It is neither passion nor homicide that makes Pamuk's latest, My Name Is Red, the rich and essential book that it is. While Pamuk's descriptions of the ravishing and ravenous Shekure quicken the heart, and his circuitous clues to the identity of the murderer quicken the mind, Pamuk is neither Jacqueline Susann nor Umberto Eco. It is Pamuk's rendering of the intense life of artists negotiating the devilishly sharp edge of Islam 1,000 years after its birth that elevates My Name Is Red to the rank of modern classic … Pamuk's Istanbul is a city trembling over a fault line of ideas. To read Pamuk is to be steeped in a paradox that precedes our modern-day feuds between secularism and fundamentalism … My Name Is Red, like the best historical novels, is a super-parable, a novel of our time.
This curious, sumptuous, protracted thriller consists of fifty-nine chapters told from a total of twelve viewpoints, including that of the murderer … Pamuk's consciousness of Turkey's fate of imitation and inauthenticity expresses itself in his characters' frequent feelings of detachment from their real selves … The novel bears traces of an interrupted composition, wherein the author had to get a fresh grip upon the many glittering threads of theory and incident. Orhan Pamuk's labor, in this otherworld of miniatures, was long, and the reader's labor at times feels long, between spells of being entranced and educated … Erdag Göknar deserves praise for the cool, smooth English in which he has rendered Pamuk's finespun sentences, passionate art appreciations, slyly pedantic debates, eerie urban scenes (it keeps snowing, which one doesn't think of as Istanbul weather), and exhaustive inventories.
My Name Is Red is not just a novel of ideas. Eastern or Western, good or bad, ideas precipitate once they sink to human level, unleashing passions and violence. Red is chockful of sublimity and sin. The story is told by each of a dozen characters, and now and then by a dog, a tree, a gold coin, several querulous corpses and the color crimson ('My Name Is Red'). It concerns investigation of the murders, the tales of the three master miniaturists who survive Elegant — one of them the killer — and Master Osman's long (considerably too long) perusal of the classic Persian miniatures in the sultan's library. Also myriad other incidents, scenes and characters gyrating wildly in an era of seismic shift … Readers will have spells of feeling lost and miserable in a deliberate unreliability that so mirrors its subject: a world governed by fog.
While My Name Is Red has a many-layered plot — including a murder mystery and a love story — its thematic value is threefold: to provide a glimpse into an Islamic society, to understand the global tensions that exist when one empire waxes while another wanes, and to point out the cyclical nature of history … In addition to addressing the artistic, cultural, and political differences between the Ottomans and the Venetians, Pamuk also distinguishes between Turkish, Arab, Persian, and Chinese thought, philosophy, and art … The twist is that the story unfolds as each chapter is narrated by a different character or object — the murder victim, the murderer, the lovers, the town gossip, a dog, the color red.
...a huge and ambitious novel that is by turns charming and pedantic … Pamuk sketches a lively Istanbul at the end of the 16th century. It is a time of plagues, fires and war, where religious repression coexists with decadent social and sexual behavior … All of this allows Pamuk to explore the aesthetics of representation in great and sometimes exhausting detail. We learn about the significance of gilded borders, prescribed ways for drawing eyes and nostrils and the tension between innovation and imitation … At its best, My Name Is Red contains chapters of stunning artistry and drama, and it offers a fascinating view of life in a historic Istanbulite artist community.
My Name is Red is itself constructed around the individualising perspective; each chapter offers the varying first-person truths experienced by the characters. Pamuk achieves by narrative alchemy the empathetic understanding of both worlds, the dying and the emergent. Death is a subject, and is given its own chapter as a character, stalking the streets of windy Istanbul … This is a profound work with deep roots. Far from being a mere ‘historical novel,’ it has unforgettable narrative drive that unites past and present, as well as the high art with popular appeal that has made Pamuk into Turkey's greatest writer.
novels of the intervening centuries. This half-antique, half-contemporary style reveals itself in the structure of My Name Is Red. To begin with, the story is told from more than a dozen perspectives, including the illustrators', and also, apparently, many of their illustrations: a dog, a tree, a coin, and, perhaps connecting to the enigmatic title, the color red. Dead people also tell their tales.Within the individual narrative voices, we hear multiple mini-essays that pose questions about style and what effect art has on its viewers and its makers. More so even than the twin plots of love and death, these questions are the true center of My Name Is Red.
Although it features a large cast, My Name Is Red is essentially the story of Black, a failed illustrator who has spent 12 years in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire after falling in love with his beautiful cousin, Shekure, and being rejected by her … As Black simultaneously tries to woo Shekure and identify the killer, now hanging about in coffee houses, now talking to illustrators, now poring over the priceless illuminated manuscripts in the sultan's treasury, Pamuk takes the reader into the strange and beautiful world of Islamic art, in which Western notions no longer make sense … Pamuk is the real thing, and this book might well be one of the few recent works of fiction that will be remembered at the end of this century.
My Name is Red speaks in many voices, some more predominant than others. A dog, a tree, and a horse as well as Death, Satan, and a corpse all make eloquent contributions to the narrative, but center stage are Black the clerk, the Murderer, Esther the Jewish matchmaker, and Shekure, recently married to Black … A rich feast of ideas, images, and lore.
