notes

-
On My Name is Red
Orhan Pamuk

These notes on My Name is Red were written on an airplane just after finishing the book.

November 30, 1998

After reading and rereading My Name is Red and correcting the commas for the thousandth time - after handing it in, what are my thoughts?

I'm happy, tired, at peace with myself, because the book is finished. I feel as relaxed and as happy as I did when I finished my licée exams and my military service. I went to Beyoglu and bought myself two expensive shirts; I ate chicken döner, looked at the shop windows. I rested at home for two days, tidying up here and there; I was glad I had given myself over to my work, my book, for so many years, and particularly happy about the last six months, when I'd worked with the incandescence of a mystic trying to leave his body. All those drafts that had failed to come together, all those cul-de-sacs and passages that ended badly - over the past two months I's ruthlessly cut them out and thrown them away. I am sure that the prose is at last taut and well organized, and it flows.

What is there of my soul, of me, in this book? I would say that there is quite a lot here from my life and somewhat less from my soul. For example, my endless quarrels with my older brother, Sevket - I put these into the book though in an affectionate spirit. I did not convey the violence of the beatings I suffered or the deep desires and furies they provoked; this was because My Name is Red was to be indebted to the hopefulness of beauty, to tolerance, to a Tolstoyan harmony, to a sensitivity worthy of Flaubert, these ambitions were with me from the very start. But still my views on the merciless, coarseness, disorderliness of life found their way into the book. I wanted it to be a classic; I wanted the whole country to read it and each to find himself reflected in it; I wanted to evoke the cruelty of history and the beauty of a world now lost.

As I was finishing the book, it seemed to me that the mystery plot, the detective story, was forced, that my heart wasn't in it, but it was too late to make changes. I had worried that no one would be interested in my lovely miniaturists unless I found such a device to draw the reader in, but my speculations (on Islam and the prohibition against representational art) led to an assault on their world, their logic, and their fragile labors. That said, I cannot, in the presence of contemporary readers, close my eyes to Islam's historical intolerance of painting, its deep-seated opposition to creativity and visual expression. So this was why my poor miniaturists were forced to endure the intrusion of a political detective plot that would make my novel easy to read. I would like to offer them my apologies.

My Name is Red was a huge labor, undertaken with childish enthusiasm and heartfelt seriousness, drawing many things from my own life, and designed as a classic that would speak to the whole country. If I now proudly claim to be sure I will succeed in this aim, am I being too sure of myself? My fragility, my filth, my depravity, and my shortcomings - they are not in the fabric of the book, in its language or its structure, but they can be made out in the characters' lives and stories.

The shape of the novel is hopeful, plain for all to see; far from challenging life, it affirms it; far from awakening suspicions, it calls the reader to enjoy what miracles life affords. I hope many readers will like this book. Though I wonder wheter a writer's silly optimism is reason enough for a book to be liked.

- - -
Pamuk sobre My Name is Red em Other Colors.