Books: July 2025
My Name Is Red — Orhan Pamuk
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ My Name Is Red is Orhan Pamuk’s best-known book, at least in the West. Pamuk is also Turkey’s best-known fiction writer, at least in the West. So this is Turkish fiction 101. I wanted to read this after listening to the excellent Empire podcast on the Ottoman Empire.
The story follows a group of miniaturists – an art form based on embroidering texts with depictions of historical events, battles, etc. – in the late 1500s Ottoman Empire as they grapple with their changing art form and the mysterious murder of two of their members. Each chapter is a character relating events to the reader, who is placed in the position of some unidentified third party within the story.
The most straightforward read is as an allegory for Turkey’s unique place in the world, straddling “east” and “west.” Pamuk’s miniaturists are consumed with anxieties about the seeping of “Frankish” style (Western Renaissance art) into their art form. The discussions of stylistic differences are some of the most interesting parts of the novel. The miniaturists are especially troubled by the use of perspective in Frankish art, which they perceive as a kind of idolatry. Their traditional art form instead “lacks” perspective, imagining itself as presenting the world as Allah sees it: trees, dogs, buildings, people, all the same size, flattened.
Part of the reason they are anxious is that there is something alluring about these new forms. This is key to the allegory: it is not the case that Western forms are being exogenously imposed on Ottoman artists. At this point, the Ottoman Empire is arguably at the peak of its power. Rather, there is something innately alluring about Western art, especially portraiture, which the Sultan instinctively finds appealing because of its grandiosity and projection of power.
This ambiguity is where Pamuk keeps the reader for most of the novel. We should find something distressing about the encroachment of Western art, the loss of indigenous art forms. But we should also be disturbed by the orthodox, puritanical rejection of those who burn down the storyteller’s tavern at the end.
Parallel to all this is an epic love triangle with great characters, world-building, and dialogue. Peak historical fiction.