My Name is Red

This book by Orhan Pamuk is a little different from his others. Oh, it’s still got his inimitable style, the details, the east-west angst, the ironical voice (voices, here, though). But it’s a mystery told in a number of chapters, by a dog, a gold coin, a lot of miniaturists, some women. One of the Sultan’s painters is murdered, and we only find out towards the end who it is. It’s because the Sultan wants a book painted in the style of the Venetian painters, and that’s going to change everything. It’s because of the man’s beautiful daughter who has a distinct voice and a mixed-up existence. It’s because of art and the messiness of life.

Orhan Pamuk used to paint, I don’t know if he still does. He knows a lot about art, and this book is about it, about the art and the artists and the tension between style and individuality. There are a large number of chapters focusing on the way horses are drawn by different people. Of course it’s not just art, it’s people, it’s how people are unique and how life doesn’t work out the way you want it to. Pamuk always puts an incredible amount of detail into every sentence (his writing is like the miniaturist paintings) and it really builds up this textured effect which is perfect for what he’s trying to achieve – a picture of Turkey. He is the best writer of all for westerners to read about Turkey because he knows that it has such a unique set of historical events, mythology, religion, custom, language, peoples, all of which just touch the western world without being part of it. Even though he hasn’t created it, it is something like reading a science-fiction novel about a new world, a new planet, although it wouldn’t be believed because it really is – just like home. Sex is sex, love is love, children are children, employment, food, in-laws, buying, selling, growing, thinking, reading, painting, it is all like it is everywhere else, except it’s Turkish, it’s Eastern, it’s just over there.

Pamuk’s books aren’t easy to read. They’re dense and they’re somehow mysterious. But even so, they give such a perfect impression of what it is to walk through Istanbul today or Constantinople yesterday or Byzantium before that, all those worlds, that they’re utterly unique. That’s why everyone thinks he should’ve got the Nobel prize; well, that, and they hoped it’d save him from the ten-year gaol sentence hanging over his head.