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Rating:
The novel I want to talk about today is not exactly a leisurely stroll through the city center on a mild spring Sunday afternoon; on the contrary, it resembles more of a hike at altitude. Therefore, I recommend it to those who can dedicate time to a consistent reading and to those fascinated by a land wedged between the East and the West, with all the issues that arise from it.
I open a parenthesis and go back about ten years when some ingenious Italian and European politicians loudly tried to sponsor the annexation of Turkey to the European Union: a millennial crossroads of different cultures, a bridge between two continents, a densely populated and complex country with historical problems of ethnicity, religion, and situated in a world part that is geopolitically, to say the least, volatile (borders with Armenia, Syria, Iran, and Iraq).
By Orhan Pamuk (Nobel Prize in 2006 who had to take refuge abroad), I read two books in quick succession this winter: "Snow", set in the icy border city of Kars, and "My Name is Red". On the web, you can find reviews where this novel is compared to "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco. I find it a forced similarity as the only points of contact consist of the historical setting and the search for a murderer. But if Eco's masterpiece enjoys fluidity and suspense, these features are completely absent in Pamuk's work.
"My Name is Red" is a high dissertation on art and the growing and inevitable "contamination" of Western infidels. The plot unfolds at the end of the sixteenth century (1591) when commercial relations between Istanbul and Venice were particularly close. The realistic painting style of the Venetian Masters will create turmoil, hate, and simultaneous admiration among the Turkish miniaturists, breaking the centuries-old balance of an unchanging tradition. The commission by Sultan Murat III of a book commemorating the millennial of the Hijra with portraits using European perspective will generate silent disagreements among the miniaturists. Bloodshed is inevitable.
Pamuk tells us the story in 59 first-person chapters where not only all the main characters speak, but even objects, colors (the pages where the color red and the coin speak are wonderful), and some drawings. With brief flashbacks, the reader relives the same scene from a different point of view. The plot flows viscously like lava down a gentle slope, and this annoying slowness is compensated by the depth of the characters Pamuk offers us. The voices intertwine like in a rather complex choir: if it were music, it would be a band with at least eight instrumentalists with pieces full of variations and no unique style.
The author has done an elitist, exceptional, and original work that deserves all the admiration of the reader of this infinite and complex mosaic. In the work, Pamuk has realistically and forcefully evoked a historical period unknown to most of us Westerners and has courageously expressed his vision of art as a result of the union of different cultures in mutual respect. Partially taking up the title, it is thanks to the mixing of two colors that a third is born.
It is not an easy read, but I believe it is a stimulating, original book worthwhile.
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