Fabian's Reviews > My Name Is Red

I could not help but think of the film "Daisies" (“Sedmikrasky,” dir. Vera Chytilova), that shameless classic of the Czech New Wave while reading Ohran Pamuk’s My Name is Red. That brilliant & psychedelic film of the 60’s portrays two incessant, silly girls who seem to want to emphasize their existence by playing pranks on other people and being undeniably obnoxious. They are terrified at the idea of being forgotten—of not existing. Similarly, in Pamuk’s epic novel of conspiring miniaturists, of love and death, the reader is confronted with the theme of existence. There is an unknown presence which strives to be part of the reader’s consciousness—which, like the two unremitting, adolescent & undeniably-alive individuals of the film, tries its hardest to appear, to become known & acknowledged.

My Name is Red has a radical structure. As I read more and more books, it becomes increasingly clear that some writers take an enormous amount of effort in establishing a frame, a “cabinet of curiosities” (in the same tradition as MVL’s “Chinese boxes” and “communicating vessels) in which to properly display their creations. For example, A. S. Byatt, in her Booker-prize winning novel "Possession," a novel that is more poetry book than a novel, creates several frames in which to place all the poetry which two poets keep exchanging as tokens of their love. Byatt obviously wants to make her poetry accessible, and gives it further clout by giving each poet his or her unique voice—by fully creating two different minds. Pamuk also uses the novel to display his craft, establishing a museum in which to showcase his “paintings”: his cabinet of curiosities includes, not poems, but individual vignettes, brush-stroke tableaus which represent but one facet of a full universe. The conglomeration of these makes up the bulk—gives the reader the voice, the theme & style—of the novel.

“If I could only,” the nameless murderer tells Enishte Effendi, “see the last picture in its entirety” (158). Both the character’s expectations and the reader’s match—their journey is, therefore, genuinely entwined. The reader wants to know what all these different vignettes will culminate in. The wants of a fictional character and those of an actual live reader are the one and the same—this is the main catalyst which moves the narrative to its awesome conclusion. The reader is prepared to sift through the surplus of stories, images, and motifs to get to the bottom of this radical love story/murder mystery. Enishte Effendi admits: “They say we’ve committed an unforgivable sin by daring to draw, from the perspective of a mangy street dog, a horsefly and a mosque as if they were the same size” (158). Virginia Woolf’s literary sense of character democracy, of consciousness-equality, is pretty much Pamuk’s own. By depicting various POVs, by making them authentic and articulate, Pamuk seems to rationalize like many of the great writers that every tiny aspect of the plot is essential—only with all of these different takes on the same thing (the murder of Elegant and the love story of Black and Shekure) can the reader get a faithful interpretation of such enormous complexity and chaos.

There is a consciousness which ties the characters together, and it is perhaps the force of life itself. The crazy girls perturb the status quo when they admit that they want to live (live!) in Daisies. The different entities (whether they be annoying Shekure or the talking picture of a dog, or literally, the color red) all possess life and they indulge the reader in their personal and unique elucidations on life in 16th-century Istanbul. The added element, that is, all the writer’s own beliefs in art (writing is aptly compared to painting) are present in Red, and the work transcends not only the rules of storytelling by having such incredibly different characters in it with such unique voices, but also because it dabbles with the postmodern idea of reading about art within a work of art.

All that being said, there is a grave problem with the pacing of the book--it took me forever to complete this (and lets face it, Gone With the Wind this is not). Also, there is a ceaseless amount of repetition of events, a constant reassurance that seems extraneous-- a recompilation of different occurrences voiced by the different (though extremely intriguing) characters. The themes, rich in the context of the production of art, are very appropriate and very revolutionary. This is a postmodern work which of course still lingers on the romantic, and then plays around some with the detective novel genre.