More than a Murder Mystery

My Name is Red, By Orhan Pamuk, Translated by Erdag M. Goknar

Abstract

Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, lucidly translated by Erdag Goknar, is a dastan being told by an artful dastango, surrounded by a group of people, weaving a yarn in a winter’s night illuminated by the yellowish glow of a warming fire. Set in Istanbul where two civilisations and two continents meet and part, the novel probes paradoxes emanating from the constant tensions between appearance and reality, seeing and ‘blindness’, ‘sin’ and ‘virtue’, asserting identity and surrendering individuality, the incapacitating power of fear and liberation through freedom from fear. These issues are threaded together in a debate about Islamic tradition of miniature painting and European concepts of art.