My Name is Red

Pamuk, Orhan

ISBN 10: 0571200478 / ISBN 13: 9780571200474

Published by London; Faber;, 2001

About this Item

First edition, first printing. Signed by the author. Fine paperback original in near fine card, spine faded dustjacket.

Seller Inventory # 14929

Bibliographic Details

• Title: My Name is Red
• Publisher: London; Faber
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571200478
• ISBN 13: 9780571200474
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

In the late 1590s, the Turkish Sultan secretly commissions an illuminated book: a celebration of his life and his empire. At a time of violent fundamentalism, however, this is a dangerous proposition. Then one of the miniaturists is murdered. The Sultan demands an answer within three days.

Review

Orhan Pamuk is one of Turkey's premier novelists and My Name Is Red, when published in the original Turkish in 1998, became the fastest-selling book in Turkish history. It is high time then that a translation to English was made, and this publication will be widely welcomed by Pamuk's growing legion of English-speaking admirers.

In the late 16th century, during the final years of the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III, a great work is commissioned, a book celebrating the Sultan's life. The work is conducted in secret, to the ignorance of the artists involved, for fear of a violent religious reaction to the European style of the illuminations in the book. An artist goes, missing, feared dead, and Black, a painter who has been in a self-enforced exile because of spurned love, returns to help his former Master investigate the disappearance.

Pamuk's prose is as exquisite and rich as the elucidations it describes. This is a dense, atmospherically fevered book, which demands a high level of patience and attention from the reader, perhaps mirroring the patience of the miniaturists. Written in the first person, with multiple narratives, this is a book full of unreliable witnesses, and as the various stories of the narrators unfold, the truth of the disappearance slowly emerges. The sense of place and time are carefully constructed and diligently maintained throughout the novel, which, like Umberto Eco's The Name Of The Rose, far exceeds the genre of literary historical crime to become a hypnotic meditation on religion, love, time, patience and artistic devotion. --Iain Robinson