If you ever feel like taking a gamble that bears a high chance of a big return and you're happy to wait a while for the proceeds, then make a wager that one day Turkey's Orhan Pamuk will win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
My Name is Red is a massive new novel by Turkey's most famous author. Crucial to this story is how the country stands at the border between two civlizations. It's a rambling, garrulous, endlessly inventive book, and mixes the comic and the casually grotesque as easily as a Persian miniaturist once juxtaposed red and black paints.
This needs a word of explanation. The novel, which is set at the end of the 16th century, concerns the rivalry between book illustrators in Istanbul. However, in those days, there was more to book illustration than one might think. The apex of Turkish graphic art at the time was the craft of producing miniatures, decorating the margins of a vast collection of legends with minute but vivid illustrations, highlighted in gold.
Addicts of classic literature will appreciate how this novel is as episodic as Don Quixote, as full of digressions as Moby Dick, as loquacious as Crime and Punishment, as crammed with absurdities as Tristram Shandy, and as obsessively detailed as John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor.
This book is clearly the product of someone to whom invention comes thick and fast, and whose mind so teems with fantasy that he can barely get one idea down on paper, laughing to himself as he does so, before a tribe of others have marched into his head demanding that they too are given a permanent life in literature.
It follows that this book isn't light reading. Even so, one of Pamuk's earlier novels caused a stampede in Istanbul bookstores and became the fastest-selling publication in Turkish history. Translation can take some of the spice out of any book, but this version, by a writer of Turkish origin who is currently an American Fulbright scholar in Istanbul, has all the fireworks such a maverick and eccentric work demands.
To get an idea of its flavor, consider that the first two chapters are narrated by a corpse, the third by a dog, the fourth by the corpse's murderer, and later ones by a tree, the murdered man's wife, Death and a girl who delivers love letters.
Central to the story are Istanbul's artists, who are presented as torn between the rival influences of West and East. The gateway between Europe and the Islamic world was traditionally Venice, and the Venetian style in painting has Istanbul's miniaturists agog. There, in the land of the Christian infidel, large-scale paintings exist consisting of nothing but the faces of actual, living individuals, recognizable in every detail. In addition, the world is depicted with shadows and perspective, exactly as someone might see it when walking casually along a street. Islamic art, by contrast, shows things in their perfect forms, as the Creator had always meant them to be, with images of people strictly forbidden. This tradition of Islamic painting is seen as proper, but the temptation for some of being immortalized on canvas in the Venetian style is nevertheless considerable.
So it is that the Turkish sultan secretly orders a book to be made that contains his portrait. Various characters in the novel agree to undertake this task, but the rivalry, envy and suspicion unleashed eventually lead to murder.
The book is awash with historical detail. In this era, Europe and Turkey see each other as alluring, but at the same time each represents a dangerous temptation to the other. The Europeans were understandably intrigued by the harem, but only went as far as to adopt the idea of the coffee shop. The Turks thought Venetian portraiture ungodly, but were sorely tempted by the way it flattered the sitter's self-esteem.
It is told how England's Queen Elizabeth I sent a gigantic mechanical clock, complete with life-size figures that danced on the hour, as a goodwill gift to the Ottoman sovereign. It took the English delegation weeks to reassemble, but Sultan Ahmet I personally smashed it to pieces it, seeing it as a corrupting example of the infidel's pointless and perverse inventiveness.
From China came more acceptable technical advances -- red ink, different types of lacquer, brushes and so forth. The whole Ottoman artistic style was characterized not by innovation, but by a continual process of refinement, superior techniques leading to ever finer materials and higher levels of gloss and polish.
My Name is Red is an awesome book that will repel many by its length and its detail, but will attract others with its fun-loving charm and the little-explored world it presents. But the whole history of Islam, and Central Asia more generally, is pitifully understood by outsiders. Yet, a glance at the chronology with which the book closes can open a window on a world of fabulous antiquity. If this novel does nothing more than coax its readers into a better knowledge of the history of this extraordinary part of the world it will have achieved a great deal.
Publication Notes:
My Name is Red
By Orhan Pamuk
421 Pages
Faber & Faber
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