The many stories of master painters going blind at the end of their careers is thus presented less as an infirmity than as a consecration. Al-Jawziyya argues, in the same fashion as Islamic doctrine, that the souls of the dead remain on earth and can hear the living.įor some of the miniaturists, in particular the head of the Sultan's workshop Master Osman, viewing miniatures or "perfected art" is less a way of seeing than a way of knowing the eternal. : 125Įnishte Effendi, the maternal uncle of the main character (Black), is reading the Book of the Soul by Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya, a Sunni commentator on the Qur'an, and continuous references to it are made throughout the book.
In all, there are 21 different narrators. Subsequent chapters are narrated by different characters - including four living members of the Sultan's workshop, a man named Black who has just returned to his uncle's home in Istanbul after 12 years of travel and who is the first living character to narrate the novel -, by several drawings (the archetype of a horse, a dog, a counterfeit gold coin, Satan, and two dervishes) and one chapter, which gives the novel its name, is narrated by the color red. In the chapters narrated by his murderer, the reader learns that this illuminator was concerned about the increasingly Western attitude towards painting in a project commissioned by the Sultan. The first chapter of the novel ("I am a corpse") is narrated by one of the workshop's illuminators (Elegant Effendi) who has just been murdered. Several of the major characters in the novel belong to the same workshop of miniaturists in the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Murat III. BBC Radio 4 broadcast an adaptation of the novel in 2008. In recognition of its status in Pamuk's oeuvre, the novel was re-published in Erdağ Göknar's translation as part of the Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics series in 2010. The English translation, My Name Is Red, won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2003.
The French translation won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and the Italian version the Premio Grinzane Cavour in 2002. The book has been translated into more than 60 languages since publication. The novel, concerning miniaturists in the Ottoman Empire of 1591, established Pamuk's international reputation and contributed to his reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. My Name Is Red ( Turkish: Benim Adım Kırmızı) is a 1998 Turkish novel by writer Orhan Pamuk translated into English by Erdağ Göknar in 2001. (original Turkish) 417 pp (1st English ed.)
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