Orhan Pamuk

The first thing this book made me want to do was go out and learn more about the Ottoman miniaturist painting traditions. There is a lot of interesting history being depicted here, particularly if you have any interest at all in art and traditions.

The story itself, part murder-mystery and part romance was great in conception but I found myself occasionally impatient with the romance part and eager to by-pass it to get back to the more compelling mystery part. Still, very well written overall.

I think it must be very difficult to draw the right balance in introducing the history part and providing enough context for the average reader and also building good plot and good characters. That's a lot of moving pieces to keep flowing in a work like this, and while I didn't full out love this, it's definitely well done.… (more)

Osman first comes across a book called The new life when he sees a pretty girl carrying it around in the university refectory. He spots a copy on a bookstall, reads it himself, and finds his life transformed in some weird way by what he reads. Osman and the lovely (but regrettably unavailable) Janan set out on a quest for Janan’s lost lover that involves criss-crossing Turkey on an apparently endless series of bus journeys, a considerable number of which end in deadly bus-collisions.

Repeatedly, Pamuk seems to side-step any straightforward interpretation of the book, allowing the plot to shift directions unpredictably whenever we seem to be getting close to some kind of resolution. It’s a sweetly-ironic account of young love, a study of how conspiracies and counter-conspiracies work and of how ready young people are to allow themselves to be influenced by ideas that promise to bring an escape from the everyday, a look at how the power of an idea can become detached from its originator’s intentions when it is put into a book, and it's often also a gently satirical look back at life in provincial Turkey a few decades ago. And a nostalgic homage to obsolete Turkish brand names, overnight buses, rail travel, bad films and the low-grade children’s literature of the author’s youth. But it also brings in Dante, Rilke, and a whole bunch of other apparently incongruent threads, so you need to keep your wits about you.

Puzzling, but often quite captivating. If you are looking for a book about how many angels can dance on a candy-wrapper, this is the one.… (more)