Take a photo of a barcode or cover
adventurous
mysterious
reflective
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Even though Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, I was unfamiliar with his work and never heard of “My Name is Red” until I took a free on-line class, Invitation to World Literature, which dedicated an entire lesson to this book. Several university literature professors as well as the translator and the author himself enthusiastically talked it up and, after 30 minutes, I was more than eager to read “My Name is Red”. I was certain I would LOVE this murder mystery set in 16th-century Istanbul with a cast of characters consisting mostly of artists.
The literary devise of having the story told by a number of different characters, beginning with the corpse of the murdered artist and including a dog, a picture of a tree, a coin, Death, Satan and even the color red, seemed to be a winning formula. The writing was beautiful and I immediately began highlighting sentence after sentence so I could come back to read them and share them with friends. For example:
“I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.”
“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.”
“A letter doesn't communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, 'Go on then, read what the letter tells you!' whereas the dull-witted will say, 'Go on then, read what he's written!”
But, although I was in awe of the profound snippets of philosophy and social commentary, I soon lost my enthusiasm for the “story”, and at the 40% mark, I still didn’t care about any of the characters.
I’m not giving up on “My Name is Red” completely, because there are parts that are brilliant. Maybe I’m just not in the proper frame of mind for this right now, so I’ll shelve it for now and give it another chance in a few months.
P.S. I DO highly recommend the free literature class that introduced me to this novel. http://learner.org/courses/worldlit/
The literary devise of having the story told by a number of different characters, beginning with the corpse of the murdered artist and including a dog, a picture of a tree, a coin, Death, Satan and even the color red, seemed to be a winning formula. The writing was beautiful and I immediately began highlighting sentence after sentence so I could come back to read them and share them with friends. For example:
“I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.”
“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.”
“A letter doesn't communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, 'Go on then, read what the letter tells you!' whereas the dull-witted will say, 'Go on then, read what he's written!”
But, although I was in awe of the profound snippets of philosophy and social commentary, I soon lost my enthusiasm for the “story”, and at the 40% mark, I still didn’t care about any of the characters.
I’m not giving up on “My Name is Red” completely, because there are parts that are brilliant. Maybe I’m just not in the proper frame of mind for this right now, so I’ll shelve it for now and give it another chance in a few months.
P.S. I DO highly recommend the free literature class that introduced me to this novel. http://learner.org/courses/worldlit/
Muy buen libro... ansías saber quién es el asesino!
I read this book over a period of several months. I don't think it is a book to be read quickly but one to be sipped slowly like a good cognac. Pamuk's style is very different to Western authors. This is a dense, atmospheric book, which demands a high level of patience and attention from the reader, perhaps mirroring the patience of the Turkish miniaturists illustrating the book celebrating the Sultan's life. Black Effendi, newly returned from exile, is set the task of finding the murderer of one of the illustrators by his uncle, for whom the victim was working when he was killed. Written in the first person, with multiple narratives, this is a book full of unreliable witnesses, the first narrator is strangely a corpse at the bottom of a well (Elegant Effendi) and as the various stories of the narrators unfold, the truth slowly emerges. It would have been nice to have some illustrations in the book, though the pictures Pamuk conjures in the reader's mind are vivid.
Objectively this is an absolutely brilliant novel that I subjectively did not love, but liked a lot. Pamuk shifts perspectives chapter-to-chapter to explore desire, art, faith, and ambition with early-Renaissance-era Turkey as a backdrop.
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Disappointed doesn't begin to describe how I felt about this book. I had high hopes from Orhan Pamuk, the biggest name in Turkish literature and a Nobel laureate no less. This book has been lying on my shelf for years now, ever since I received it as part of a book exchange. Having never heard of Pamuk at the time, I was not exactly thrilled, but when I later discovered how well reviewed it is, I thought I must have a gem on my shelf.
How foolish I was.
My Name is Red is a book about art. Islamic art, specifically, and its story is a piece of historical fiction that is also a murder mystery set among the clique of miniaturist painters who were celebrated in Istanbul in the 16th century. An intriguing premise that must make for a compelling read, right? Wrong.
Pamuk is much less concerned with the story than he is with the art of the miniaturists, and he misses no opportunity to show off his deep knowledge about the many illustrations, famous and lost, of the time. Once a painting enters the story, that's it - we're subjected to pages upon pages of painful detail about the colours used, the figures present, the scene depicted and the history of the piece, completely digressing from the plot, until Pamuk uses some farfetched reasoning to link the essence of said painting to some kind of pseudo-profound observation about the culture and society of the time.
All of which would've been perfectly acceptable once or twice, but Pamuk does it dozens of times, throwing to the wind any sense of story development or realism. There is a key moment towards the end of the book, a moment of great tension, when one miniaturist holds a knife to the throat of the other. Rather than focus on the stakes of the moment, Pamuk instead chooses to have his character go off on a monologue, about how the very scene in question is oh-so-similar to a supposedly-great painting.
By biggest such gripe is with the final third of the book - when the miniaturists face a countdown, and need to find the murderer among their midst, "or else". In the middle of it all, the whole story screeches to a halt when an old man, on the pretext of analysing artwork to ascertain the unique style and identity of the culprit, gets so distracted by the beauty of the art before him that he forgets the objective altogether spends three indulgent days just looking at paintings.
And we, the readers, are forced to look with him. In agonising detail, we're fed piece after piece of pointless trivia, till the images of the paintings we're expected to hold in our head all start to blur together into one gigantic, featureless mess - which is as apt a description as I could think of for the book as well.
I fail to see how My Name is Red was received as anything but a pretentious and loud attempt by a man trying to prove himself novelist, historian and art expert through one unbearable ordeal of a novel. It's not like the translator did a very good job either.
How foolish I was.
My Name is Red is a book about art. Islamic art, specifically, and its story is a piece of historical fiction that is also a murder mystery set among the clique of miniaturist painters who were celebrated in Istanbul in the 16th century. An intriguing premise that must make for a compelling read, right? Wrong.
Pamuk is much less concerned with the story than he is with the art of the miniaturists, and he misses no opportunity to show off his deep knowledge about the many illustrations, famous and lost, of the time. Once a painting enters the story, that's it - we're subjected to pages upon pages of painful detail about the colours used, the figures present, the scene depicted and the history of the piece, completely digressing from the plot, until Pamuk uses some farfetched reasoning to link the essence of said painting to some kind of pseudo-profound observation about the culture and society of the time.
All of which would've been perfectly acceptable once or twice, but Pamuk does it dozens of times, throwing to the wind any sense of story development or realism. There is a key moment towards the end of the book, a moment of great tension, when one miniaturist holds a knife to the throat of the other. Rather than focus on the stakes of the moment, Pamuk instead chooses to have his character go off on a monologue, about how the very scene in question is oh-so-similar to a supposedly-great painting.
By biggest such gripe is with the final third of the book - when the miniaturists face a countdown, and need to find the murderer among their midst, "or else". In the middle of it all, the whole story screeches to a halt when an old man, on the pretext of analysing artwork to ascertain the unique style and identity of the culprit, gets so distracted by the beauty of the art before him that he forgets the objective altogether spends three indulgent days just looking at paintings.
And we, the readers, are forced to look with him. In agonising detail, we're fed piece after piece of pointless trivia, till the images of the paintings we're expected to hold in our head all start to blur together into one gigantic, featureless mess - which is as apt a description as I could think of for the book as well.
I fail to see how My Name is Red was received as anything but a pretentious and loud attempt by a man trying to prove himself novelist, historian and art expert through one unbearable ordeal of a novel. It's not like the translator did a very good job either.
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
At its core, I believe My Name is Red is about a dying breed of artistry set during the Ottoman Era told through a healthy dose of murder mystery, romance not to mention a lot of short stories within the story itself. The story is divided into several point of view chapters starting off with the delightful "I am a Corpse" and "I will soon be called a Murderer" chapters. This book should not be approached as a murder novel like the description makes it out to be since its about painting and its various. It is fascinating to see the effect the open minded Frankish painting has on the conservative Ottoman style that leads to a moral and philosophical conflict among the Ottoman painters. However this can also make the narrative dull at times with its insistence on describing on all sorts of painting which actually accounts for a major part of the story and felt like a major deterrent. Anyhow, its still quite an interesting read and recommended for someone who is looking a different sort of narrative.