My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of My Name Is Red
Book Review: "To God belongs the East and the West."
Summary: 5 Stars
Orhan Pamuk uses a tight and clever plot to expound on how art and society are entwined. The setting he uses is Ottoman Istanbul of the 1590s. Even though the murder mystery qualifies as a whodunnit in its own right, there is a lot more going on. This might book might be a difficult read for people not interested in art or middle eastern culture. But it is certainly worth a try and if you survive the first 20 pages of this multiple-perspective art house page turner, you are in for a memorable ride.Book Review: A Haunting, Haunted World, Beautifully Rendered
Summary: 5 Stars
Pamuk's 16th Century Turkey is a magical world shot through with consciousness - all physical objects, natural and artificial, are invested with self-awareness, fully aroused, senses piqued and perceptively observant. Here we have "the mind" - the perfectly knowing, self-conscious thoughts - of coins, dogs, horses, painted dervishes, trees, the color Red, Death (personified and unpersonifed), and of an exuberant cast of unforgettable characters, both living and dead, whose insistent voices effortless cross over from the other side in Pamuk's seemingly borderless world of physical and spiritual Being. (Indeed, My Name Is Red begins, like Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, the narrator speaking to us from a watery grave.)A nickel's worth of dime-store aesthetics: one function of art is to elicit - through the creation of representations, the arrangement of symbols, and the like - sensations that might otherwise be impossible. I can never experience Ottoman Istanbul in its 16th Century context. I will never see with the eyes of a court miniaturist or illuminator of manuscripts or a courtier or a rag- or liver-seller. But Pamuk convincingly recreates these myriads of worlds in all their strangeness with the imagination and skill of an ethnologist who has lived among these lives for decades. Here is a unique world, and Orhan Pamuk the ideal tour guide.
With immense subtlety, literary nuance, and historical and philosophical erudition, Pamuk has written what, at its most fundamental level, is a literary-scholarly mystery that at times is reminiscent of Eco's The Name of the Rose. Someone is murdering the great miniaturists of the Ottoman court. But why kill an official painter or calligrapher, who works largely from royal commission, and who executes his commissions in a highly formalized manner that idealizes the absence of "style"? The world of Pamuk's late 16th Century Istanbul is one in which the pace of change is accelerating and colliding with entrenched forces of jealously preserved tradition. That world is nearly as exotic to contemporary Turks as it will be to us, and Pamuk (and his translator, Erdag Goknar) has a lot of explaining to do, which he manages by carefully assembling a painterly, almost pointillistic narrative, dab by dab, stroke by stroke, giving gradual shape to the story, displaying exemplary patience and timing, advancing or withholding plot and subplot with consummate skill.
My Name Is Red is also a monumental, and monumentally odd, love story, a tangled tale involving Pamuk's hero, "Black," and Shekure, the impossibly beautiful daughter of the Court's "Head Illuminator," as well as a host of other characters. My Name Is Red is, moreover, a formidable, forbidding book, filled with strange names and places and embedded tales from esoteric lands in faraway times, requiring considerable readerly patience and attention. In return for the effrontery of have made such demands, however, the author (and publisher) is bound by honor to provide rich rewards. Happily, Pamuk closes the deal. The familiar materials of the epic novel - love, hate, friendship, rivalry, loyalty and betrayal, political machinations, the clash of great ideas, the grinding together of tectonic movements of time, in which one side or the other must give way - are spectacularly worked in the dazzling, winding, dreamlike context of the Ottoman court.
For me, one long chapter at the heart of the novel captures perfectly the pervasive sense of the numinous that Orhan Pamuk casts in this beautiful novel. Black and the head illuminator receive extraordinary permission to search for clues within the inner sanctum and holiest of holies, the Royal Treasury. Their guide is an aged dwarf who knows the treasure rooms intimately and can locate any item in the antique clutter of countless conquests, royal gifts, and opulent indulgence. Noting the awe and apprehension on the faces of the two investigators - overwhelmed by the opportunity to caress and examine objects of legendary beauty or notoriety from among the piles of paintings, tapestries, jewels and bejeweled weapons, gold plate, rare oversized books - he asks, "Frightened? . . . Everybody is frightened on their first visit. At night the spirits of these objects whisper to each other."
With its whispering spirits, sentient paintings, quirky lovers, and a lost world fully realized and recovered, My Name Is Red is an absorbing, gorgeous gift of a novel from a master artist.
(And let me conclude by singing a paean in praise of amazon.com. I would never have discovered this book had I not, having read through several non-fiction works on Turkey, gone to the amazon.com web-page of one and seen "Customers who bought titles like this one also bought . . ." My Name is Red. "An intriguing title," I thought. A bookworm seldom needs more. So my most hearty thanks, amazon.com, Jeff Bezos and company, for having made such discoveries possible. Yes, yes, we all see the commercial motive, but - to stretch a point - the European Renaissance came out of commercial motives as well. We're all grownups here.)
Book Review: A Meandering Ride
Summary: 3 Stars
The novel is clever rather than illuminating. For all its experimentation with structure, points of view, and language, it fails to engage. The story is meandering without leading anywhere meaningful. Its characters are found wanting in complexity and depth. In fact, the multiple narrators speak with the same voice, namely, the author's. There is a murder mystery, but it fails to excite. There is a love story, but it ignites no flame. The book poses as a psychologically complex novel rather than being one. And at four hundred odd pages, it's far too long.Book Review: A Novel That Works on Several Levels
Summary: 4 Stars
"My Name Is Red" is a philosophical historical murder mystery reminiscent of Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose"; in both books the central philosophical issues are concerned with the clash between religious values and cultural ones. Whereas Eco's novel is a relatively straightforward first-person narrative, however, Orhan Pamuk's is told using a multiple narrator technique similar to that used in Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying". Moreover, not all of Pamuk's narrators are characters in the normal sense; there are also chapters narrated by a dead man, a dog, a horse, Satan, a coin and the colour red. (Hence the title).
The novel is set in Istanbul during the January of 1591. The Sultan, Murat III, has commissioned a magnificent book to celebrate the glories of his reign and of his empire and has ordered his miniaturists to illustrate it. He has also ordered that they should make use of artistic devices introduced to the Ottoman Empire by European painters- perspective, chiaroscuro and realistic portraiture. This suggestion, however, is highly controversial for religious reasons. According to the strictest interpretation of Islam, any pictorial representation of the world, especially of living beings, is idolatrous and therefore forbidden; artists should confine themselves to calligraphy and abstract patterns. Over the centuries, however, this stance had been softened. At the period of the story, Muslim artists, at least in Turkey, were permitted to create representational works of art, provided these were illustrations contained within a book, not freestanding works of art. They had to be executed in a highly stylised, non-realistic manner. The Sultan's commission is therefore a highly controversial one
The opening chapter is narrated by the ghost of Elegant Effendi, one of the Sultan's workshop of illustrators, who has been murdered. It is clear that the motive for his murder is connected to the dispute between traditionalist Islamic artists and those more progressive ones who accept the new innovations from the West; Elegant was one of the traditionalists and it seems that his murderer is one of the modernisers. The main suspects are three of his colleagues, normally referred to by their nicknames "Butterfly", "Olive" and "Stork". Another major character is Enishte Effendi, the painter in charge of the Sultan's book project, and another major strand in the plot concerns the romance between Enishte's daughter Shekure, a beautiful young widow, and her cousin "Black". (Presumably another nickname; we never learn his real name).
Although the novel deals with events which took place more than four hundred years ago, it nevertheless has implications for modern Turkish society. Although Turkey-in-Europe, a term which until the Balkan Wars of the early 1910s encompassed large parts of south-eastern Europe, is now confined to Istanbul and a small area to the north and west, the country still aspires to a European identity as well as an Islamic one, something shown by its ambition to join the EU. Although Islam is the religion of most of the population, the Turkish state has been officially secular since the 1920s, and the man who made it so, Kemal Ataturk, is regarded as a national hero. The clash between traditional Islamic values and secular Western ones remains at the heart of Turkish politics to this day, and the clear implication of Pamuk's novel is that his country's split identity is not something new. (It is perhaps significant that Sultan Murat was partly Turkish and partly European, having an Italian mother and a Ukrainian paternal grandmother). The novel itself can be seen as an expression of this dichotomy, having a historical Turkish setting but being written in a modernist European style.
The novel also deals with another dichotomy, that between religion and art. All institutionalised religion functions, to some degree at least, as a means of social control, setting or reinforcing boundaries between the permitted and the forbidden. Art seeks to cross boundaries and to explore forbidden territory, so there is always a potential tension between religious values and artistic ones, a tension which is increased when religion seeks to control not only the subject-matter of art but also the very form of artistic expression itself. The Christian clergy may have condemned certain subjects (particularly erotic ones) as immoral, but unlike Muslim preachers they never sought to stigmatise perspective or portraiture as being in themselves sacrilegious, something which may explain why art in the West was less conservative and constrained by tradition than it was in the Islamic world.
"My Name is Red" may be a story about a murder, but fans of Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle are likely to be disappointed if they approach it in the expectation that it will be a simple "whodunit" with an exotic setting. The three suspect miniaturists are not really characterised as individuals, so the investigations into which of them is in fact the murderer never generate much excitement. (The characters who do come across most strongly as individuals in their own right are the two young lovers Black and Shekure, Enishte and Master Osman, the elderly head of the Sultan's workshop). The novel works on several levels; it is more than just a crime story or a love story. It is also vivid portrayal of Turkish society at a particular point in history and a stimulating novel of ideas. A fascinating read. My one complaint is that the translator could have done more to explain points relating to Turkish and Islamic history, literature, art and thought to a Western audience.
Book Review: A Tour de Force from a Nobel Prize Winner
Summary: 5 Stars
This story takes place at the end of Sixteenth Century when the competiton between the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe was reaching its climax. Soon, the Ottoman State would begin its steady and long winded decline. In "My Name is Red", Orhan Pamuk examines this contest of civilizations through the prism of painting. This struggle pits the conversative East with its stress on tradition against the more dynamic West with its emphasis on perspective and individual style.
It is very difficult to place "My Name is Red" within the borders of any one genre. The novel is one part murder mystery and another part love story. However, if there is any one characteristic that dominates this novel, it is the literary brilliance of the Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk. He is one of the world's great novelists and his talent elevates a historical mystery novel to another level. "My Names is Red" is a complex novel that requires a high level of commitment from a reader. Reading this novel takes special effort but in the end this extra effort is well rewarded. Highly recommended.