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My Name is Red |  | The New Life | |||||||
Fate or Fiction? Orhan Pamuk’s Yeni Hayat, reviewed by Maureen Freeley in Cornucopia 14 "Yes, I liked it, but what is it about?" That's what people said about The New Life (Yeni Hayat) when it first came out in Turkey. I remember wondering why it was selling faster than any book in Turkish history even though no one knew what to make of it. Now I have read it myself I can see that it was successful because it made people puzzled. This is a book about a man whose life is thrown off course by a book: the conceit wouldn't work if it didn't also make its readers lose their bearings. The man, Osman, happens onto the book by accident - or so he thinks. He sees in it the hands of a beautiful girl, Janan, whom he has been admiring from afar and decides to buy his own copy so he can know her thoughts. He gets more than he bargained for. "Even on the first page I was so affected by the book's intensity I felt my body sever itself and pull away from the chair... the book worked its influence not only on my soul but on every aspect of my identity. It was such a powerful influence that the light surging from the pages illumined my face, its incandescence dazzled my intellect but also endowed it with brilliant lucidity. This was the kind of light in which I would recast myself; I could lose my way in this light; I already guessed in the light the shadows of an existence I had yet to know and embrace." And so he sets out to do both. All roads lead to Janan, until she and her boyfriend disappear. Osman tries and fails to find out what's happened to them. Then one day he boards a bus without knowing exactly why. As one bus leads to another, all he knows is that there is no going back. Anatolia whisks past. No sooner has he registered a village than it disappears. As he catalogues the details, he hypnotises the reader in much the same way as the book hypnotised him. It is not long before he finds himself on a bus that is in collision with a cement truck. He describes his first brush with death as a poet might describe the first signs of spring. He becomes obsessed with all the other bus wrecks he passes. One day a police tip-off leads him to the place where two buses have collided only half an hour earlier - "The magic that makes life meaningful and bearable still hung in the air" - not knowing he is looking for Janan in thewreckage until he finds her. Without pausing for explanations, the two board another bus. It is showing low-budget films on its TV set. Together they watch one tawdry, over-acted kissing scene after another, but though the distance between them continues to narrow, they do not become lovers. Janan is on her own quest for her own lost lover, Mehmet. She has no leads, but thanks to a series of accidents they find his childhood home. Mehmet's father, still in residence, is a crank philosopher-inventor who thinks his son is dead and has hired a string of "watches" to get to the bottom of the conspiracy that killed him.He invites Osman into his son's childhood bedroom, which turns out to be full of quirky children's adventure stories that Osman remembers from his own childhood: the author is none other than his uncle. It is at this point that the story doubles back on itself to prove that there is no such thing as an accident But the story is almost beside the point. The book's interests lie elsewhere. In a way The New Life is not a novel but something too powerful to be contained in such a flimsy "foreign toy". Suspended in the gap between life and death, it expresses longings and raptures that owe more to Sufism than any Western tradition. Despite its modernist tricks and its elegant allusions to other novels, its own cadences are closer to poetry. As are its intentions - the way it makes you feel, what it makes you see and remember and regret, matter more than what it might or might not mean. Like Orhan Pamuk's earlier novels, it offers many thoughts on the paradoxes that come with being a Westernised Turk. It evokes what he has called elsewhere "the feeling of being off track, forgotten...that sadness that life lived elsewhere is more mythic, more real than your own pale, shabby imitation-life." By writing a book that captures this sadness, he has broken the spell - andput a uniquely Turkish sensibility at the centre of the world literary map.
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Dangerous perspective Orhan Pamuk’s rich stew of murder, love and art, In August 1599 the Lancastrian organ-maker Thomas Dallam arrived in Istanbul with a specially designed water organ, complete with a timepiece and statues, as a gift for Sultan Mehmed III. Queen Elizabeth was anxious to curry political and commercial favour with Mehmed, and had commissioned the extraordinary organ as the centrepiece of an array of gifts for the sultan and the grand vizier. Dallam proceeded to install and then perform on his organ in the royal private garden of the Topkapi Palace, to the astonishment of the sultan and his retinue. Describing this bizarre incident towards the end of his remarkable new novel, My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk recalls that, some years later, “Sultan Ahmed, the subsequent sovereign, seized His mace and descended from the harem to the Private Garden, where He shattered the clock and its statues to pieces”. The Prophet had come to Ahmed in a dream and warned him that “If Our Sultan allowed his subjects to be awed by pictures and, worse yet, by objects that mimicked Mankind and thus competed with Allah’s creations, the sovereign would be diverging from divine will”. This religious backlash against artistic representation brought to an end the golden age of Ottoman art, which had emerged from artistic influences drawn from Persia, China, India and, most controversially, Western Europe. It is this turbulent period in Ottoman history, towards the end of the sixteenth century, that provides the setting for Pamuk’s extraordinarily ambitious novel. Pamuk is Turkey’s leading novelist, and his previous historical fiction has repeatedly drawn on the history of the empire to make sense of contemporary Turkey’s ambivalent relationship towards modern-day Europe. On its original publication in 1998, My Name is Red became a publishing phenomenon, selling over 100,000 copies in Turkey. With the publication of Erdag Göknar’s elegant English translation, it is set to become one of the most internationally acclaimed novels of recent years. The brilliance of the novel lies in its ability effortlessly to combine several fictional genres into one. Part murder mystery, part love story, the book is above all a fascinating exploration of the pleasures and dangers of artistic creativity. The story centres on the return to Istanbul of Black, an itinerant secretary and part-time commissioner of illustrated manuscripts. Black has been invited back to the city by his uncle, Enishte Effendi, to work on a controversial book of illustrations for the sultan which aim to “use the science of perspective and the methods of the Venetian masters”. Even more scandalously, the book will reproduce the likeness of the sultan himself. Black is immediately embroiled in a deadly world of frustrated passion and political intrigue. Having left Istanbul following the marriage of his cousin and childhood sweetheart, the beautiful Shekure, he now finds her vainly awaiting the return of her husband, killed in the Persian wars. Their childhood romance is rekindled. However, their clandestine relationship is overshadowed by the murder of Elegant Effendi, an illuminator working on Enishte’s secret book. When Elegant’s murderer strikes again, Black is pitched into a desperate race against time to track down the murderer and secure Shekure’s hand in marriage before both he and his uncle’s cherished project are destroyed by religious intolerance and political skulduggery. His quest takes him on an extraordinary journey into the history of Eastern art – from Herat and Tabriz to Venice and to the very heart of the Ottoman court, and an encounter with “His Excellency, Our Sultan, the Refuge of the World”. While the murder and the romantic elements of the novel will absorb the general reader, My Name is Red is also a profoundly philosophical meditation on the nature of art and creativity from a specifically Ottoman perspective. What troubles the novel’s painters and authorities is how close the development of an individual artistic style comes to questioning, or even rivalling, God himself. In several brilliant and often funny moments, the dogs, horses, trees, coins, even pigments (such as red) which make up Enishte’s miniatures are given their own monologues, where they worry that painters try to “depict the world that God perceives, not the world they see. Doesn’t that amount to challenging God’s unity, that is - Allah forbid - isn’t it saying that I could do the work of God?” Pamuk’s fictional painters also debate the destructive impact of Western perspective and portraiture on art. Enishte Effendi’s book is attacked as “the Devil’s work, not only because the art of perspective removes the painting from God’s perspective and lowers it to the level of a street dog, but because your reliance on the methods of the Venetians as well as your mingling of our own established traditions with that of the infidels will strip us of our purity and reduce us to being slaves”. Ultimately, the novel does not endorse this vision of artistic and religious purity. On the contrary, it is a deeply moving exploration of the dilemmas facing both Eastern and Western artists, which refuses to ignore the specific qualities of both ways of seeing and representing the world. This is a brilliant novel that will delight anyone who knows anything about Islamic art and Ottoman history, and will fascinate and entertain those new to these subjects. At a time when so much is being said to denigrate the culture of Islam, Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red is an eloquent and important affirmation of an artistic tradition that the West has been far too quick to dismiss or exoticise.
Jerry Brotton’s new book, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (OUP), is available to Cornucopia subscribers. | |||||||||
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