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A review by ptankha
My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
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.