He lived in Alexandria, spending his summers in Portugal, and whiled away his time with friends who were also retired or ousted European and Middle Eastern princes and monarchs. He just wanted to be able to stay permanently in Turkey, which he was able to visit only on a foreign passport. As the youngest grandson of Sultan Murat V, he would have been on the throne at that time if the sultanate had continued and the Ottoman dynasty remained in power in Turkey.īut this old man, by now in his eighties, who had only recently been allowed to return to Turkey, wanted neither political power nor a throne. At a family get-together in 1982, I met Prince Ali Vâsıb Efendi. Here then, is a list of influences, drawn from life, literature, and art:ġ.
Of all the books I had written, this novel led most clearly to questions such as: “When did this idea first come to you?”, “What inspired you to write this novel?", "How did you come up with this?”, and so on.Īs The Museum of Innocence is not just a novel, but also a museum in Istanbul that took many years to establish, these questions have become ever more frequent. Thirty five years later, upon finishing The Museum of Innocence, I decided that the time was right. In the future, one day, I was determined to make the same sort of list. Around the time, aged twenty-three, when I decided to give up painting and become an author, I was enthralled to read Hemingway’s list and see musicians like Bach and Mozart and artists like Brueghel and Cézanne listed beside writers such as Flaubert, Stendhal, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
In a famous article in the "Paris Review", Hemingway made a list of the literary figures who had influenced him or taught him something important.
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