52 Weeks of Literature, Week Two: “My Name is Red” by Orhan Pamuk

Representative excerpt: [From the perspective of a counterfeit gold coin] “…let me list for you the various things I might be exchanged for: the foot of a young and beautiful slave girl, which amounts to about one-fiftieth of her person; a good-quality walnut-handled barber’s mirror, edges inlaid with bone; a well-painted chest of drawers decorates with sunburst designs and silver leaf worth ninety silver pieces; 120 fresh loaves of bread; a grave site and coffins for three; a silver armband; one-tenth of a horse; the legs of an old and fat concubine; one buffalo calf; two high-quality pieces of china; the monthly wage of Persian miniaturist Mehmet the Dervish of Tabriz and the majority of those of his like who work in Our Sultan’s workshop; one good hunting falcon with cage; ten jugs of Panayot’s wine; a heavenly hour with Mahmut, one of those young boys world-renowned for his beauty, and many other opportunities too numerous to specify.” (pp. 102-3, trans. Erdağ M. Göknar)

Retro will always be in vogue. Nostalgia sells. The desire to go back in time, resurrect the past and ape the fashions of eras long gone is in all of us. The present in this way is a concave mirror, reflecting and shining a light on previous generations to better define itself while itself remaining nebulous, and while the future remains a total blank. Do we really ever know our own zeitgeist—the styles and auras that make our place and time unique—until some decades later? How exactly should we define the 2010s, since we are already halfway through them? We might answer that we’ve assembled the 2010s from the detritus of the still-opaque ‘00s, which was itself crafted out of the fragments of the now-clearer 1990s, etc. From a historiographical perspective, it helps that the Old and New Millennia can be cleanly differentiated by 9/11—until we remember that Osama bin Laden was of course one of the most serious geopolitical threats of the ‘90s. Lost in the present, we retreat to the past and seek answers from it. My Name is Red, the novel that (along with Snow) propelled the Turkish postmodernist Orhan Pamuk to his 2006 Nobel triumph, draws much of its power from the genres and forms of yore. Parables, fables, poetry, Quran interpretations, a traditional love story and a classic murder mystery all amass into one hodgepodge in which they’re able to riff and commentate on each other and themselves. It looks innovative and challenging, but the ingredients are familiar. Pamuk brings back centuries-old modes of storytelling to bear on the present, to remind us of lessons we may have forgotten, to reintroduce perceptions new to us but well-known in history.

Written before and published in English around the time of 9/11, Red is well positioned to provide a discourse on Islam, as Turkey seems one of the few nations (Albania is another) able to compromise Islam with secularism and syncretism. Set in late-1500s Istanbul, it opens with the murder of one Ottoman miniaturist—an esteemed book illustrator—by another. Both are involved in the task of creating a series of miniatures celebrating the life and reign of their Sultan. This task is kept confidential, as it essentially demands several affronts to Islam such as idolatry and blasphemy. Small wonder it leads to bloodshed. The murder mystery itself is, in execution, the novel’s most egregious blemish: there are only three suspects, who are not as much characters as they are vessels for the narration of parables. Besides the killer—who is privileged to share his point-of-view in anonymity—the men are distinguished by themes, not by personalities. This makes the reader’s duty of trying to solve the murder a near-impossible sludge. Thankfully, the narrative’s other major component—its love story—is much more riveting. The one non-suspect miniaturist, Black, returns to Istanbul after a long exile with the intention of wedding his widowed cousin, Shekure, the daughter of his uncle and mentor, Enishte. This story and other subplots are paralleled neatly—like a single prism showing off a rainbow of color—with the Turkish legend of Hüsrev and Shirin, which is similar to the Greek legend of Oedipus in that Hüsrev is envied and slaughtered by his own son. Divisions are drawn across various generational lines; there are not just conflicts of old versus young, but also those of tradition versus innovation, and of the Quran versus free expression. Mired in this mess is the question of how the Sultan’s book will represent the Ottoman Empire to Europe and the world.

It’s heady stuff, sometimes to its own detriment. There are times when Pamuk is more interested in displaying his vast knowledge of Turkish history, mythology, art and literature than in getting on with the narrative—and this only serves to bring more attention to the tedious regimentation of the many meta-literary parables, most of which blend into and repeat each other. When he does push the story forward, it’s thrilling. His most profound literary choice is to distill that story between multiple perspectives, some of which I doubt any author has thought up before. The color red, the alleged gold coin from the quote above, Death more as a condition than as a figure, a young version of the author inserted conveniently into the text—all of these and more are endowed with their own voices and personas, which are both original and plausible. Such personifications give credence to Red’s most haunting theme—the fundamental Islamic concept that “the blind and the seeing are not equal,” namely that the capacity to see does not alone indicate sight. Herein, the miniaturists who aspire to greatness are necessarily impelled to become blind in old age, whether by intense visual labor or by deliberate injury, so as to let their artistic talents ossify and to perceive the unknowable as Allah does. To see in a spiritual sense sometimes does require forsaking the privilege of physical sight and of learning through viewing. Perhaps we fail to define our eras and our religious/spiritual beliefs because we rely too much on the present we can “see”, and too little on the past we cannot.

Grade: B+

Next week: I head home to New York to read Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

31 Days of Cinema, Days Twenty-Nine, Thirty and Thirty-One: “Yi Yi” | “Pather Panchali” | “Winter Sleep”

The opening of Yi Yi—the three-hour swansong of the late Taiwanese New Wave master Edward Yang—had me worried: the character introductions are uneven, the musical theme is saccharine. But the film quickly recovered after that. It traces one year in which a well-off Taipei family faces crises of communication, trust, maturation, and the major transitions that we like to package into things called milestones. The father, NJ (Nien-Jen Wu), heads to Tokyo to cement two relationships: one with the Japanese software developer Ota (a tender yet serious Issei Ogata)—with whom he talks in halting English, since neither knows the other’s native tongue and English is a global force—and one with an old flame, Sherry (Su-Yun Ko). His daughter, Ting-Ting, has a crush on Fatty (Pang Chang Yu), the moody boyfriend of her best friend, Lili (Meng-Chin Lin). Her little brother, Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang)—no doubt named for the filmmaker—is precocious and wise for his age, a fact that the adults around him don’t appreciate as much as they should. NJ’s mother is comatose but back at home; doctor’s orders are to keep talking with her as if she were conscious to keep her uplifted in case she does wake up. The family can say anything they want to her yet can’t expect reward from it. She is a vessel for catharsis, and one of the film’s chief themes is whether environment, or at least an unconscious entity, can have a tone, an emotion.

Several scenes occur in an empty room or in a room into which innocuous action is filtered, with the central narrative developing offstage in the actors’ urgent voices. There is a disconnect between sight and sound, yet also an esteem for and an effort to capture urban space unfettered by human presence or perception—an artifact and a memory that will withstand the most pressing concerns of the mortals on its periphery. We’re always on the periphery with these characters, not allowed to get too involved, because we’ve got three hours to hustle through, yet we grow quite attached to them. The standard rituals that form life’s milestones—the wedding, the firstborn birth, the anniversary—are all on display here, but Yang does not use them as clichés, rather as defense mechanisms by which people stave off the stress of transition, insomuch that by the time of the funeral that concludes the film, they’re exhausted and have no walls left to burn. There’s some commentary on globalization—McDonald’s, Coco-Cola, the English language—and we wonder why such staples in society have to promote themselves so aggressively when we all know what they are already (to foist their power, of course, in particular over youths), yet Yang’s view of this urban global culture is always impartial, leaving the people there to set the mood. Fatty does collapse into cliché—as he becomes the mortality-obsessed teen turned homicidal—and I was disappointed in his arc. But the film ends strong, and Yang-Yang’s climactic speech is undeniable.

Grade: A-

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As with most though not all debut films, Pather Panchali—the world’s introduction to West Bengali master Satyajit Ray—has its shortcomings, though it was and is quite an auspicious debut, especially considering the immense poverty and dearth of resources that it was made under and depicts. Based on a novel by B. Bandhopadhyay, and kicking off the filmmaker’s Apu trilogy, the film chronicles the efforts of Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee) to care for her two children, Apu (Subir Banerjee) and Durga (Runki Banerjee and Uma Dasgupta) and her aged cousin Indir—played by Chunibala Devi, in a performance so great, so minimalist and sexless and stoic, that I thought she was a man—in the absence of her husband Harihar (Kanu Banerjee), a poet who goes off to the city for work. Note that none of the Banerjees were related, yet their family unit is plausible throughout, so you could be forgiven for mistaking the coincidence. The story is built from vignettes that are connected perhaps a bit too loosely. There’s a contrast between the urban-industrial and the rural-pastoral that goes undeveloped; one scene set in a field of train tracks and power lines is supposed to suffice. I could have used more of that.

Granted, there is plenty of contrast between wealth and destitution, as is evidenced by Durga’s incessant impulse to steal fruits from the orchard of the family’s neighbor and (in a smattering of irony that I hope I am recalling correctly) once-landlord. And the vignettes host some truly beautiful moments: Apu’s introduction, which is constructed ominously enough to foretell a later death; the aforementioned train; an interaction with a candy vendor; a bathing scene; a play-within-the-play; a brutal monsoon; and an extended, impressionistic shot of a cow standing in the middle of ruins right after it. The photography is by Subrata Mitra, also debuting, and it is baffling that he had no experience with a camera before this. The film’s testament to innate talent over pedigree—to earning a living off artistic merit and not off playing to identifiable tropes, even while not everyone can succeed at that, much less use that to escape poverty—is thus very genuine. I hesitate to give away too much about the film, as it ends in tragedy (the monsoon is the least of it), and it is the sort of tragedy you must feel rather than be told about. Ray constructs this catastrophe with long takes, with set pieces of viscous silence and suspense, and the payoff is loud and vigorous. If there is one element that makes this film worth watching, however, it’s the music of Ravi Shankar. It doesn’t take long to see how he got famous. It’s stunning how broad an emotional range that man was able to create using just a handful of sitars and percussion. The soundtrack here is an aural feast.

Grade: A-

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The last three days of my July challenge saw me going west across Asia, from the Taiwan of Yi Yi to Ray’s India, finally ending with Winter Sleep in Turkey, on the cusp of Europe inasmuch as I was on the edge of the month, looking into an August in which I would not be burdened with thirty-one films. There is something sacred about an ending, something furtive and ethereal about having gone through a film—or a group of films—as a rite of passage, and emerging with the awareness of how it culminates. Spoilers cannot suffice for this feeling. Much of these emotions in fact were conjured by the Cappadocia depicted in this film, a borderland of modern buildings and houses carved into jagged, imbalanced, unstable towers of rock, a clash between nature and man, old and new, tradition and liberty. The most ostentatious of these constructions is an inn, the Hotel Othello, run by Aydin (the superb Haluk Bilginer), a retired actor who spends his days writing hot air for the local news (on his rare Mac laptop, no less), extracting rent from the villagers, and insisting to himself that he will start writing his history of the Turkish theatre very soon. Towards the beginning, he’s riding shotgun in a truck when an indignant kid chucks a stone at his window. The entire plot emanates from that single moment.

Adapted by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (who won the Palme d’Or for this, after several attempts) from some Chekhov stories, Sleep runs at over three hours and has been accused of wheel spinning. I disagree with that sentiment. The story uses as an axle two confrontations in its middle act—one between Aydin and his blasé sister Necla (Demet Akbag), the other between Aydin and his younger, more humane and simmering ex-wife Nihal (Melisa Sözen)—that are almost twenty minutes apiece. These scenes and others felt much more to me like real life than contrived cinema. People on different sides of a coin try to get their points across, things boil, they reach a détente and fall silent, then one of them can’t resist muttering a riposte, and the other’s passions grow inflamed, and it all starts up again and repeats itself…and so on. Tensions play out in the void between words, when words are calculated, as much as when they are spoken, and when they are, they aren’t always clear or accurately chosen or what ought to be said. Writing and acting scenes like that is a hundred times easier said than done, and Ceylan and his ensemble pull it off time and again. The effect is more hooking and exhilarating than one might think a three-hour gabfest should be. Throughout, the film shows awareness of time as a straggling process, but not without a pitch-black sense of humor. At one point, Aydin is told that his train is delayed by an hour, and that’s about how much of the film is left. Characters invoke Shakespeare and the tenets of Islam, with as much pretension as one may expect from artists and wordsmiths, yet the film is far from pretentious, as it exploits these references for irony and meta-commentary, which it earns. There is banal hunting scene, a use of English as a universal tongue similar to that in Yi Yi, and a climactic act of pure spite that nearly had me jumping from my seat. I’m with the Cannes jury here; this was a tremendous closer to the month.

Grade: A

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Well, folks, I’ve done it. Yes, it took me longer than I’d hoped to get the reviews finished, and yes, I abandoned my original schedule completely in the final days. Never mind. I watched all thirty-one films I said I’d watch, all within the month of July, and though the execution wasn’t perfect, the challenge was a success. There were a few duds and disappointments, but gratefully, there were no outright bad films in the bunch (except for maybe La Ciénaga), and I discovered five masterpieces (Eternity and a Day; Lore; In Vanda’s Room; Je, Tu, Il, Elle; and Open Your Eyes), several films that were close to, and several films that may grow on me in the coming weeks–which is more or less what I set out to do. Thanks to everyone who watched and read along, or who will watch and read along in the future. This challenge nabbed this blog its greatest number of readers yet (special thanks to the Robert Pattinson fans who recognized my approval of The Rover), and I will definitely do it again in the future (next January, perhaps) and am even contemplating making it an annual or twice-yearly tradition. I already have another list of films to get through. Furthermore, taking the effectiveness of this effort into account, I’m thinking of doing a similar challenge for literature, as God knows there are too many books that I need to read, so giving myself a concrete schedule of books just might do the trick. That’d have to be a yearlong endeavor, though, and the reading of each book would have to be drawn out to a week–two weeks, if it’s long. It’ll be more complicated. But it might be worth it, so don’t be surprised if you see a “52 Weeks of Literature” challenge springing up next year. In the meantime, I’m more satisfied than I’ve ever been to take a break from viewing films, and I’ll be glad to turn my focus back onto my Great Films reviews and other projects. Once again: thanks for reading!