![]() ![]() Eco's medieval crime puzzler led us through the byways of antique learning and made the solution of the whodunit depend on a knowledge of medieval literary theory. ![]() The combination of historical setting and murder mystery will remind many of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1984). However formally elaborate or philosophically ambitious, the book is - to use that originally dismissive label - a whodunit. The main character of My Name is Red, Black, attempts to solve the murders of a court painter and their master, who is also his own uncle. Pamuk likes to build his novels around mysteries, making detective stories of intellectual inquiries: The Black Book is about a man whose wife has disappeared in Snow a journalist investigates a spate of suicides in a remote Turkish town. It is also an example of what has been a popular genre in recent decades: the historical mystery. This is a novel of ideas and a meditation on how east and west might meet. ![]() To them, the aesthetic and religious values informing these (of course invisible) pictures are second nature. The anglophone reader is required to imagine the formal delights of the illuminations painted by the miniaturists who are Pamuk's main characters. Set in Istanbul at the end of the 16th century, it is much concerned with the clash between eastern and western - Islamic and Christian - ideas about art. It is structurally demanding, being divided up between 10 narrators, with interspersed parables offered by several imaginary voices (Death, A Horse, Satan). M y Name Is Red is in some ways a difficult novel. ![]()
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