my name is red by orhan pamuk

8th april 2007

ferit orhan pamuk won the nobel prize for literature on the 12th of october 2006 for his book `snow'.

regarded a post modern writer, he was the first turk to have won the prize. at the time of the announcement of the nobel prize, he was undergoing trial for accusing his country of being involved in some mass killing of the armenians (1 million) and the kurds (300 thousand) in anatolia. in an interview he had given to a swedish magazine, he insisted that the turkish government wronged these people.

i was fascinated with orhan pamuk's biography so my sister and i bought `snow'.
at the same we also bought `my name is red' and since i had started the book a year ago while browsing through the novels in kinokuniya, i decided to read the latter first.

finished it today.

pamuk is an amazing writer. however, the book is a complicated albeit fascinating read.

he is amazing because he presents the novel in many voices (nineteen narrators i think)and from amazingly different perspectives. a brilliant way of making it obvious that we should not just see things from one view. some of these narrators are not human. he gives them voices. and each chapter is narrated by a different person, animal or object.

supposedly a murder mystery, though definitely of a very different kind, when the murderer was revealed towards the end, i found it strange that i did not want him dead or tortured for the murders he committed. the book has this effect on you...it sort of makes you feel that the killing was not really important and yet the whole book was about the murders.

pamuk sets this story in the late 16th century in istanbul amongst the miniaturists of the sultan murat III, stressing on the difficulties of the declining ottoman empire that he says the turkish government avoids discussing due to the easy acceptance of the influences of the west.

he describes the paintings in exhausting details, so much so that one is easily bored with the minutest of all descriptions, and especially since we are not able to relate to them.

the book revolves around artists, illustrators, miniaturists and paintings. a brilliant symposium on the part of art and the typical love, jealousy and greed amongst the miniaturists. it is also about innovation, styles, changes and imitations of the art work over the years.

i was confused with the characters as he doesnt give them real names. even though the pace is slow and again, too detailed, the description is out of this world.

however, he also puts in love and romance in a very strange manner, a manner which we might not understand and therefore it instills a sense of impatience with a dash of annoyance.

like i said it is a difficult book to digest but he has opened up my mind to things i never imagined, never read about and never perceived through such extraordinary views. even the deliberate blindness with the god gifted sight and appreciation following that threw me off balance just as much as the love, romance and sex did.

red speaks in just one chapter. she is the colour of divine splendour and earthy violence. so why did he call it `my name is red'? hmm! a topic for discussion.

i loved orhan pamuk's style but it was an effort going through the detailed stuff i had no idea existed. he is an absolutely remarkable writer and deserved the international impac dublin literary award in 2003 and the french and italian book literary awards in 2002 for this book. orhan's real brother is really shevket (the one he describes in his book) and he talks of shekure as if she was his real mother. he however, ends the novel impishly having his mother state that he would go to any extent to lie just for a good story.

if you are for light reading and fast pace, this is a definite put-off. however, if you are in a small way, literary and love a perception beyond your own, this will do you wonders. :-)