Kelly's Reviews > My Name Is Red

My fickle heart longs for the West when I'm in the East and for the East when I'm in the West.
My other parts insist I be a woman when I'm a man and a man when I'm a woman.
How difficult it is being human, even worse is living a human's life.
I only want to amuse myself frontside and backside, to be Eastern and Western both.

This is Pamuk's enduring, never ending obsession. He's written fiction and non-fiction, journal articles and newspaper bites, and given endless interviews on this theme. He's even been thrown in jail and put on trial for the identity he has chosen. He's won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his commitment to expressing his deeply divided mind and spirit, and that (at least he and many others believe) of his country- Turkey. (I apologize in advance if this ends up being something of a ramble through the literary bramble, but I can only say that that would mirror the experience of reading this book.)

My Name is Red will tell you that it is a murder mystery, set in 16th century Istanbul, under the rule of the Sultan. But it will also tell you that it is about many other things, each of which changes, ephermerally, by the moment. The atmosphere of the story digs a little bit into Garcia-Marquez's garden, but storytelling would never be mistaken for his. Each chapter is told by a different voice- some of which are plausible members of a storytelling round, and some of which would really only belong in that category if you were on acid, but they all seem about equally credible, due to the fact that nobody is really credible, so one might as well be fiction or myth as fact. (For instance, we hear from the voices of the drawing of a horse, the fake voice of a woman who is actually a man, a gold piece and the color red.) It is ethereal, elusive, and there isn't one incarnation of the mind that can be trusted here. Don't fall into the trap of assuming that what you read has anything to do with anything other than the particular pyschology of the moment- Pamuk is a master of depicting the every day track of a mind, and how unreliable each feeling of a moment is- how everything important is changed by the fact that one just happens to feel hungry at a particular moment, or desperately horny at another. It is an absolute masterwork of insight on the psychology of a particular people at a particular time, and all the various reasons why they are that way, and yet he is able to make them as relatable as possible through it all.

What struck me the most throughout the entire book was how terrified, it seemed, that Pamuk was of missing something. While other authors might be striving to become masters of literature, masters of form, I think Pamuk wished that he could be nothing so much as a master of tapestry-making. I think he would die happy if he could have given this book to the theoretical Weaver in the sky and gotten it back as a divine scrap of worked fabric. There are lists upon lists upon lists of endless things that go on for pages, only to stop and start up once again. As a part of his contradictory feelings towards the West, in a culture whose stories and traditions often originated in the East... although he longs for the West, he's terrified, just as his characters are, that everything they know from the East will disappear. It seems like he can't stop himself- there's some sort of driving fear if he doesn't list everything about history and culture and myth, and repeat all the stories again and again to make sure we remember what they are, it will be gone forever. His expression of ambivalence towards Western culture perfectly expresses the mindset of illuminators in 16th century Istanbul terrified that their entire lives are about to become irrelevant.

The other absorbing, fascinating, and horrifying thing was how well Pamuk illustrates the idea that absolutely nobody speaks with their own voice, both through his painters, constrained by centuries of adherance to a perfect style that some random master brought out of Baghdad that depicts the "perspective of Allah." It is considered heresy and a fault to have a "style", and "signatures" are furitively hidden away as much as possible- the idea that blindness is the ideal to be obtained for these artists is just heartbreaking- at least to someone coming at it from a Western perspective, where seeing painters deliberately rob themselves of their sight, their most precious commodity, over and over again, in the course of obtaining a meaningless idea of perfection that is not their own. The murderer throughout this book strives endlessly to hide himself by speaking in a voice that does not at all resemble how we see him in other places. The majority of people who are speaking a themselves tell stories in order to express their feelings- in fact at the beginning all the suspected illuminators speak almost entirely in story form in order to answer any important question on any philosophical, religious, or even personal topic. Expressing one's feelings just isn't done. One doesn't go up to the pretty boy one would like to fuck and tell him so, one tells him a parable about a gorgeous boy in order to show your admiration for him. Much as the pictures are seen as the "perspective of Allah," it seems that there is only one way to speak, too, in the "words of Allah," or those stories which are sanctioned by the authorities as legitimate- the authority of Allah on earth. It was the ultimate tragedy of the book from the Western perspective, and the ultimate triumph of the book from the accepted ides of the time, all of these de-individualized people (as much as can be done or denied or pushed from sight) striving towards the goal of seeing as Allah does, ever in the correct way.

But everyone recognizes the end of the "Eastern" way of life coming from the West, in the guise of the "Venetian" ways that everyone will want to slavishly follow in the future, ways which reactionary preachers and religious people are protesting against before they've even made serious headway, trying to keep their way of life "pure." But the rest of the book poitns out again and again that there is no way that the culture of the Ottoman Empire was pure in any way- no constantly conquering culture with a large army and a long reach could ever be. No autocratic society that entailed artisans, craftsman and soldiers to pick up and serve someone else once their lord was defeated (if they weren't killed out right) could develop in isolation without any influence from the outside. He shows globalization already happening, back in the 16th century, and how deep the effects penetrate then and now.

I loved his Istanbul for his brilliant evocation of identity, living with a burdensome past and an uncertain future, for its poetry and its memory. My Name is Red accomplishes much the same thing, with more magic- but just enough dirt to bring it right straight home where it belongs in 2009.