And so it followed that to spend too much time thinking about other people’s misery might make me unhappy, too, and in so doing, pierce my armor.”
Since the age of twenty I had felt myself protected by an invisible armor from all variety of trouble and misery. “Some people spend their entire lives in pain, owing to the misfortune of being poor, stupid, or outcast from society-this thought passed through me, gliding by with the measured pace of the coffin, then disappeared. Clinging to the engagement with Sibel, Kemal slowly descends into a terrible, final obsession for Füsun, his eventual fate already being foreshadowed in the early chapters of the novel. On the cusp of his engagement to Sibel, aristocratic and educated, thirty-year-old Kemal falls in love with eighteen-year-old Füsun, a shopgirl. A billboard advertisement for Meltem, a domestic soft drink brand launched at that time by Kemal's close friend and business associate, proclaims: "You deserve it all!" Does Kemal, scion of one of Istanbul's most prominent families, really deserve it all? Pamuk tells the long life story of Füsun and Kemal, two star-crossed lovers united for but a very short time. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.”
It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant “now,” even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. “In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it.
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