Brief Notes on Orhan Pamuk

I picked up 'My Name is Red' more than three years back on the basis of blurbs promising something along the lines of Umberto Eco like literary medieval mystery. I read it after the book had graced my shelves for more than a year. By this time, he had grabbed the headlines for bemoaning the lack of discussion and self-criticism on Armenian genocide in Nationalist Turkey. He seemed a modern hero to me, and I picked up the book with great anticipation.

The book did deliver on the expected pleasures of Eco like intellectual-philosophical mystery, and still more on solid, emotional punch. The novel is set in the world of medieval miniaturists of Turkey's Ottoman empire, slowly getting exposed to Europeans and their new techniques. It doubles up as an investigation into a series of heinous murders committed by one possibly disgruntled miniaturist, and the subtle impact of European intrusions into indigenous life and arts. In some sense, it is also a masterpiece in 'perspectival' technique where you view the world from the representations of a ferocious dog to the murdering and murdered miniaturists.

It is a set of partial, half-understood stories of half-aware people, where there is always something getting added, and something missed from the narration. The novel also powerfully illustrates how unhappiness or grief is often caused by the asymetry between what we believe and what we end up doing. How instinct and passion can give lie to your most cherished values. The irony and humour are never lost on the situation - whether it is the soft-spoken, guarded lover behaving overtly sexually with his widowed, childhood love, or the tyrant master illustrator waxing eloquent on creativity to buy time from would-be murderer.

However, this often brilliant novel gets undone when Pamuk's authorial voice becomes too strong and disrupts the flow. Then, he moves from the specific to the general too soon, and leaves too little for the reader to chew on. Also, the medieval city life, with its bylanes and smells and coffeehouses, becomes banal at times with description that is too often and too ornate. To me, these intrusion made both 'My Name is Red' and 'Snow', which I picked up later and will talk about some other time, a little under-whelming.