777 times lovelier than I'd ever seen
October 2003
October 6, 2003
My Name is Red
I've been purposefully avoiding reading any reviews or discussion of My Name is Red, because reading cold was such a fascinating experience. The book, by Turkish author Orham Pamuk, is set in sixteenth century Istanbul, a time and place I know very little about; its main focus is the art of Turkish miniature illustration, about which I know even less. My Name is Red is a murder mystery of sorts, but the actual facts of the mystery totally fall to the wayside while Pamuk explores his theme, that of the end of the Turkish tradition of illustration painting (in which perspective was not used and human figures were iconic, not mimetic) for a more Western-influenced style. The question of "style" haunts the characters, in fact; for the miniaturists, the more skillful a painter you were, the less individuality your work had and the more it represented the work of past masters. The arrival of Western art is creating a crisis of confidence on the part of the master miniaturists commissioned to do a book of miniatures for the Sultan; in the mounting stress, increased by the deep-seated religious distrust of representational art, one has killed another. A former miniaturist's apprentice, Black, is assigned the duty of finding out who it was before all are tortured; meanwhile, Black woos his childhood sweetheart, the daughter of the man creating the book. The narrator changes from chapter to chapter (and includes some of the illustrations; "I Am a Gold Coin" and "I, Satan" were particularly memorable). While the range gives Pamuk an amazing amount to play with to work his themes of identity, signature, and style, it also prevents most of the characters from developing a distinct voice. (Part of this fault may rest with the translator; the language each character uses was similarly florid and mannered.) My Name is Red rests somewhere in the Invisible Cities continuum of books -- the slow spinning out of multiple variations on a single theme. I enjoyed it and I learned a bit about Turkish art. But it never really gelled as a novel (and certainly not as a mystery; the revelation of the murder's identity is completely haphazard). Invisible City dodges this neatly: Marco Polo and Kubla Khan are mere adjuncts to the real character, that of the city universal. My Name is Red doesn't quite manage the same dodge (at least to someone unfamiliar with the material) and thus reads as a nice piece of armchair philosophising, but just a so-so novel.
