Chain Reading

As I sit to write this post I try to bring myself out of Black and Shekure’s romantic confrontation (it is not lust for lust is brazen) in Orhan Pamuk’s murder mystery - My Name is Red. There is something about the narration in this book, which ought to have a name, that gives you a feeling of being a mind-reader. Until I find out what this narration style is named by the Oxford, I’ll choose to call it self-narration, wherein the plot has a protagonist yet the characters speak for themselves. Self-narration is a very innovative, brilliant and an enchanting experience.

When I first started the book it took me a while to understand: what’s the style, whose the protagonist, and who is the narrator. But once you get used to it you realise the beauty of it.

From the tons of books I have read (I’m not sounding bombastic, am I?) this one will always be special for its concept of self-narration. The specialty of this writing is that you know characters as they are and not as the protagonist derivatively knows them. You read every character yourself, and not as forced by the central-character.

Another distinctive feature of this book is its personification. Even the dead has a voice. Death proclaims its uniqueness, the dog its regret and the Gold-coin its counterfeitness. Even the non-living creatures have their say and as you read their voices you feel sad for the coin because it is counterfeit and wish that dogs had a larger voice just as their smelling capabilities.

Pamuk excellently takes you through the streets of Istanbul (Is that a cliche?). He gives you an opportunity to know every person walking the by lanes. You can read their minds, hear their inner voices as they think and not the way you feel they think. It gives the power to the reader to live within each of the character and knowing them without the protagonist’s help.

There are no assumptions, no detective work in the plot - just thoughts - carved by the miniaturist, spoken by the characters, encrypted by the author. It lets you go deep into a person’s skin, read a confused mind - fear of immorality, guilt, jealousy and every possible human emotion - and the way they compromise their feelings and follow the stimuli.

There is more to the book than self-narration, of course it is not even half-read yet. Love, lust, terror, truth, pain, blindness, jealousy, murder and even death - every aspect of human life is woven in the miniature. A seemingly micro-level work holds the power to capture the larger aspects human-life.

Posted here: http://sequesteredwords.wordpress.com/2007/04/10/my-name-is-red-and-self-narration/