My Name Is Red
by Orhan Pamuk
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Book Reviews of My Name Is Red
Book Review: Brilliant, Innovative, But Not An Easy Read
Summary: 5 Stars
This book will leave the reader slightly restless. It took me a week to read the book. The pace is slow, about half normal reading speed. There are many characters, and many tangents that take the reader away from the main story. After 50 pages I had to stop and make a list of all the characters and their relationships to one another. I would equate the difficulty with reading The Iliad, by Homer, perhaps the Penguin Classics version. Red might be a bit more complicated than that classic, but Red is a bit more interesting.
Orham Pamuk is enjoying a high degree of current popularity, and the present book can be found in all the book stores. I was introduced to his writings by his recent article in a December of the New Yorker where he describes his relationship with his father and their common interest in writing. His father was an amateur writer. That is a wonderful article and I would highly recommend that article in the December 25 issue. It is his Nobel lecture and available on the web.
So, it was with much anticipation that I sat down and read Snow cover to cover after that article. More recently, I finished the present book, My Name is Red.
The book is innovative and unusual. It uses over 15 different narrators to tell a story about love and murder in Turkey in the late 1590s. Some of the narrators are animals, objects, and even colors. There is much Turkish history worked into the plot along with many comments on Islam.
As a mystery story it is a bit weak and too complicated. Similarly as a love story the characters seem wooden. The prose is good but complicated. It is hard to read and will take the average reader a while to absorb everything.
So, this is clearly and innovative book; in many ways it is brilliant; similarly, it is a bit complicated and not everyone will want to invest the time to slowly wade through the 500 pages.
Book Review: Eternal Arts meets the New Millenium
Summary: 5 Stars
I started reading Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red in 2003 when a friend lent to me while abroad. It was right after I had taken a course in Islamic art so a lot of the information about the popularity of Persian painting was fresh in my mind. When I finally got around to reading the whole book it was several years later, the art history information was less fresh in my brain, but that did not diminish the perfect wonder that is in this book.
I may have been reluctant to pick up this book as it would be another in the subgenre of art history narratives like Girl with a Peal Earring or The Agony and the Ecstasy which I do not like. A large part of the problem with those is that they are celebrations of people you already know are great, and they take a canonized view of western art history which each old master's genius is inevitably going to come to fruition despite the melodrama surrounding it. The past is finished and isolated. Fortunately this is not the case in Turkey.
The narrative describes the complicated relationship between Christianity and Islam in the day-to-day practices of art and life. To present this debate Pamuk employs a many narratives, some of whom are hiding their true identities from the reader. Though the novel is narrated by many different voices which take different sides of the debate they all sound similar in a way that both helps keep the secrets of the story. It also makes the text of the novel part of the debate of "true style" versus "personal style" debate that informs the book. The debate is so much part of the story that the actual murder mystery just gives the form for these ideas to be expressed and changed.
It is a wonderfully complex tale filled with complicated characters that keeps you guessing and works as an exploration of interpreting any form of representation.
Book Review: Timely and historical at the same time
Summary: 5 Stars
My Name is Red, set in 1591 Istanbul, speaks to the clash of civilizations. While the murder mystery novel unfolds, the art of the miniaturists is the true main character. All the humans have supporting roles. What happens to this particular form of art in the 16th century is displayed before the reader like a painting. The embellished borders consist of a love story, a murder mystery, religious fundamentalism, and everyday life in the city.
If you read the book seriously for its history, there is a helpful timeline in the back of the book. If you read it for the mystery, you may wish to take notes as you go through, to see if you can identify the murderer before he reveals himself in the last chapter.
The challenge before the artists is the new idea of perspective in a painting. Enishte Effendi has been to Venice and brings back a desire to see this skill added to the talents of the miniaturists. The murderer challenges Enishte, who is creating a secret book, by saying that using perspective in art "removes the painting from God's perspective and lowers it to the level of a street dog". Enishte Effendi's response is classic. I will quote a bit of it.
"Two styles heretofore never brought together have come together to create something new and wondrous. We owe Bihzad and the splendor of Persian painting to the meeting of an Arabic illustrating sensibility and Mongol-Chinese painting. Shah Tahmasp's best paintings marry Persian style with Turkmen subtleties. Today if men cannot adequately praise the book-arts workshops of Akbar Khan in Hindustan, it's because he urged his miniaturists to adopt the styles of the Frankish masters. To God belongs the East and the West. May He protect us from the will of the pure and unadulterated."
Book Review: Fantastic! Deserving of his nobel prize!
Summary: 5 Stars
I started reading this novel a month ago, and it's not a novel that you can read in a day or two. One needs to read a few chapters and then stop and deliberate over the meaning over what the author has written.
The book centers around Istanbul, Turkey during the 1590's. Sultan Murat III commissions a book in secret to be illuminated by the Master Miniaturists and overlooked by Enishte Effendi.
The book is to be illuminated in the European/Frankish style and soon we find that one of the Master's have been murdered.
Enter Black, Enishte Effendi's nephew, is requested by his uncle to find who the murderer is, and intending to win the heart of the lovely daughter of Enishte Effendi, Shekure, Black agrees.
The story unravels in a strange form with interesting and peculiar narrations from different parties, including a gold coin, a tree, a dog, etc.
The book give us enlightening insight to the world that is set in tradition and is afraid of change due to its rich cultural heritage and power. The Ottoman Empire ruled for six centuries (from the 1300's!) and only ended in 1922.
The conflict between the East and the West is noted in this novel and is under discussion by readers and is often thought provokind.
Miniatures are a form of art and I have managed to find a few which Orhan Pamuk, the author, has advocated for the use of reference to his novel:
[...]
Orhan Pamuk definitely deserves the Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 which he won for this novel. It was fantastic and it kept me in suspense right until the end.
Although this was a long, and thought provoking book, filled with intrigue, jealousy, love, religious influence, it was a mentally stimulating read which I quite enjoyed and I would award it 10/10.
Book Review: Blind as a Metaphor
Summary: 3 Stars
I wish I could avoid "starring" this novel. I could just as easily give it one star or five, since I don't quite know what to make of it. I don't read Turkish, but I've visited Turkey several times. I thought I had a start on an impression of Turkish culture, but this book refutes my impression in that I can't fathom what it might mean to a Turkish reader. (There's a one-star review by a Turkish reader below, which you might want to look at.)
Many reviewers have chosen to treat My Name Is Red as a mystery novel. If I go along with that concept, I'll have to give it one or two stars at most. The "mystery" is of no interest. There are three suspects, the three brilliant miniaturists, but I can't imagine that a normal reader would give a hoot about which is guilty. They are poorly differentiated, except in external details, and I really felt no empathy with any of them. By the canons of popular mystery fiction, this book is an outright failure.
On the other hand, if I choose to read Red as philosophical fiction, in the manner of Borges or Eco, I find myself once again "blinded" by culture. I COULD do a "new criticism" analysis of the metaphor of blindness which pervades the book, but I have no confidence at all that I'd be grasping Pamuk's version of his own writing. I've seldom read a book that seemed so intellectually inaccessible. The other pervading "symbolism" of the book is the "pretty boy", AKA buggery. Okay, Orhan, what are you trying to say, something generic (genus Homo) or something specific to Islam?
I've also read Snow, which I found equally inaccessible intellectually but more rewarding in verbal excitement. Red has its beautiful passages, but I'm not convinced that even the descriptions quite translate into my culturally blinded schema or perception.