The After-Dinner Payback

I’ve been carrying Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red with me for quite some time, but it wasn’t until late last night that I got around to starting it. Now I’m wondering why I put it off for so long. It’s the kind of book that makes everything else a needless distraction—eating and sleeping don’t seem as important as reading. Even at four-thirty in the morning, with my eyes burning from exhaustion and my mind wandering, I was reluctant to set the book aside; I’d pondered brewing a pot of coffee and, in a marathon session, reading to at least page one hundred.

Alas, life calls and sleep is important—I’m having brunch with a friend and his family and I can’t be sulking through the day with bloodshot eyes and an irritable disposition.

I can say that, even though my “marathon” took me thirty pages into the book, My Name Is Red is damn good. It’s thoroughly engrossing and so far, better than Snow. And I have to chuckle a bit: like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the story is told from multiple points of view, with each chapter alternating between narrators. The book revolves around a group of painters—”miniaturists,” as they’re called in the book—whom the Sultan has commissioned to illustrate a book, inspired by the Venetian painters, glorifying his kingdom. The story brims with creativity—it opens with the murder victim (My Name Is Red is a mystery) describing what it’s like to be dead. Pamuk even tells one chapter (via a human storyteller) from the point of view of a Muslim dog. And the chapter, like the rest of the book, is a joy to read, with its tongue-in-cheek playfulness; Pamuk is winking at his readers, but there’s an undertone of seriousness to it.

I’m a dog, and because you humans are less rational beasts than I, you’re telling yourself, “Dogs don’t talk.” Nevertheless, you seem to believe a story in which corpses speak and characters use words they couldn’t possibly know. Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.

And that’s really what it comes down to: Pamuk entreats us to listen—if we know how—and to let go of all preconceived notions of what a novel can and can’t do and enjoy the story for what it is. And in Pamuk’s expert hands, that’s exactly what happens.