My Name Is Red (Vintage International) (edit title)

• Rated 5 stars

“If I had to select one novel-- just one -- it is very difficult to do, but I would select this one! Orhan Pamuk is my (other) favorite writer, and I was happy to have pegged him out for the Nobel years ago. I have read all his books. He has that rare gift! He has that Asian lyricism that I love. The prose is dripping with music. It reverberates, and takes you into a murder mystery like no other, back in time to the Ottoman empire where characters you meet speak to you in the first person, teach you about art, the history of art, and their lives and desires -- personal stories of love... of God, of their craft, and of the other.”

• Rated 4 stars

“It took me forever to get through but I guess it was a good idea to finish it.
It is a mystery of sorts... The Sultan is having a book made in honor of himself...the bookmakers (illustrators) are not very happy with the project since it seems they have to use a bit of European style in their paintings...supposedly a thing totally unheard of.
Then one of the illustrators is murdered. Since the whole book is narrarated by almost all of the major characters you get various viewpoints of the same scenes. The murderer also shows up and actually taunts the reader. (I bet you can't guess who I am...kinda thing.)
There is also a lovestory weaved into all this. Pamuk does a pretty good job at describing the woman's viewpoint and her feellilngs of being torn between two, no, three different men.
This is a nobel prize winning author.”

• Rated 3 stars

“ Reading My Name Is Red in English was a much different experience than reading it in its native Turkish. My Name is Red, is composed of different chapters, each which come from the perspective of someone in the Sultan’s 16th century ottoman Turkey, these include several murder victims, a Jewish matchmaker, a dog and even a horse. The accounts and plotline may remain, but the power of the words and images Pamuk uses are lost in translation. When Enishte Efendi is looking back at his life after his death, he notes that before my birth there was infinite time and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before; Id been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.” While the translation is correct the Turkish words Pamuk used for Infinite and inexhaustible – “sinirsiz” and “bitip tukunmeyecek” are much better at describing the time before and after death. The Turkish words carry with them much heavier connotations of endless and unfulfilled time. Similarly, in the Turkish translation the narrator describes living as straddling two worlds of darkness, the English translation describes this as living luminously between “two eternities of darkness.” However, the narrator was trying to say that even in life he lived in a dark world within the luminosity of life.
There are some phrases that I much prefer to the original Turkish ones, such as the chapter name “I am the Corpse” which in the Turkish version was “ I am a Dead Man”, the connotation of corpse is much stronger and appropriate to the tale of the narrator who describes his murder. I am a dead man in no way evokes as much feeling as I am a corpse.

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• Rated 4 stars

“An absorbing "who done it?" story, set in late 16 century's Istanbul's miniaturist community. A most different story which won Orhan Pamuk the 2006 Nobel prize for literature.”

• Rated 0 stars

“It was a very heavy read but the journey was well worth it, There came a point where I was no longer bothered about the main plot line I came to realize that the story is just a ruse to show what the Islamic art world was like in turkey at that time, it explains the philosophy of Islamic painting and are the then contrasts it with the western world's way of looking at it. A facet i really loved was that along the way many a times you find fascinating analogies and beautifully worded passages which are a delight to read.”

• Rated 5 stars

“Orhan is a complete unpredictable lunatic, in a good way of course.
his fondness of colors is out of this world. He’s more than an artist. The man is a magician.
This novel is about everything, all kind of people and objects. Every body/thing talked to me personally and I believed them all. That was a great escape novel :)
5 stars won't do it justice.

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• Rated 3 stars

“I know this book is by a Nobel Prize-winning author (who lectures at Bard College, Dawn) and has won an award itself and that I'm supposed to be bowled over by this book, but it did nothing for me. I've red a coujple of others by the same author which I enjoyed. This one had me stopping frequently to get some fresh air and think about the washing up and ironing.

It's a murder-mystery with romance set in 16th century Turkey. It moved the centre of my usual literary world from Western Europe to Central Asia, which was a change. The Renaissance history covered is interesting. The exploration of how art is perceived by Islam and by Christianity is interesting. The detailed study of Islamic miniature art and Islamic literature is interesting. The way this book was used as a metaphor for the present struggle between Islam and the West is clever.

The book was also repetitive and therefore overly long. I found it hard to stay focussed on whodunwhat from the murder-mystery point of view. It covered torture, anti-Semitism, rape, homosexuality and child abuse along the way in a clever way, but it took quite a while to wade through minute trivial details to get to the parts which showed that a clever writer was at work.

OK, well I'm going to stay off the bandwagon which thinks this is a great read, because it wasn't for me. I found it hard to stay motivated to keep going to the end, but I did and now I'm going to read a technical book for light entertainment.”

• Rated 0 stars

“buku ini berkesan padaku. ya barangkali karena aku jadul banget... heheheh.... jadi suka suasana tempoedoeloe...”

• Rated 3 stars

“Culturally rich. ”