Istanbul, his home and his muse, is the ever-present character in his novels; his city’s often-uneasy equipoise between East and West, secular and sacred, traditional and modern adding tension to whatever story is in the novel’s foreground. The Red-Haired Woman once again explores this duality ... Pamuk has a masterly control of mood in this section of the novel, and its sometimes stilted language seems apt for his half-formed, often arrogant, intellectually and sexually curious young narrator ...flits like a barn swallow over fascinating issues of contemporary Turkish life, but never alights long enough to offer interesting insights or even substantially enrich the story ...for this reader, even the relative sprint of Pamuk’s slim book seemed unsustainable.
The Red-Haired Woman, translated by Ekin Oklap, brings together what Pamuk considers the crowning myths of the East and West: Ferdowsi’s Persian epic, the Shahnameh, and Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus the King … In reënacting the fates that befell the tragic heroes of Sophocles and Ferdowsi, The Red-Haired Woman is dominated by two extreme moods: lull and bombshell. The novel assumes a steadier pace in its final chapters … The Red-Haired Woman drapes Turkey’s political situation in the language of myth, suggesting that the ancient pairs of Oedipus and Laius and Sohrab and Rostam may have company in the present.
Many of Pamuk’s works, including My Name Is Red, Snow, and The Black Book, contain self-conscious, postmodern twists in which the tale reflects back on itself. This one is packed with so many allusions to patricide and filicide that the plot ends up overdetermined. Perhaps the point is that human freedom is an illusion, that by trying to elude fate we only end up hastening its arrival. But Pamuk has also built a structure whose scaffolding has not been removed. It is a well site that, for all the strenuous digging, comes up dry. Narrated by a middle-aged Cem reflecting on the passions and blunders of his youth, the opening section is the most evocative part of the novel. The rest, delivered by another narrator, is commentary ... The myths of violent encounters between fathers and sons that are the subtext for The Red-Haired Woman are familiar and credible. But the story contrived to give fresh life to those myths creaks.
Pamuk’s chief handicap as a novelist has always been his eager didacticism, his spotlighting of all the allusions and symbols. Here there are symbolic stars, symbolic books, symbolic women, intercut with loads of uselessly deep musings about the firmament. To be insistently metaphorical is one thing; to be insistently metaphorical while repeatedly explaining those metaphors is something else. Pamuk is forever afraid his reader isn’t paying attention. The marshaling of myth can make for dynamic storytelling, but Pamuk is too frequently a stranger to the potency of nuance, to the furtive unfoldings of character and plot. The real trouble here is the translator’s prose. Ekin Oklap’s incessant reliance on dead language does great injury to Pamuk’s already damaged tale ... What you’ll have to decide is whether Pamuk has penned the Sophoclean tragedy he aimed for or just another Turkish melodrama.
Istanbul-born Orhan Pamuk uses his city’s creep as the topography for his new novel; unstable memory is its shifting landscape ... Saturated with sympathy and sense of place, the book charts a boy’s journey into manhood and Turkey’s into irreversible change ... Cem’s journey through experience and the earth digs into layers of psychology and history — but it is predominantly an excavation of our desire to shape our own life-stories ... The Red-Haired Woman is also the story of Cem and his society’s moral slide — justifying horrors by trying to escape what you have left undone, or by smothering the truths you want to forget ...it is above all a book of ideas. Pamuk’s work promotes the fact that we should always interrogate the past but never deny or bury it.
Pamuk masterfully contrasts East with West, tradition with modernity, the power of fables with the inevitability of realism. Can we have our myths but be spared their consequences? As usual, Pamuk handles weighty material deftly, and the result is both puzzling and beautiful.
At 50 pages in, I had this book pegged as nothing more than an adaptation of the Oedipus myth, a story governed by the Freudian idea that what you resist persists. Mr. Pamuk lured me in with heavy-handed geologic metaphors and hints that had as much subtlety as a cartoon hero hitting a villain over the head with a frying pan ... The Red-Haired Woman explores the many myths and stories about father-son relationships...the novel contrasts Western and Eastern father-son relationships, while calling into question the very need for the strong, authoritarian father figure that seems both universally needed and reviled ...a beautifully written parable, a thoughtful consideration of Western and Eastern myths of fathers and sons, and the limits of free will.
On its surface, Orhan Pamuk's latest - a fable masquerading as a novel titled The Red-Haired Woman - is an exploration of 'the enigma of fathers and sons,' that always-tangled love-hate relationship that Freud, in an essay referred to here, viewed as murderous ... Pamuk's men tend to fall like this for idealized women who never fully come alive ... She's more plot device than person, but what a plot device... In his spare time, he ruminates on two myths, both awkwardly sutured to the narrative and given considerable airtime: the Oedipus story (in which a son inadvertently kills his father) and the Persian story of Rostam and Sohrab (in which a father inadvertently kills his son) ...novel's periodic references to Turkish politics leave no doubt that Turkey's slide toward dictatorship... In Pamuk's world, one rarely gets to go home again to the father's house.
...the first half of the novel [is] allusive, enchanting and perfectly controlled ... Haunted by his past, Cem grows obsessed with ancient tales of patricide and filicide, particularly Oedipus Rex and the tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab from the Persian epic the Shahnameh. Whole chapters are devoted to recondite scholarly investigations, à la Umberto Eco, to unpack the hidden meanings of these texts. When a real estate opportunity returns Cem to Öngören, Mr. Pamuk forces an inevitable reckoning with the red-haired woman and others who know what he did at the well, contriving events so that they mirror those of the famous stories. This, combined with a late-occurring narrative switcheroo, makes it impossible to discern what in the story has been the result of Cem’s actions and what has 'been dictated by myth and history.' An enticing book cedes, in the end, to storytelling at its most pointlessly rococo, the kind that invariably seems more fun to dream up than to read. Mr. Pamuk’s postmodern tricks may make him appear contemporary, but it’s when he’s being old-fashioned that his writing is most vital and alive.
In Pamuk’s latest book, The Red-Haired Woman, his avatar is a bookish Istanbulite, Cem, who struggles with 'the enigma of fathers and sons' ... Pamuk’s plotting is so overdetermined — and so relentlessly in service to his unsubtle thematic arguments — that the novel’s denouement is tiresomely predictable ... Pamuk’s postmodern puzzles are as meticulous as ever, and The Red-Haired Woman contains a wealth of atmospheric detail and memorable scenes. But he recycles situations and set pieces from his earlier books to a maddening degree ... his writing would be better served if he unshackled it from the grand task he set himself some seven books ago.
The Red-Haired Woman, translated by Ekin Oklap, is driven by the same obsessions, but develops them in suggestive new directions ...it blends the close observation of details with the broad brushstrokes usually associated with myth-making and fables ... At every turn, Pamuk balances the actual against the symbolic. The well is a site of genuinely hard work, but also a dive into the subconscious ... As Cem and Ayse begin to see the larger political issues raised by these stories, so we start to read The Red-Haired Woman as a parable about present-day Turkey... In a novel less thoroughly aware of its own strategies, this authorial friskiness would seem clunky. Here it seems happily all-of-a-piece.
The Red-Haired Woman doesn't approach the heights he has reached in those previous books, but at its best, it does reaffirm his reputation as a skilled writer ... With the exception of the book's final section, The Red-Haired Woman is often plodding and occasionally ponderous. Pamuk spends a lot of time explaining how well-digging works — he's clearly done his research — but it gets to be a bit much ... That's not to say The Red-Haired Woman doesn't have redeeming qualities. The last section of the book — the only one not written from Cep's point of view — is genuinely shocking, and it forces the reader to reconsider everything that came before. It's not quite enough to save the book, but it does serve as a fascinating coda ... The Red-Haired Woman is far from perfect: It's a minor work from a major author. Fans of the Nobel Prize winner may well find much to admire here; for those unfamiliar with his novels, it's inessential.
Ostensibly, this is a novel that explores father/son themes, but Pamuk insightfully ends by including what’s missing from both Eastern and Western accounts — a woman’s voice. Switching to the triangulating narrative voice of Gülcihan allows Pamuk to sustain both foundational myths at the same time. In the end, Pamuk’s revision gives authority (and authorial voice) to the woman, who usurps the place of the father ... On one hand, The Red-Haired Woman is a novel that celebrates characters who are Oedipalized into the modern neoliberal order. On the other hand, while that celebration exposes familial violence, it conceals a concomitant history of state violence that maintains the patriarchal order. As modern Turkish history reveals, the political father — whether the erstwhile secular founder Atatürk or the current Islamist President Erdo?an — rules like Rostam rather than Oedipus. The success of this novel, subtly staged, is that it allows us to consider how these ideologies might coexist.
Now, at 65, with The Red-Haired Woman, he has published a novel about such absences — or, at least, about the experiences of prodigal fathers and the lonely sons they leave in their wake ... Written in the French tradition of the conte philosophique, it deals predominantly with the themes of patriarchy and patricide, and it comes with the expected references to Freud and Oedipus Rex. It is also a very personal book ...puts both the freedom and anger caused by fatherlessness at his novel’s center. By doing so, he also, in more ways than one, captures one of modern Turkey’s central cruxes ...a clever writer. But sometimes, as in this book, he can be too clever. He wants to outwit his reader ... He is trying to tell us something about Turkey and its cycles of patriarchal figures and rebellious sons.
Adorned with notions of the uncanny, The Red-Haired Woman is fearless in its reading of canonical texts like Oedipus Rex and Rostam and Sohrab and in tackling the question of patricide and paternal filicide ... The entwined stories of fathers and sons take unexpected turns and proceed like the epics that have long shaped Cem’s life ... Pamuk’s readers will no doubt recognize the presence of his past works in this novel ... haunting and unprecedented novel. Pamuk’s mischievousness and playfulness are at a minimum, perhaps nonexistent ... In his shortest novel to date, Pamuk leaves the reader with questions about his choices in storytelling and his late style. For instance, the changing of the book title from The Well to The Red-Haired Woman means giving up a perfectly Freudian metaphor that captures the subtle threads in the book.
The 10th novel from Nobel Prize-winning Pamuk, The Red-Haired Woman is a story of fathers, sons, and myths ... Allusions to Oedipus Rex and Shanameh, stories of patricide and filicide, fill the novel, but there’s more than a little mystery here as well. And since this is Pamuk, you can be sure to find plenty of musings on the clash between modernism and tradition, new and old.
Like most of the nine other novels by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, The Red-Haired Woman is a story that personalizes political, cultural, and philosophical conflicts, especially east vs. west. But above all, it is a tale of obsession ...Pamuk’s language is so sharp that a reader can taste the gritty sand and feel the claustrophobia ...Pamuk rarely makes it easy on his readers. He and his narrators are so in love with erudite philosophical and political discourses that major plot points often seem like nuisances, to be discarded in a subordinate clause ...more approachable than some of Pamuk’s oeuvre (like Snow), thanks largely to the sharp descriptions and fascinating plot.
Fathers and sons just can’t get it right in this somber tale crammed with references to the story of Oedipus and its linked opposite, the Iranian national epic Shahnameh, in which a father unknowingly kills his son ... The novel has Pamuk’s customary wealth of atmospheric detail about his beloved Istanbul and the perennial conflict in Turkish politics (and in the Turkish soul) between secular modernism and traditional values. It’s also ham-fistedly obvious and relentlessly overdetermined; Pamuk seems to be trying for the stark authority of folklore and myth, but the novel’s realistic trappings don’t comfortably accommodate this intent. There are some bright spots: Pamuk paints a moving portrait of Cem’s childless marriage, and a searing final monologue by the red-haired woman very nearly redeems the flawed narrative that precedes it. A disappointment, though no book by this skillful and ambitious writer is without interest.
While Cem’s consideration of these stories initially drives the novel, by the end of the book, the contemplation of fatherly themes feels heavy-handed and the story devolves into predictable, almost melodramatic myth. Pamuk’s power continues to lie not with the theatrical but with the quiet and the slow.
