Publisher’s
write-up (from Goodreads):
‘On the outskirts of a town thirty miles from Istanbul, a master
well-digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain.
As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck metre by metre,
the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before--not the poor
middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after
being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to
depend on each other, and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the
world. But in the nearby town, where they buy provisions and take their evening
break, the boy will find an irresistible diversion. The Red-Haired Woman, an
alluring member of a travelling theatre company, catches his eye and seems as
fascinated by him as he is by her. The young man's wildest dream will be
realized, but, when in his distraction a horrible accident befalls the
well-digger, the boy will flee, returning to Istanbul. Only years later will he
discover whether he was in fact responsible for his master's death and who the
red-headed enchantress was.’
Note: I read the French
translation of this book
The Red-Haired woman is a novel of the Turkish author, the Nobel laureate,
Orhan Pamuk. He is known for is literary works and plots that show the Turkish
culture to the world. This is not like his typical novels, and has only 330
pages (in my pocket edition from Gallimard), and was also written in simple
language and was thus easy to read.
The main character of the novel is Cem, a young boy in his teens from a
suburb of Istanbul. His family depends on his income as his father died and he
works as an apprentice to a well-digger – Mahmud, before his studies at the
university. It is during this apprenticeship that he sees the red-haired woman,
and he is immediately impressed by her and falls in love, despite the fact that
she was as old his own mother. After several years, Cem is a very successful
businessman in Istanbul in the present day, but his past was going to return to
haunt him.
Orhan Pamuk used several allusions – and the two I enjoyed in particular
were, one from Greek mythology, the story of Oedipus, who killed his father and
the other, is from a Persian tale – the story of Rostam and Sohrab, here, a
case where the father kills his son. The relationship between Cem and his
master, Mahmud, was well described where even though Mahmud is very strict, he is
also very caring towards Cem. As always, Pamuk described his country well,
especially the poorer areas and suburbs. For a third of the novel, he kept the
mystery around the red-haired woman, to the extent that as a reader, I was
desperate to read her first dialogue. And it should also be noted that this was
a novel easy to read and I read almost the whole novel during my journey from
Paris to Brussels (which takes around 3 hours).
I did not have any major issues with the novel, maybe the narration of
the final third was a bit like that of a film, and I felt that the tone was very
different from the rest of the novel. Maybe, if he had written a longer novel as
is usually the case Pamuk, we could have had a better written ending.
To conclude, it was a very interesting novel, one of the best that I
have read this year. I read a lot of translated novels to understand other
cultures and here, my favourite was the reference to the Persian tale of Rostam
and Sohrab. On that note, I would award the novel a rating of eight on ten.
Rating – 8/10
Have a nice day,
Andy