(no subject)

[skygiants]

fahye recommended me Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red after being recced it herself by copinggoggles; this is a distinguished recommendation lineage and thus I decided to pick it up! And in short: I pretty much loved it.

My Name is Red is told in a wide range of first-person perspectives that includes a peddlar, a murderer, a slew of artists, a coin, a horse, a color, and at least one corpse. Among others. The main plot involves the murder of a miniaturist, a top-secret possibly-blasphemous book project, and the courtship of a beautiful probably-widow, but the real drive of the story is the conflict between two different styles of art - Islamic book illumination and European-style portraiture - which I find incredibly interesting. The book constantly refers back to famous stories and anecdotes from Islamic literature and different ways of telling the same story or painting the same picture, the characters debate artistic concepts by telling each other stories about famous artists (when they are not murdering each other, of course) and it's all very meta and fascinating. I like literary thrillers because they make questions of art and storytelling exactly as exciting and dramatic and relevant to the characters as I feel they should be, and although this is not really a literary thriller exactly it does the same sort of thing and does it really well.

(My favorite part is probably when the head miniaturist manages to talk himself into the Sultan's Highly Guarded Treasury Library to look for a Stylistic Clue, and then pretty much hunkers down and refuses to leave because LOOK AT ALL THE PRETTY BOOKS, while his co-investigator is like "UM YES THIS IS ALL VERY NICE BUT WHAT ABOUT CATCHING THE MURDERER?" And then there is a part that I found highly creepy and made me clutch at my eyes for a while, but anyways.)

I also loved getting to read a story set in fifteenth-century Istanbul that was not a European dude getting plunged into a zomg Foreign Culture, and I really appreciated the range of different viewpoints for that reason. One of the POV characters was even a Jewish peddler/matchmaker! Which was very exciting, and I loved the character and her voice despite being unpleasantly pinged by a few things (I do wish when there is only one Jewish character in a story that they would not focus quite so much on the Monetary Deviousness.)

There are also a one or two things I found out after I read the book that I am glad I did not know while I was reading it, and thus I will not mention them here, but in conclusion I am totally going to be hunting down more of Orhan Pamuk's books.