My Name Is Red

I got this book from the farmer's market in Pilsen in the summer. While I was browsing the book table, a woman and I started talking about which books we had already read, which we loved, etc. I pointed out Suite Francaise and mentioned that it was one of my favorites. She recommended a massive tome called My Name is Red. She said she loved it and encouraged me to take it. I saw that the first chapter was titled "I Am A Corpse" and said, hey why not.

Well, it did not make my favorites list. It also didn't really make my recommendation list either. I have never read anything in this genre before and it was an interesting experience. The book is set in 16th century Istanbul. And the main plot premise is that a group of miniaturists commissioned by the Sultan (miniaturists are artists) begin to earn the wrath of others because of their attempts to paint like the infidels of the West. This infidel style involves painting images of people and things in a way that makes them identifiable (what we know of today as portraits). This style is said to be against the Sultan's and the Koran's will. Anyway, there is a murder of one of the artists and the book takes 413 pages to reveal the identity of the murderer. Along the way there is a love story between a man and his cousin and much historical and social commentary about life in 16th century Istanbul. I did find some of it interesting; however sometimes the tangents about artistic style completely lost me.

My favorite part of the book was its use of multiple narrative voices to tell the story. As I mentioned before, the first chapter was told from the point of view of the murdered artist, laying dead at the bottom of the well. Some of the narrative voices are from the drawings, yes the drawings, themselves (including a tree, the devil and a gold coin).

So, it was interesting to read a story like this. Not really my style though.

Favorite Passages:

Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a color? Color is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness.

This is what occurred to me the moment before I was beheaded: The ship shall depart from the harbor; this was joined in my mind with a command to hurry; it was the way my mother would say "hurry" when I was a child. Mother, my neck aches and all is still. This is what they call death. But I knew that I wasn't dead yet. My punctured pupils were motionless, but I could still see quite well through my open eyes. What I saw from ground level filled my thoughts: The road inclining slightly upward, the wall, the arch, the roof of the workshop, the sky...this is how the picture receded.