Read this book beside Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and you will see the same novel written twice — once in Latin Christendom, once in Ottoman Istanbul — by two erudite men of roughly the same generation who had, without knowing it, the same project. Eco published The Name of the Rose in 1980. Pamuk published My Name is Red in 1998. The lag between them is the same lag the Ottoman empire ran behind its European rivals on most questions of modernity. The pairing is not incidental. The pairing is the argument.
Both novels are murder mysteries set inside a closed religious intellectual community — Eco’s is a Benedictine abbey in 1327, Pamuk’s is a workshop of Ottoman miniaturist painters in 1591. In both, a man is killed and a second man is killed shortly afterward, and the investigator is an outsider who must read the visual and textual evidence of the dead men’s work to figure out who is killing his colleagues and why. In both, the killer is defending an older tradition against a new influence — Aristotelian comedy for Eco, Venetian perspectival realism for Pamuk — and in both, the murderer is not a villain but a tragic figure who understands, more clearly than anyone else in the book, what is being lost and what is being gained, and who cannot accept the ratio.
What Eco gave the novel: the library as the site of the crime. The idea that a killing could be about a book. The weight of the monastic architecture as moral geography. What Pamuk added to the form: the multiplicity of narrators. My Name is Red is narrated, in rotating chapters, by a dozen voices — the murderer, the corpse, the miniaturists, the woman they all love, a gold coin, a dog, the color red itself. Eco wrote a novel that felt, in 1980, like a medieval manuscript finally being read. Pamuk wrote a novel that feels, in 1998, like a miniature painting finally being allowed to speak.
The speaking is the innovation. In Pamuk’s cosmology, drawn from the actual theological debates that animated Ottoman miniaturist workshops, painting is a form of devotion, and the painter’s obligation is to reproduce not what he sees but what God sees — which is the form of the object, unclouded by the painter’s individual vantage. The Venetian tradition, arriving via coin and manuscript in late sixteenth-century Istanbul, proposed the opposite — that painting should represent what a single human eye, in a single position, at a single moment, actually sees. This is perspective. This is individuality. This is the Renaissance. And it is, to the Ottoman traditionalist, blasphemy, because it places a human eye where only God’s eye should be.
The novel’s murder is a murder over this question. It is also, obliquely, a murder over what Turkey itself would become — and Pamuk, writing in 1998, is writing three years before September 11 and four years before his own prosecution under Turkish Article 301 for insulting Turkishness. The book is not an allegory, but it is positioned. Pamuk is asking, in a four-hundred-year-old frame, the question his country is asking contemporaneously. Which tradition do we defend. What do we concede. Is the concession the loss, or is the refusal the loss.
Eco, writing in 1980, was asking a similar question in a different frame. His monastery is debating laughter — whether Christ laughed, whether laughter is theologically permissible, whether the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics (on comedy) should be preserved or destroyed. The murderer in Rose is protecting the Church from laughter. The murderer in Red is protecting the Ottoman tradition from the individual eye. Both are protecting something real. Both are wrong in the way the book asks us to find them wrong. Both are tragic in the way the book insists we find them tragic.
Read the two together, separated by a week or two. Start with Eco — it is harder, and will reward a fresh reader more — then come to Pamuk when your ear is already tuned to the kind of novel where the puzzle and the metaphysics are the same puzzle. You will see things in each that you would not see alone. The diptych is the point.
A practical note on My Name is Red: the English translation by Erdağ Göknar is very good. There is an older partial translation by someone else that is worse. Make sure you have Göknar’s. The book lives or dies on the prose voice of the individual chapters, and Göknar is the one who makes the gold coin and the red pigment and the corpse sound like different beings speaking different dialects of the same devotion. That is the thing that makes the novel work. Lose it, and you lose the book.
A related vagobond.com piece: On Translation and Survival.
Readers and fans of My Name is Red will really enjoy Keys to the Riad — my novel set in a Moroccan riad where the old arts and the new world collide, where tarot and Sufi and the particular visual grammar of the Moroccan house become the language of a murder mystery that is also a devotional. Different empire, different miniature. Same question. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
