A thriller set in 16th century Istanbul, among the miniaturists of the sultan Murat III, My Name is Red tells the difficulties of the declining Ottoman Empire in receiving the influence of the West -- here, it is the influence of the Venitian painters upon miniaturists who sought inspiration from the Old Masters of Persia. To win the heart of his beloved Shekure, Black Effendi is in charge of finding the author of a horrid double murder among the miniaturists. More than a thriller, the story addresses the importance of calligraphy over painting (the paintings stand mainly as illustrations of text) in a world where the power of images is feared by the all-powerful Muslim clergy which denounces figuration as evil. The emergence of the influence of the Western ‘heretic’ interest in reality (perspective, shadows, recognizable portraits) shatters the centuries-old traditions, and threatens to precipitate the decline of Ottoman art – hence civilisation.
Non commitally, Pamuk sets out these rock-hard orthodoxies. Clearly he has no use for fatwas or fundamentalist rage. Elsewhere, though -- his own civil war is fought on both sides with exquisite weapons -- he sympathetically refines the implications. These, in fact, brush up against our own tradition's questioning of the place of art. Does it create its own order (or disorder) or does it discover, serve and bring out a larger, timeless order (or disorder)?(Richard Eder, NY Times, September 2, 2001)
Orhan Pamuk lovingly describes the masterpieces of ancient Persian miniatures; intertwines the story of Black and Shekure with that of myhtical lovers Shirin and Husrev; mixes history with religion; sacrifice with conspiracy.
Part of Pamuk’s dazzling mastery is in the narrative devices. The story is told by no less than nineteen ‘characters’, who successively become narrators, in a succession of fifty-nine chapters. I say ‘characters’ but Pamuk even gives voice to images (a dog, a gold coin, Death, Satan, even the colour Red who gives her name to the book…), via the performances of an itinerant story-teller. It also tells to what extremes the love of art can lead, from murder, to heresy, even to self-mutilation. It seems that art can lead to the same fanatical excesses as fundamentalists
This use of multiple main-characters does make the reading difficult for the reader though, and I think this book probably needs, to be fully appreciated, to be read more than once. Although Pamuk manages to subtly individualise the characters through changes of tone, pace, style and mood, the reader has to set his mind in a different pattern for each chapter to be able to follow the plot. This is emphasised by the fact that the three main suspects, three miniaturists, are not adequately distinguished throughout the book. By the end of the novel, I barely cared anymore about who was the murderer, as I was gradually mixing up the different personalities and had to keep flipping the pages back to understand what was going on. In my particular case, the difficulty was probably raised by the fact that English is not my mother tongue, and the extreme richness of his writing made it harder. Richness which at times turns to heaviness (I think about Master Osman’s experience in the Treasury for instance, recalled in exhausting details). I had difficulties also to understand in what extent the rendering of Shekure’s character was relying on a 16th century vision of women, and on the author’s own vision. Shekure is for me a barely likeable character, whose only obsession if finding a father for her sons – using criteria that a 21st century woman would, I hope, found extremely inappropriate – makes completely obnoxious. But women in this novel are mainly double-faced, animal (enjoying ‘copious lovemaking), hollow, deeply dependent, devious, single-minded.
Mind you, everybody in the novel is obsessed with something: tradition, religion, art, glory, love, ‘copious lovemaking’… It seems also that the final aim of each character is to liberate oneself by achieving one’s most desired goals, whether it be immortality, love, or the subliminal bliss of the vision of God, as achieved through blindness. As Richard Eder writes, it is the story of the ‘stubborn humanity in the characters' maneuvers to survive. It is a humanity whose lies and silences emerge as endearing and oddly bracing individual truths.’
It is finally, despite its magnificent descriptions of the Ottoman civilisation, a deeply dark book, as it seems that nothing can be achieved without correlative loss, and that decline is unavoidable.
Non commitally, Pamuk sets out these rock-hard orthodoxies. Clearly he has no use for fatwas or fundamentalist rage. Elsewhere, though -- his own civil war is fought on both sides with exquisite weapons -- he sympathetically refines the implications. These, in fact, brush up against our own tradition's questioning of the place of art. Does it create its own order (or disorder) or does it discover, serve and bring out a larger, timeless order (or disorder)?(Richard Eder, NY Times, September 2, 2001)
Orhan Pamuk lovingly describes the masterpieces of ancient Persian miniatures; intertwines the story of Black and Shekure with that of myhtical lovers Shirin and Husrev; mixes history with religion; sacrifice with conspiracy.
Part of Pamuk’s dazzling mastery is in the narrative devices. The story is told by no less than nineteen ‘characters’, who successively become narrators, in a succession of fifty-nine chapters. I say ‘characters’ but Pamuk even gives voice to images (a dog, a gold coin, Death, Satan, even the colour Red who gives her name to the book…), via the performances of an itinerant story-teller. It also tells to what extremes the love of art can lead, from murder, to heresy, even to self-mutilation. It seems that art can lead to the same fanatical excesses as fundamentalists
This use of multiple main-characters does make the reading difficult for the reader though, and I think this book probably needs, to be fully appreciated, to be read more than once. Although Pamuk manages to subtly individualise the characters through changes of tone, pace, style and mood, the reader has to set his mind in a different pattern for each chapter to be able to follow the plot. This is emphasised by the fact that the three main suspects, three miniaturists, are not adequately distinguished throughout the book. By the end of the novel, I barely cared anymore about who was the murderer, as I was gradually mixing up the different personalities and had to keep flipping the pages back to understand what was going on. In my particular case, the difficulty was probably raised by the fact that English is not my mother tongue, and the extreme richness of his writing made it harder. Richness which at times turns to heaviness (I think about Master Osman’s experience in the Treasury for instance, recalled in exhausting details). I had difficulties also to understand in what extent the rendering of Shekure’s character was relying on a 16th century vision of women, and on the author’s own vision. Shekure is for me a barely likeable character, whose only obsession if finding a father for her sons – using criteria that a 21st century woman would, I hope, found extremely inappropriate – makes completely obnoxious. But women in this novel are mainly double-faced, animal (enjoying ‘copious lovemaking), hollow, deeply dependent, devious, single-minded.
Mind you, everybody in the novel is obsessed with something: tradition, religion, art, glory, love, ‘copious lovemaking’… It seems also that the final aim of each character is to liberate oneself by achieving one’s most desired goals, whether it be immortality, love, or the subliminal bliss of the vision of God, as achieved through blindness. As Richard Eder writes, it is the story of the ‘stubborn humanity in the characters' maneuvers to survive. It is a humanity whose lies and silences emerge as endearing and oddly bracing individual truths.’
It is finally, despite its magnificent descriptions of the Ottoman civilisation, a deeply dark book, as it seems that nothing can be achieved without correlative loss, and that decline is unavoidable.
