Short book review

My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk

A painter has been murdered in a city in the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, a man named Black arrives from a long absence abroad to help his former mentor finish a book of illustrations that could change the artistic tradition of the region forever. Oh, and he's after a girl, his mentor's clever, but married daughter, with whom he was in love many years before. Eventually, Black gets pulled into the quest to solve the mystery of the murder, along with several other painters and the help of some of the most skillful works of art the Empire has known.

The central dilemma, besides the murder, concerns the nature of art, and the book Black's mentor has started. To really roughly and poorly summarize Persian miniature, it was a collective effort by an entire workshop of artists, not focused on accurate representations of human figures, and were intended to hint at a transcendent, eternal reality beyond our everyday sights. The book centers on whether the artists should start applying their own sense of "style" to their portions of paintings, to paint horses that look like one very particular horse, or paint a woman who looked like a very particular woman. "The Frankish style," they call it. On one level it's about religion, but on another very different level it's about where exactly genius lies. Is it in the mind, or the hand? The imagination of what lies beyond reality, or the ability to mimic what you see? Is one more right than the other? And so on.

This book is just incredibly neat. The first chapter of the book is narrated by the ghost of the man whose murder the rest of the book is set up to solve. Everyone takes turns telling the story, including I Will Be Known as a Murderer, adding or omitting as much useful information as they see fit. Portions of illuminated manuscripts - a gold coin, a tree, the color red - will even, while telling the stories of their creation, offer some clues. At many times, I found the talking illustrations to be the most engrossing parts of the book, and very poetic. At the same time I thought the more prosaic sections, the love story, the high-falutin' discussions about art, etc, were amazingly rich and rewarding, and worth taking time to chew through slowly.

P.S., it's a fairly heavy read. Like, don't expect to get through this quickly if your main reading time is just before bed. I had to do a lot of thumbing back to remember what I had dozed through the night before, but in the end it was well worth slowing down and chewing through slowly. A rich, rewarding piece of work.