Overview
My Name Is Red (1998, English translation 2001) by Orhan Pamuk is a postmodern murder mystery set in 16th-century Istanbul. A miniaturist working on a secret manuscript commissioned by the Sultan is found dead, and the investigation into his murder pulls the reader deep into the world of Ottoman illuminated art — and into a collision between two ways of seeing: the symbolic, God-centred traditions of Islamic painting, and the individual perspective of European realism arriving from Venice. The story is told through a chorus of voices: artists, apprentices, a woman navigating love and survival, and — in a move that is playfully unsettling — inanimate objects, including a tree, a coin, and the colour red itself.
Book Review
I picked up My Name Is Red because of the painting. I’m not sure what I expected, but I wasn’t prepared for how deeply it would speak to me as a photographer.
The novel is built around a question that sounds deceptively simple: what does it mean to see? The Ottoman miniaturists who populate Pamuk’s Istanbul do not paint what their eyes see; they paint what God sees — the world as it truly is, not as it appears from a single vantage point. A horse is not painted as one particular horse standing in one particular light. It is painted as the idea of a horse, the truest possible horse. To paint from life, from your own eyes, from your own position in the world — as the Venetian masters do — is, in this tradition, a kind of arrogance. To say: I see this, is to say: my sight matters.
I kept stopping to think about that. Every time I raise my camera, I am doing exactly what the Sultan’s miniaturists were forbidden to do. I am choosing a position, a moment, a light. I am insisting that this particular kangaroo, in this particular golden-hour glow, seen from this particular angle, is worth preserving. It is an intensely individual act. My Name Is Redmade me aware of that in a way I had never quite articulated before.
The murder at the heart of the story gives the novel its propulsive energy, but it is really a frame for something more layered: an exploration of what happens when an artistic tradition begins to fracture. The miniaturists in the Sultan’s workshop are anxious, competitive, devoted, and frightened. One of them has killed to protect a style of seeing. Whether that style is worth protecting — whether any tradition is — is the question Pamuk leaves beautifully open.
The voice I loved most was red itself. The chapter in which the colour narrates its own existence — its capacity to hold passion and violence and beauty simultaneously — is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve read in a long time. Light does something similar in photography: a single shift in colour temperature changes everything, not just aesthetically but emotionally. Red at dawn and red at dusk are not the same red. Pamuk knows this, and he gives it language.
The love story between Black and Shekure is handled with the same layered intelligence. It is tender and complicated and refuses easy resolution. Shekure is one of the most fully realised characters I’ve encountered in historical fiction — pragmatic, guarded, genuinely uncertain, and never reducible to her circumstances.
Pamuk’s Istanbul is vivid without being picturesque. The cold, the smell of the streets, the candlelit workshops, the weight of snow on the Golden Horn — these details accumulate until the city feels entirely real, and the collision happening within it — between two visions of the world — feels entirely urgent.
Erdağ Göknar‘s translation deserves its own quiet round of applause. The prose breathes.
If you have any interest in art, in the act of making images, in what it means to be caught between tradition and change — read this book. It will stay with you. It stayed with me for weeks, surfacing unexpectedly every time I looked through my viewfinder and chose a frame.
Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952) is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Erdağ Göknar is a Turkish-American scholar, literary translator, and poet. He is an Associate Professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University
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