27. Don't Lean Back That Way, You Might Fall

"To reflect the synthesis of traditional pleasures and inspirations drawn from French home and garden magazines favored by Sibel and Nurcihan, the picnic basket displayed here—the thermos filled with tea, stuffed grape leaves in a plastic box, boiled eggs, some Meltem bottles, and this elegant tablecloth passed down to Zaim from his grandmother—evokes our Sunday excursion that may offer the visitor some relief from the oppressive succession of interior settings, as well as my own agony. But neither the reader nor the visitor should on any account think that I could forget my pain even for an instant." (The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk)

"The image in the background is one of the architect Antoine-Ignace Melling’s etchings. The European painter Melling who was born in 1763 came to Istanbul when he was nineteen and painted gouaches of the city that no Western artist has ever matched in directness, realism, and precision. He remains unmatched because he refused to exoticize or orientalize people and objects, and because, especially in his paintings of Bosphorus landscapes, he developed a style that made use of perspective while, as in Chinese scrolls, composing scenes almost without a center." (The Innocence of Objects by Orhan Pamuk)