My Name is Red
Title : My Name is Red
Writer : Orhan Pamuk
Year : 1998
Language : Turkish/English translated into Indonesian
After longing for reading a Turkish literature, finally, I got this novel written by Orhan Pamuk, a famous international Turkish writer who is believed to be the best in his country despite of his controversy. Not deliberately got this book standing in a library, I directly pulled it from a bookshelf and hoped to read a great and amazing story. And I was quite right about it.
I may not talk about the story very long, since its core is not far from the other mystery and detective kind of stories. It’s finishing is also not so quite interesting, well it’s quite genius though. The story is about the battle between Islam ideology and western influence in Turkey in the middle of 16th century. I believe it to be true since I myself ever read a Turkey’s history book talking about the eagerness of the country to be modern and to follow western ideology and style started from Attaturk’s reign. Their struggle to do so is not small and trivia, they mean it. In this novel, it’s depicted with the effort to imitate the western/European style of painting to replace the illustration style which has been so rooted from the early days of the Turkey’s monarch called Herat times. Unfortunately, this effort must sacrifice someone who believes that this westernization is wrong and distracts Islam teaching. And the story goes on, the mystery is on the searching for the killer of this person.
The story runs so slow not because of the slow searching, but because of the details put by the writer. The writer seems to be so obsessed to make every history and explanation appear so clear and in detail. Interestingly, he also runs the story based on each character’s point of view. Since there are so many characters and their personalities and thoughts are numerous, this kind of story telling just becomes so complicated yet very much incredible! This is the credit point of the writer despite his so-so kind of mystery story. The other interesting and unexpected thing in this novel is the humanity which is uncovered by the writer. He depicts the love and sex scenes so clearly (although I believe it also distracts Islam teaching, but he can make it just like…it’s just a matter of being human beings). The most interesting scene is when a character states that when he is praying, he can’t still stand of thinking about having sex with a girl!! Yah, we’re all human beings, right??
This is novel is interesting by its history explanation, its language and its way of story telling. The story is not so good, unfortunately.
Rating: 3
