My Name Is Red: a book review

the fact that orhan pamuk won the nobel prize in literature last year prompted me to read this book. this turkish writer broke away from conventionalism by presenting a decentralised voice in his novel - in short, all his characters have a voice, so we get to read the novel in their own views of how the plot goes.

this novel overwhelms me with pamuk's detailed explanation on the techniques used by turkish miniaturists (master artists), so much so that i skipped pages and pages of details which i think are unnecessary (read that to mean i'm bored). it is, after all, stripped to its bareness, a cloak and dagger novel, with the philosophical outlook of the finer arts of painting as its frills. while i applaud his ingenious way of using this decentralised point of view, i find that it is too much for my patience. who wants to know what a drawn subject such as a dog or a satan thinks? or what a gold coin thinks?

a good writer should know what is appropriate to be put in in his text. and not to just simply shove everything in, for the sake of being constant in applying his technique.