Key themes
- The conflict between Eastern miniaturism and Western perspective — two ways of seeing the world
- Murder as a symptom of a civilisational argument
- Love in the margins of a story that is about something else
About this book
In 16th-century Istanbul, an illustrator is murdered — and the miniaturists in the Sultan's atelier must discover which of their number committed the crime while navigating the debate between Eastern and Western styles of representation. Pamuk's Booker International-shortlisted novel is both a detective story and a meditation on artistic identity, tradition and the politics of seeing. He won the Nobel Prize in 2006.
Published in Turkish in 1998, My Name Is Red won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and several other prizes before Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in 2006. It is one of the most formally inventive historical novels of the period.
Discussion questions
- The novel has many narrators — including a corpse, a tree and a painting. What does this formal polyphony achieve — and what is Pamuk saying through the multiplicity of perspectives?
- The debate between miniaturist convention (the unchanging divine image) and Western perspective (the individual eye) is the novel's philosophical core. What is this debate actually about — and how does Pamuk position himself?
- The murder mystery drives the plot but the novel is as much about aesthetics as detection. How does Pamuk integrate these registers?
- The novel is set in 16th-century Istanbul but is clearly a meditation on Turkey's own civilisational crisis. How does the historical setting serve — and partly conceal — this contemporary argument?
- Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What does My Name Is Red do that earns this recognition — and is it the formal experimentation, the cultural argument, or the love story that you find most compelling?
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