Orhan Pamuk is a man in love. So is Kemal, the narrator of Pamuk's shimmering, brimming new novel The Museum of Innocence (Knopf, $28.95).

Kemal falls in love with Fusun, a poor and distant relation 12 years his junior. Pamuk, more happily, is in love with literature.

``I am not Kemal,'' insists the 2006 Nobel laureate, who appears Friday at Miami Book Fair International. Yet, like Kemal, he grew up in a wealthy, westernized household in Istanbul's fashionable Nisantasi district, with every intention of going into the family business. Life decided otherwise. Pamuk, who came from an engineering family, had been studying painting and architecture, ``but it made me frustrated somehow, so, at 23, I stopped painting and began writing novels.''

30 YEARS OF WRITING

He devoted himself to the endeavor with an ardor worthy of Kemal and is the author of eight novels, including his 1982 debut Cevdet Bey and His Sons and Snow, completed shortly after 9/11. Its English translation was named one of The New York Times' 10-best books of 2004. At 57, Pamuk is one of the youngest Nobel laureates, but he's been practicing his craft for more than 30 years.

When love turns badly for Kemal -- and it does -- his focus telescopes. Fusun becomes his world, work a mere distraction. He collects Fusun's stray earrings, empty cologne bottles, 4,213 cigarette stubs. Detritus to others, they are to him the artifacts of a lost love. ``I may not have `won' the woman I loved so obsessively,'' he says, ``but it cheered me to have broken off a piece of her, however small.''

Like Kemal, Pamuk has an intense power of association. He recalls ``all the scary folkloric stories'' the family maid told him as a boy and with them recalls where she told him, ``how the room was formed, the way it smelled. It is a dreamy sequence that stayed in my mind.''

Though no longer a visual artist, Pamuk, who last month received France's Vermeil Medal from the City of Paris, remains ``essentially a visual person. Whenever I go to a museum or pick up a reproduction book, I'm happier. Clear-cut, memorable pictures, that is what I begin with, not plot,'' he says, speaking from Harvard, where he's delivering a series of lectures, ``The Naive and Sentimental Novelist.''

Images translate universally to Pamuk; language translates less so. That's why though published in 50 languages, he is ``dramatically involved in English translation. You hear Kemal's voice, and it is not what you dreamt. It's not a very happy thing.''

Speaking fluent, emphatic English, Pamuk explains, ``Turkish is the language I talk to myself. It's a distant language, a removed language. It makes the wonders of Turkish culture a bit distant, not accessible to others, unfortunately.''

OLD AND NEW

Pamuk writes exuberantly about Turkey, whether the action takes place in 16th century Istanbul, as with My Name is Red, or The Museum of Innocence's Istanbul of 1975. It is a place alive with brilliantine-haired men, heady with glasses of raki and hectic with Kemal's pacing, traversing the old and the new ``between Aga Mosque and the Palace Cinema.''

You can see why Pamuk's friend Paul Auster finds the Turkish author ``incredibly gifted, with a lush and fertile imagination.''

Yet in writing about Turkey, Pamuk gives you the world. ``Cultural differences? I don't think so, and I won't believe it,'' he says. ``Human beings are all equal everywhere. I don't make distinctions. This is not my cup of tea.''

Pamuk does ``not want to be political.'' And yet politics happens. In 2006, speaking out about Turkey's mass killings of Armenians and Kurds, Pamuk was arrested. The charge? Violating Turkey's Article 301.

``Article 301 forbids anybody from criticizing the government,'' says Auster, author of the new novel Invisible. ``From our point of view, it's a stupid and terrible law.''

PEN, the writers' organization, came to Turkey to advocate, and the charges were dropped the following year.

Despite the occasional death threat, Pamuk remains committed to free speech but prefers to keep his political and literary voices apart. Despite all he endured, he never lost his faith in humanity, because he never stopped loving literature. The two are as entwined for him as Kemal and Fusun.

``Reading and loving literary fiction is based on a desire to understand and implies a trust in humanity,'' Pamuk asserts. ``You want to learn the ways of human beings, you want to be informed through fiction. That is very optimistic, and that will save all of us. There is a solidarity of humanity contained in every good book.''

``An Evening with Orhan Pamuk'' begins at 7:30 p.m. Friday in Chapman Conference Center.

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