Orhan Pamuk: My Name is Red

To most of us, an "artist" is a person who can express his or her individuality in some tangible and aesthetically pleasing form, be it painting, music or piece of architecture. Yet this need not be so.

Nobel price winner Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red is set in a world where individuality is not the norm, but rather a flaw in artist's expression. The novel is set in late 16th century Turkey. Its characters are miniature painters, who painstakingly create pictures for their wealthy patrons, in this case the Turkish sultan.

As good moslems, the artists do their work in a contradictory setting: depicting humans is considered a grave sin according to their religion. The solution is to paint not as the human sees, but as God sees the world. God sees all things: therefore, perspective is not needed, and in fact its use would be regarded a sinful attempt to place the painter in the centre of the world. The picture of a horse should not represent a living animal, but rather an ideal horse existing in artist's mind, painted from memory in a style indistinguishable from any other artist, living or dead. The ideal fate for an artist is to become blind at the end of his career, so finally becoming able to see God's world unclouded by the normal vision.

Unfortunately, in what sets the stage of the novel, this world is coming to an end. To impress Venetians, the sultan has commissioned an unusual work from his miniature artists: a book where western style painting is to be used to show off the skill of Turkish artists and the accomplishments of the Ottoman empire. The chain of murderous events that emerges forms the bulk of the story.

Thus this book is a story of several levels: it can be read simply as a "whodunit" thriller, and the reader can indeed test his wits by venturing guesses of the killer as the story enfolds. It is also a philosophical text on the nature of art and the role of the artist as its creator (or is it only God who creates art, and the artist just conveys it for others to see?). It is also a story of people and how they perceive the world and what happens it: Pamuk switches the perspective of story-telling from chapter to chapter, even letting inanimate things such as pictures and colours to have their say.

I read the book as translated in Finnish; I am hopeful that also English readers will have an equally gripping reading experience as I had. I recommend the book for anyone who wishes to contemplate the topic matter of the novel.