when his love goes unrequited, he finds solace in collecting everything his beloved has ever touched. Finally, as we learn at the end of the book, he takes all of these objects from daily life – postcards, photographs, matchsticks, saltshakers, keys, dresses, film clips, and toys, mementoes of his doomed love affair and of the Istanbul of the 1970s and 80s whose streets he wandered with his lover – and displays them in the Museum of Innocence.

Museums should focus on the lives and belongings of ordinary people, just as modern novels do

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