Jim Fonseca's Reviews > My Name Is Red

This book is as much about art as it is a historical novel.

First the novel. A tale of miniaturist painters in Istanbul during the late 1500’s. The deceased master’s daughter is in a religious and political limbo: her soldier husband has been missing for four years, but with no body and no witnesses to his death, she can’t get a divorce and move on with her life. She wants to find a new husband and a father for her two young boys and get away from the amorous intentions of her husband’s brother. And there's a murder mystery.

Enter a man called Black, an administrator of sorts who has returned to town after twelve years in distant lands. He still carries a torch for the beautiful widow from his days as a youth. Can he find her father’s killer, keep the brother-in-law at bay, help her get a legal divorce, and win her hand in marriage? Along the way we have blended into the text what are really mini-essays about horses; dogs in the Koran: what it’s like to be a murderer; Satan; the path of a counterfeit coin, etc.

At least half of this lengthy work is about art. (I say lengthy because the 500-page paperback I read was tiny type, so this is a 700- or 800- page book in normal font.) Miniaturist painting was imported into the Ottoman Empire from Persia. Most of the painting was done as pictures in books and to illustrate the borders of pages of books, accompanied by elaborate calligraphy. (Think of the Irish monks’ manuscripts such as the Book of Kells.)

Ottoman miniaturist painting was highly stylized. Pictures were drawn from the viewpoint of Allah, from the top of a minaret, and did not use what the West thinks of as true perspective. Armies lined up symmetrically in battle scenes; horses always had the same foreleg raised; a finger placed in a mouth always represented surprise. In accordance with religious concerns about idolatry, faces were generic, not individualized. Who would dare place an identifiable individual at the center of a painting? Man can copy; only Allah can create. The painter tried to portray the ideal horse or chair as Allah created it (think Plato’s “ideal chair”), not the individual variant before them. Is individuality expressed by a traditional miniaturist painter “style” or a “flaw?” Does it offend God?



Compare all this to the European masters at the time such as da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael (the Turks called them “the Venetians”). So a lot of the book is about East meets West in the art world. All in all, an excellent book from the Nobel Prize-winning Pamuk. The story kept my interest and I enjoyed learning about Ottoman art, even when the sections where the miniaturists talked about the philosophy behind painting got repetitive at times.

Here are links to my reviews of other books I’ve read by Orhan Pamuk:

The Black Book

Snow

Silent House

A Strangeness in My Mind