My Name is Red
Orhan Pamuk and Erdag Goknar
"My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk is a very, very complicated novel. It takes place in Istanbul in the 16th Century when Memnet the Conqueror had come in just -- I guess that 80 years before -- and wanted to bring in the best of the West and the East; and so artists were learning how to paint in the Western, Italian Renaissance style. It was very exciting for the painters of the day.
Orhan Pamuk who was trained as an artist, decided to write the story of a painter in that very interesting time, an atelier of great artists. The master of the atelier has a daughter whom one of the painters falls in love with. The catch is that she is already married to someone else, who is off to the wars. He's off in the wars and is presumed dead, but he has to be declared -- he has -- there has to be a resolution of this absent husband business before the two can get together, and that romance between the young artist and the young daughter of the master is really what drives this book.
What it really is is a love story and talks about how art is informed by love and how art makes us fall in love. This is the only book of Pamuk's that I know of that has a lot of eroticism in it; and I wish he would have done more because he's so good at it, and he's so good at describing the longing and the sexual tension.
With all Pamuk's books, you can get a little impatient because he has ideas that he wants to express as much as he wants to tell the story, and he does skip around. It is very rewarding. I'd give My Name is Red 4 -- stars."
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