Nobel Prize Winners discussion

Please post your thoughts on My Name is Red here.

Bruce wrote: "Using the chronology at the end of the book, I conclude that the book’s events are taking place at the end of the 16th century. The multiple perspectives - each chapter seems to reflect a differe..."

You are absolutely right about the view of artistic creation in the Muslim world at that time. If you wanted to pursue that idea there is an excellent study "Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West" by Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton that looks at the development of contacts between Venice and Istanbul.

The other thing that struck me forcibly about this book is how cheap life is, where one's very existence is dependant on the whim of the autocratic ruler and the jealousy of a rival, the unforgiving politics of it.

Bruce wrote: "Who is the murderer? “Olive” or “Stork” or “Butterfly”? Woven throughout this fascinating philosophic and artistic treatise is an engaging mystery story.

Representational painting seems to eleva..."

Yes, very interesting, Bruce. I always wondered about the importance of icons to the Orthodox and the kissing of statues amongst the Catholics, whether all this amounted to idolatry.

On art, I always thought that art was a mirror held up to society - not at all sure about "...imitating or even co-opting the office of the Divine." Can this really be the case for an artist who proclaims no faith at all? And I'm not sure I understand what you mean by a "Creator outside Creation" - I'll have to ponder on that concept for a while.

Yes, very helpful. I fully agree with your first paragraph.

One of the great contradictions that has puzzled me from childhood is the idea that in armed conflict both sides tend to claim that 'God is on our side' as if God has been enlisted along with all the other human cannon fodder. Even my tiny brain realised that God couldn't possibly be on both sides at the same time. I have similar problems with the concept of a 'just' war. It has always seemed to me that the only possible 'just' war is one where going to war is the only way to defend friends, family, country from direct agression. And that still has problems for me in terms of 'country' because the 'nation state' has always struck me as a rather arbitrary concept, especially in the context of European history.

Back to Pamuk - I suppose what I really appreciate about him and his work is the insights he offers to the tensions between the religious and the secular in the political sphere, which seem to be closer to the surface in countries such as Turkey.

I'm half way through and loving it, and have omitted reading the comments above in case they contain spoilers. Then I'll go over all of them. I just popped in to share a documentary I found on the web where several scholars and Pamuk discuss the novel and the setting. I think it's worth watching.
http://www.learner.org/courses/worldl...

Yes, I enjoyed that immensely - it certainly gave me new perspectives on the bigger picture of the book. I endorse Bruce's thanks for bringing it to our attention.

I've just finished reading, and I enjoyed it very much. I liked the central theme concerning the function of art, and the problems brought about by change of paradigm the Renaissance meant in the West. I think the main tension here is the individual vs. the community, or the central power. Art, it appears in the novel, had a very specific function in the Ottoman Empire: to illustrate sacred stories and to try to see reality from a divine perspective. The subjectivity Venetian painters displayed in painting things from their point of view, in their individuality and detail, meant a worshipping of the human and the sensual, instead of the divine and the transcendental.
I also think the book tackles, if tangentially, the function of literature and story-telling, too. The fact that we realize at some point that there is a subversive storyteller who, through his narration and use of the pictures, challenges the established truths, and that he is killed for that, tells us that painting in the story has a narrative function. Actually, one of the main issues is that Venetian paintings don't illustrate a story known or told beforehand, but tell a story in themselves. And I thought Sekure's final admonition not to believe everything Orhan tells us because he tends to distort what he says contaminating it with his own personality (=style) is clearly a self-mocking metaliterary comment on the authority of the author.

Here's an interview to Pamuk on the novel.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/ch...