24 august 2022

Book review: "The Woman with Red Hair" by Orhan Pamuk

 It has been a long time since I published an interesting article on my blog. But now I have come with an interesting book which I am reading at this time. A book made me approach literature again.

I really missed reading a book and not least writing texts. Lately I've been discovering other new writers that I've heard of but haven't read yet.

I don't really miss anything from Orhan Pamuk. When a new book comes out, I buy it.

I would now like to return to the book I am reading "The Woman with Red Hair" by Orhan Pamuk.

A short story written in 2016, it is Pamuk's tenth novel, it is the story of a well digger and his apprentice searching for water in barren land.

In mid-1980s Istanbul, master Mahmut and his apprentice use ancient methods to dig new wells; this is the story of their ultimate struggle, but it is also an exploration through stories and images of the ideas of fathers and sons, authoritarianism and individuality, state and freedom, reading and sight.

This short and compelling novel is at once a realistic text investigating a murder that took place thirty years ago near Istanbul and a fictional inquiry into the literary foundations of civilizations, comparing two foundational myths of the West and the East, respectively : Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (a story of patricide) and Ferdowsi's story of Rostam and Sohrab (a story of filicide).

A demonic voice of the eponymous red-haired woman runs along.

The writer Orhan Pamuk is a laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature, he is one of the emblematic writers of Turkey.

He is a complex writer, a master of details and labyrinthine analogies between the mystical and the real, the author conveys to us that absolutely nothing is up to chance and that, regardless of whether we do not discern everything, every accident has a specific reason.

In the novel The Woman with the Red Hair, I found the construction with the eye of the reader thirsty for perfection, the writer, he masterfully stretches the complicated web of an existentialism located somewhere between Islamism and secularization, as a search not for religiosity, but for one's own self, with good and bad, with the darkness of letting go and the light of dreams.

The story of Cem Celik, a teenager of only seventeen years, is an extremely turbulent one, with countless searches for definition, with the desire to fill his inner emptiness with something burning, unforgettable.

Beyond the harsh climate at home, with a stern father and a traditionalist mother, beyond even Cem's dream of becoming a writer, the real explosion of the young man's existence begins with the father's disappearance, the turning point that will change everything.

The plumber Mahmud, the red-haired woman, traveling theater actress, but especially in Turkey of the 80s, in full revolutionary momentum, have a descriptivism in a concise style, with a philosophy of expressiveness that arouses buzz and empathy in - an inexplicable simultaneity of feeling.

The author unfolds in "The Woman with Red Hair" in three planes that intertwine in a homogeneity of a whole riot.

The foreground is the relationship between Cem Celik and the well master Mahmud, in their frantic search for the earth after finding the primordial odorless and colorless liquid.

 The second plan is the relationship between Cem Celik and the red-haired woman, unfolding between the platonic and the carnal, as an eternal challenge full of sparks between Ying and Yang in the name of animal instincts but, above all, something more than that.

The third plan is the relationship between the adult Cem Celik and the consequences of his teenage mischief.

I also recommend other books by Orhan Pamuk.

                                                       Written by Elena Bogus


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