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My Name Is Red

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Manufacturer: Vintage
List Price: $14.95
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At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.

The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book celebrating the glories of his realm. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed. The ruling elite therefore mustn’t know the full scope or nature of the project, and panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears. The only clue to the mystery–or crime? –lies in the half-finished illuminations themselves. Part fantasy and part philosophical puzzle, My Name is Red is a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of art, religion, love, sex and power.

Translated from the Turkish by Erda M Göknar


DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 894.3533
EAN: 9780375706851
ISBN: 0375706852
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: 2002-08-27
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2002-08-27
Studio: Vintage


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Snow
• Istanbul: Memories and the City
• The Black Book
• The White Castle: A Novel
• The White Tiger: A Novel (Man Booker Prize)


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Customer Rating:
Summary: My Name is Red
Comment: The narrative in this book shifts from person to person to objects and back again. It is not easy at first to follow all the shifts. The focus on Art is very interesting, as well there are some glimpses of life in the time of the Ottomans. The murderer is very easy to spot, but that makes sense in a story about the importance of perception and vision.

Customer Rating:
Summary: the transition between the medieval and renaissance ways of thinking
Comment: Somewhere in the 16th and 17th centuries, western society made the transition between the medieval mindset where it's all about how God or the king or the chieftain sees the world to the renaissance where man begins to perceive of himself as an individual. And ground zero for this were the renaissance artists and how art changed, the jump-cut from Giotto to Michelangelo. This book does an excellent job of expressing the tension in Turkey that was an eastern society bordering the west and how the success of renaissance art would have impacted the art and society of the Ottoman empire. Even in the telling of their story, it's done as a Greek choir of voices, but everyone is expressing it as an individual, from their perspective on the ground and defending their justifications for their actions. It is no coincidence that every chapter title contains the word, "I".

It's a good story, a murder mystery, with settings and place and dynamics between the characters that were really fresh and interesting.

Customer Rating:
Summary: A Tour de Force from a Nobel Prize Winner
Comment: This story takes place at the end of Sixteenth Century when the competiton between the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe was reaching its climax. Soon, the Ottoman State would begin its steady and long winded decline. In "My Name is Red", Orhan Pamuk examines this contest of civilizations through the prism of painting. This struggle pits the conversative East with its stress on tradition against the more dynamic West with its emphasis on perspective and individual style.

It is very difficult to place "My Name is Red" within the borders of any one genre. The novel is one part murder mystery and another part love story. However, if there is any one characteristic that dominates this novel, it is the literary brilliance of the Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk. He is one of the world's great novelists and his talent elevates a historical mystery novel to another level. "My Names is Red" is a complex novel that requires a high level of commitment from a reader. Reading this novel takes special effort but in the end this extra effort is well rewarded. Highly recommended.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Very knowlegable but Boring
Comment: This was the first novel by Pamuk I read and sadly must admit that 70 pages before the end I gave up unable to read one more page - the book had defeated me.The subject of this novel was the reason I wanted to read it in the first place, because I am very interested in Islamic Culture and Art. Pamuk is obviously an expert on Miniature painting and the information he gives is very interesting, and I learned a lot from it, but it is too repetitive. His passion for the subject probaly run away with him and blinded him to the fact that he was also writing a murder- mystery and not a scholarly dissertation. I feel very stupid reading all these glorious reviews but the fact is ,that admitting he is an excellent writer, the book was too long-drawn. I will certainly try one of his other novels in the near future and hope that this time I will hit the Jackpot.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Ottoman Tale
Comment: Although this tale is set in Ottoman Istanbul, in the mid 15th Century, it is a very contemporary novel that deals with perceptions of art, (in this case the art of miniaturists) in an Islamic context. It is also a love story and a murder mystery, written from the point of view of all the major characters in the story. If you are interested in Turkish history, especially the period of the Ottoman take over over the Eastern Roman Empire, (Byzantium in 1453) this is a fascinating and exceptionally well crafted book. The main woman's character Shekire is a fascinating mix of a clever schemer, as well as a completely erotic female. Red is a little masterpiece.

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