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Author Topic:   My Name is Red - Orhan Pamuk
JavaMan
Member (Idle past 2318 days)
Posts: 475
From: York, England
Joined: 08-05-2005


Message 1 of 4 (357214)
10-18-2006 8:11 AM


To God belongs the East and the West
(But East is east and West is west)
Set in Istanbul in 1591, this novel is ostensibly a murder mystery, but one more in the tradition of The Name of the Rose than Murder on the Orient Express.
The murder victim and the three suspects are court painters, miniaturists employed by the Ottoman Sultan to illustrate his books. When the story begins, the painters have been working on a book to be presented to the Venetian Doge on the 1000th anniversary of the Hegira (Mohammed's flight from Mecca to Medina). The rumours around Istanbul are that the illustrations to the book are to be painted in the Venetian style, a scandalous notion to strict Muslims. From the beginning it is clear there is some connection between the rumours and the murder.
A second plotline concerns a former illustrator called Black who has been summoned back to Istanbul by his uncle, the man commissioned by the Sultan to produce the anniversary book. Black has been away from Istanbul for more than a decade, having been banished by the uncle for declaring his love for the uncle's twelve year old daughter, Shekure. When the story begins, Shekure is married, with two young children, but her husband, a cavalry officer, has been missing in action for several months, fighting in the wars against the Safavid Persian empire.
The murder occurs just before Black arrives in Istanbul, and the first task his uncle sets him is to track down the murderer. Black, on the other hand, only has Shekure on his mind. The narrative of the book is driven by these two plotlines, Black's pursuit of the murderer, and his pursuit of Shekure.
* * *
The most striking thing about the novel is its narrative structure. There is no omniscient narrator. Instead, each chapter is narrated by a different character in the story. These narrators include the murder victim (who recounts his murder in the opening chapter), the three suspects (whose accounts all mirror each other, as though they're all writing to the template of an old master), and even the murderer himself who, despite being one of the illustrators, successfully manages to conceal his identity from us until the denoument - a clever trick by the author.
The other (human) narrators are Black, Shekure, Master Osman (the head illustrator of the book-arts workshop where the illustrators work), Black's uncle, and Esther. a Jewish cloth-seller who acts as go-between for Black and Shekure (and also for Shekure and her brother-in-law, Hasan).
Interspersed amongst these fairly straightforward narratives are more puzzling chapters apparently narrated by a dog, a coin, a horse, a woman, two dervishes, Satan, and the colour Red. Eventually it becomes clear that these chapters are actually being narrated by a storyteller in a coffee-house frequented by the miniaturists, and that the stories are about illustrations of a dog, a coin, etc. that the storyteller has hung on the wall beside him. The relevance of these illustrations becomes apparent as the book progresses.
The storyteller chapters include bawdy jokes at the expense of a fundamentalist preacher, Husret Hoja of Erzurum, whose sermons rail against illustrators, dervishes and coffe-houses, and whose thugs are spreading fear through the streets of Istanbul. This undercurrent of fear underlies the whole novel and even turns out to play a part in the motivation for the murder.
Strangely these coffee-house scenes remind me of the cabaret scenes in the musical, Cabaret, especially in the way they comment on the serious themes of the rest of the novel with a cool, cynical humour, and the way they play out against a background of fear.
The iilustrators are all referred to by nicknames, the murderer being Elegant Effendi, the three suspects, Olive Effendi, Stork Effendi and Olive Effendi, and the proto-detective, Black Effendi. When you consider that 'Effendi' is the Turkish equivalent of 'Master' (hence Master Elegant, Master Olive, Master Stork, Master Butterfly and Master Black), and that the final bloody scene takes place in a large, deserted dervish house, this novel also has curious echoes of the Tarantino film, Reservoir Dogs (although that might be entirely in my imagination ).
So, if you can imagine a novel that's one part The Name of the Rose, one part Cabaret, and one part Reservoir Dogs, with a dash of 1001 Nights and The Perfumed Garden, then that's My Name is Red.
***
So much for the narrative. What about the real meat of the novel? Here's my take on what the main themes of the novel are:
1. Personal style in painting (and by extension, individualism)
The highest compliment you could pay an Islamic miniaturist at this time (according to the novel) was to say that his work was indistinguishable from that of the old masters. To have a style of one's own was a sign of imperfection. In contrast, European painters strive for originality in style, always signing their paintings to impress their individuality on their art.
2. The blasphemy of painting from life (and by extension, the conflict between imagination and realism)
For a Muslim artist, the ideal is to paint from the imagination, to paint the world as Allah would see it. So a horse is never painted by observing a real horse - a true master paints the ideal of a horse, the imagined horse that has accumulated in his memory over many years of observing horses painted by old masters. It's only in this way that illustrators can counter the accusations of the many Muslims who are suspicious of any figurative art at all.
3. The dead hand of fundamentalism
This subject is subtly treated. The critics of figurative art (and by extension, any cultural exchange between the Muslim world and non-believers) are given all the arguments, but the book slowly builds up a panoramic vision of the Islamic world stretched between Christian Europe in the west and the Mongol/Chinese empires in the east. The classics of Islamic figurative art arose out of the influence of Chinese art on Islamic sensibilities after the Mongol invasions of the 13th/14th centuries, and one is led to conclude that a similar period of high achievement would be likely under the influence of European realism.
During this period, however, the Ottoman Empire has been warring constantly for years with the Persian Safavid Empire. Confidence is low and there is a rise in isolationist, fundamentalist sentiment.
In the final chapter of the book, Shekure provides an afterword in which she provides an account of the later lives of some of the novel's main characters. But she also tells us something of the later life of the Ottoman Empire, and recounts the symbolic story of how the Ottoman Emperor, Sultan Ahmet I destroyed the popular mechanical clock presented to him years earlier by Queen Elizabeth I of England (presumably for his help against the Spanish).
In a final elegy she laments the abandonment of figurative painting in the Ottoman Empire:
Shekure writes:
Thus withered the red rose of the joy of painting and illumination that had bloomed for a century in Istanbul, nurtured by inspiration from the lands of Persia. The conflict between the methods of the old masters of Herat and the Frankish masters that paved the way for quarrels among artists and endless quandaries was never resolved. For painting was abandoned; artists painted neither like Easterners nor Westerners. The miniaturists did not grow angry and revolt, but like old men who quietly succumb to an illness, they gradually accepted the situation with humble grief and resignation. They were neither curious about nor dreamed about the work of the great masters of Herat and Tabriz, whom they once followed with awe, or the Frankish
masters, whose innovative methods they aspired to, caught indecisively between envy and hatred. Just as the doors of houses are closed of an evening and the city is left to darkness, painting was also abandoned. It was mercilessly forgotten that we'd once looked upon our world quite differently.
Edited by JavaMan, : typo

'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

Replies to this message:
 Message 2 by JavaMan, posted 10-19-2006 6:04 PM JavaMan has not replied

  
JavaMan
Member (Idle past 2318 days)
Posts: 475
From: York, England
Joined: 08-05-2005


Message 2 of 4 (357544)
10-19-2006 6:04 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by JavaMan
10-18-2006 8:11 AM


Congratulations on your Nobel Prize
I know it's a little incestuous of me to respond to my own post, but I just discovered that Orhan Pamuk won this year's Nobel Prize for literature. Possibly as much for being arrested by the Turkish authorities (for mentioning the Armenian genocide) as for his literary merits, but congratulations anyway, Orhan.
Liked the book, by the way.

'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by JavaMan, posted 10-18-2006 8:11 AM JavaMan has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 3 by Chiroptera, posted 10-19-2006 6:08 PM JavaMan has replied

  
Chiroptera
Inactive Member


Message 3 of 4 (357545)
10-19-2006 6:08 PM
Reply to: Message 2 by JavaMan
10-19-2006 6:04 PM


Re: Congratulations on your Nobel Prize
quote:
I just discovered that Orhan Pamuk won this year's Nobel Prize for literature.
Heh. I assumed that was why you started the thread.

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw

This message is a reply to:
 Message 2 by JavaMan, posted 10-19-2006 6:04 PM JavaMan has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 4 by JavaMan, posted 10-20-2006 3:55 AM Chiroptera has not replied

  
JavaMan
Member (Idle past 2318 days)
Posts: 475
From: York, England
Joined: 08-05-2005


Message 4 of 4 (357631)
10-20-2006 3:55 AM
Reply to: Message 3 by Chiroptera
10-19-2006 6:08 PM


Re: Congratulations on your Nobel Prize
I just discovered that Orhan Pamuk won this year's Nobel Prize for literature.
Heh. I assumed that was why you started the thread.
No, it's just coincidence. I just finished reading the book.
Somehow I seem to have completely missed the Nobel Prize announcement, despite the fact that Orhan Pamuk is pretty well known over here (lengthy extracts from his book about Istanbul were published in the Guardian a few months ago).

'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

This message is a reply to:
 Message 3 by Chiroptera, posted 10-19-2006 6:08 PM Chiroptera has not replied

  
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