Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red

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My Name is Red: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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From one of the most important and acclaimed writers at work today, a thrilling new novel-part murder mystery, part love story-set amid the perils of religious repression in sixteenth-century Istanbul.
When the Sultan commissions a great book to celebrate his royal self and his extensive dominion, he directs Enishte Effendi to assemble a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed, and no one in the elite circle can know the full scope or nature of the project.
Panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears, and the Sultan demands answers within three days. The only clue to the mystery-or crime?-lies in the half-finished illuminations themselves. Has an avenging angel discovered the blasphemous work? Or is a jealous contender for the hand of Enishte’s ravishing daughter, the incomparable Shekure, somehow to blame?
Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red is at once a fantasy and a philosophical puzzle, a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of art, religion, love, sex, and power.
"Pamuk is a novelist and a great one…My Name is Red is by far the grandest and most astonishing contest in his internal East-West war…It is chock-full of sublimity and sin…The story is told by each of a dozen characters, and now and then by a dog, a tree, a gold coin, several querulous corpses and the color crimson ('My Name is Red')…[Readers will] be lofted by the paradoxical lightness and gaiety of the writing, by the wonderfully winding talk perpetually about to turn a corner, and by the stubborn humanity in the characters' maneuvers to survive. It is a humanity whose lies and silences emerge as endearing and oddly bracing individual truths."- Richard Eder, New York Times Book Review
"A murder mystery set in sixteenth-century Istanbul [that] uses the art of miniature illumination, much as Mann's 'Doctor Faustus' did music, to explore a nation's soul… Erdag Goknar deserves praise for the cool, smooth English in which he has rendered Pamuk's finespun sentences, passionate art appreciations, sly pedantic debates, [and] eerie urban scenes."- John Updike, The New Yorker
"The interweaving of human and philosophical intrigue is very much as I remember it in The Name of the Rose, as is the slow, dense beginning and the relentless gathering of pace… But, in my view, his book is by far the better of the two. I would go so far as to say that Pamuk achieves the very thing his book implies is impossible… More than any other book I can think of, it captures not just Istanbul's past and present contradictions, but also its terrible, timeless beauty. It's almost perfect, in other words. All it needs is the Nobel Prize."-Maureen Freely, New Statesman (UK)
"A perfect example of Pamuk's method as a novelist, which is to combine literary trickery with page-turning readability… As a meditation on art, in particular, My Name is Red is exquisitely subtle, demanding and repaying the closest attention.. We in the West can only feel grateful that such a novelist as Pamuk exists, to act as a bridge between our culture and that of a heritage quite as rich as our own."-Tom Holland, Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Readers… will find themselves lured into a richly described and remarkable world… Reading the novel is like being in a magically exotic dream…Splendidly enjoyable and rewarding… A book in which you can thoroughly immerse yourself." -Allan Massie, The Scotsman (UK)
"A wonderful novel, dreamy, passionate and august, exotic in the most original and exciting way. Orhan Pamuk is indisputably a major novelist."-Philip Hensher, The Spectator (UK)
"[In this] magnificent new novel… Pamuk takes the reader into the strange and beautiful world of Islamic art,in which Western notions no longer make sense… In this world of forgeries, where some might be in danger of losing their faith in literature, Pamuk is the real thing, and this book might well be one of the few recent works of fiction that will be remembered at the end of this century."-Avkar Altinel, The Observer (UK)

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“How much would they go for?” asked Master Osman.

“I hear that the great Sadiki Bey illustrated a copy of Strange Creatures , commissioned by an Uzbek spahi cavalryman, for only forty gold pieces. In the tent of a vulgar pasha who was returning from his Eastern campaign to Erzurum, I beheld an album consisting of lewd pictures including paintings by the virtuoso Siyavush. A few great masters who hadn’t abandoned illustrating were making and selling individual pieces, which weren’t part of any story at all. By examining such single leaves, you couldn’t tell which scene or which story it represented; rather, you would admire it for its own sake, for the pleasure of beholding alone. For example, you might comment, ”This is the exact likeness of a horse, how beautiful,“ and you’d pay the artist on this basis. Scenes of combat or fucking are quite common. The price for a bustling battle has fallen to three hundred silver coins, and there are hardly any interested clients. To sell pieces on the cheap and to better lure a buyer, some simply draw in black ink on nonsized, unfinished paper with nary a brushstroke of color.”

“There was a gilder of mine who was content as content could be and talented as talent would allow,” said Master Osman. “He saw to his work with such elegance that we referred to him as ”Elegant Effendi.“ But he has abandoned us. It’s been six days, and he’s not to be found anywhere. He’s plain disappeared.”

“How could anyone quit such a workshop as this, such a joyous hearth?” I said.

“Butterfly, Olive, Stork and Elegant, the four young masters whom I’ve trained since they were apprentices, now work at home at Our Sultan’s behest,” said Master Osman.

This apparently came about so they could work more comfortably on the Book of Festivities with which the entire workshop was involved. This time, the Sultan hadn’t arranged for a special workspace for His master miniaturists in the palace courtyard; rather, He decreed that they work on this special book at home. When it occurred to me that this order was probably issued for the sake of my Enishte’s book, I fell silent. To what degree was Master Osman making insinuations?

“Nuri Effendi,” he called to a pale and hunched painter, “present Our Master Black with a ”survey“ of the workshop!”

The “survey” was a regular ritual of Our Sultan’s bimonthly visits to the miniaturists’ atelier during that exciting time when His Excellency had intently followed what transpired at the workshop. Under the auspices of Hazım, the Head Treasurer; Lokman, the Head Poetic Chronicler and Master Osman, the Head Illuminator, Our Sultan would be apprised of which pages in which books the masters were working on at any given moment: who did which gilding, who colored which picture, and one by one, how the colorists, the page rulers, the gilders and the master miniaturists, whose talent allowed them to accomplish miracles, were engaged. It saddened me that they were holding a fake ceremony in place of the one that was no longer performed because age and ill health bound the Head Poetic Chronicler Lokman Effendi, who wrote most of the books which were illustrated, to his home; because Master Osman often disappeared in a cloud of indignation and wrath; because the four masters known as Butterfly, Olive, Stork and Elegant worked at home; and because Our Sultan no longer waxed enthusiastic like a child in the workshop. As happened to many miniaturists, Nuri Effendi had grown old in vain, without having fully experienced life or become a master of his art. Not in vain, however, did he spend those years over his worktable becoming hunchbacked: He always paid close attention to what happened in the workshop, to who made which exquisite page.

And so I eagerly beheld for the first time the legendary pages of the Book of Festivities , which recounted the circumcision ceremonies of Our Sultan’s prince. When I was still in Persia, I heard stories about this fifty-two-day circumcision ceremony wherein people from all occupations and all guilds, all of Istanbul, had participated, indeed at a time when the book that memorialized the great event was yet being prepared.

In the first picture placed before me, fixed in the royal enclosure of late Ibrahim Pasha’s palace, Our Sultan, the Refuge of the World, gazed upon the festivities in the Hippodrome below with a look that bespoke His satisfaction. His face, even though not so detailed as to permit one to distinguish Him from others by features alone, was drawn adeptly and with reverence. As for the right side of the double-leaf picture showing Our Sultan on the left, there were viziers, pashas, Persian, Tatar, Frankish and Venetian ambassadors standing in the arched colonnades and windows. Because they were not sultans, their eyes were drawn hastily and carelessly and focused on nothing in particular besides the general commotion in the square. Later, I noticed in other pictures that the same arrangement and page composition repeated-even though the wall ornamentation, the trees and terra-cotta shingles were depicted in different styles and colors. Once the text was written out by scribes, the illustrations completed and the book bound; the reader, turning pages, would each time see completely different activities in completely different colors in the Hippodrome which remained under the same watchful gazes of the Sultan and His crowd of guests-who always stood identically, forever gazing at the same area below.

There before me I saw people scrambling for hundreds of bowls of pilaf that were placed in the Hippodrome; I saw the live rabbits and birds emerge out of the roast ox and startle the crowd that had descended upon it. I saw the master coppersmiths’ guild riding in a wheeled cart before Our Sultan, its members hammering away at copper but never striking the one among them lying in the cart with the anvil balanced on his bare chest. I saw glaziers embellishing glass with carnations and cypresses as they paraded before Our Sultan in a wagon; confectioners reciting sweet poems as they drove camels laden with sacks of sugar and displayed cages holding sugar-parrots; and aged locksmiths who showed off a variety of hanging locks, padlocks, dead bolts and gearlocks as they complained of the evils of new times and new doors. Butterfly, Stork and Olive had worked on the picture that depicted the magicians: One of them was causing eggs to march down a pole without dropping them-as if on a broad slab of marble-to the beat of a tambourine played by another. In one wagon I saw precisely how Sea-Captain Kılıç Ali Pasha had forced the infidels he’d captured at sea to make an “infidels’ mountain” out of clay; he’d then loaded all the slaves into the cart, and when he was right before the Sultan, he exploded the powder within the “mountain” to demonstrate how he’d made infidel lands wail and moan with cannon fire. I saw clean-shaven butchers wielding cleavers, wearing rose- and purple-colored uniforms and smiling at the pink carcasses of skinned sheep hanging from hooks. The spectators applauded lion tamers who’d brought a chained lion before Our Sultan, provoking and enraging it until its eyes shone bloodred with rage; and on the next page, I saw the lion, representing Islam, chase away a gray-and-pink pig, symbolizing the cunning Christian infidel. I indulged my eyes at length on a picture of a barber suspended upside down from the ceiling of a shop built onto a cart, as he shaved a customer while his assistant, dressed in red, held a mirror and a silver bowl containing fragrant soap, waiting for baksheesh; I inquired after the identity of the magnificent miniaturist responsible for the piece.

“It is indeed important that a painting, through its beauty, summon us toward life’s abundance, toward compassion, toward respect for the colors of the realm which God created, and toward reflection and faith. The identity of the miniaturist is not important.”

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