The red-haired woman

Review by New York Times Review

RED FAMINE: Stalin's War on Ukraine, by Anne Applebaum. (Doubleday, $35.) In this richly detailed account of the 20th-century Soviet republic's great famine, the author shines a light on Stalinist crimes that still resonate today in the ongoing tension between Russia and Ukraine. THE RED-HAIRED WOMAN, by Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Ekin Oklap. (Knopf, $27.95.) In his latest novel, Pamuk traces the disastrous effects of a Turkish teenager's brief encounter with a married actress, elaborating on his fiction's familiar themes: the tensions between East and West, traditional habits and modern life, the secular and the sacred. THE FUTURE IS HISTORY: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen. (Riverhead, $28.) Gessen, a longtime critic of Vladimir Putin, tells the story of modern Russia through the eyes of seven individuals who found that politics was a force none of them could escape. RIOT DAYS, by Maria Alyokhina. (Metropolitan, paper, $17.) This fragmentary prison memoir by a member of Pussy Riot combines dark humor and protest as it describes the author's 18 months inside a Russian prison. Alyokhina shows that refusal to submit to injustice can be enough to reactivate the rule of law. THE MEANING OF BELIEF: Religion From an Atheist's Point of View, by Tim Crane. (Harvard University, $24.95.) This lucid and thoughtful examination by an atheist philosopher resists the notion that religion is simply bad science amplified by arbitrary injunctions. Unlike the more combative atheists who caricature belief, Crane strives to offer a more accurate picture of religion to his fellow unbelievers. THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN ASHBY, by Cherise Wolas. (Flatiron Books, $27.99.) The eponymous heroine of this ambitious debut novel starts a novel in secret, after setting aside a promising writing career to raise a family. FOR TWO THOUSAND YEARS, by Mihail Sebastian. Translated by Philip 0 Ceallaigh. (Other Press, paper, $16.95.) This classic Romanian novel, originally published in 1934, centers on the anti-Semitism that flourished just before the country's turn to fascism, pitting the local against the global. LENIN: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror, by Victor Sebestyen. (Pantheon, $35.) Sebestyen has managed to produce a first-rate thriller by detailing the cynicism and murderous ambition of the founder of the Soviet Union. STALIN: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, by Stephen Kotkin. (Penguin Press, $40.) This second volume of a projected three-volume life assiduously delves into Stalin's personal life even as it places him within the trajectory of Soviet history. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Nobel laureate Pamuk's (A Strangeness in My Mind, 2015) latest, a contemporary parable about a well digger, his apprentice, and a mysterious stage actress draws upon ancient myths to peer deeply into the enigma of fathers and sons, even as it questions the relevance of such thinking in today's world. Young Cem stands atop the well shaft, hauling up buckets of silt and rocks, while Master Mahmut practices his craft below. With stern guidance and cryptic tales, Master Mahmut has become a father to the bookish young man. But the well in rural Öngören is 10 stories deep and still dry, and Cem is increasingly distracted by thoughts of a red-haired woman's alluring smile. Tragedy strikes, the red-haired woman vanishes, Öngören is swallowed up by sprawling Istanbul, and modern drilling technology replaces the dangerous old methods. Young Cem is fascinated by Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, but with age he is drawn to the tragedy of Rostan and Sohrab, a Persian inversion in which a father is fated to kill his son. Pamuk masterfully contrasts East with West, tradition with modernity, the power of fables with the inevitability of realism. Can we have our myths but be spared their consequences? As usual, Pamuk handles weighty material deftly, and the result is both puzzling and beautiful. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Literary giant Pamuk is a must-read, and this intriguing tale has special allure.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Cem was a teenager when, in the mid-1980s, his father left him and his mother and the pharmacy that had supported their family in the Besiktas neighborhood of Istanbul. He soon takes work as an apprentice to a well digger, Master Mahut, and the two are hired to find water on a large, empty plot of land on the outskirts of the city. Master Mahut "knew himself to be among the last practitioners of an art that had existed for thousands of years. So he approached his work with humility." Over the course of a slow, hot summer-the events of which will haunt Cem forever-that work and that humility create the tension, the boredom, and the bond between the older man and the younger one. Cem catches the eye of an older, red-headed woman in town, and the image of her consumes him. Meanwhile, building a windlass and burrowing deeper into the earth, Cem and Master Mahut swap stories. Cem previously worked in a bookstore, which fueled his reveries about one day becoming a writer and introduced him to seminal stories of fathers and sons, like those of Oedipus, Rostam and Sohrab, and Hamlet. While Cem's consideration of these stories initially drives the novel, by the end of the book, the contemplation of fatherly themes feels heavy-handed and the story devolves into predictable, almost melodramatic myth. Pamuk's power continues to lie not with the theatrical but with the quiet and the slow. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Winner of the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his unflinching and exhaustive ruminations on Istanbul in such books as Snow and My Name Is Red, Pamuk's tenth novel is once again set in his beloved Turkey. The story follows Chem, a boy who finds both an employer and a father figure in Master Mahmut, a local well digger. As they move across the countryside, excavating the hidden waterways underneath the Turkish landscape, they also trade stories and myths about civilization. Despite his age, Chem has a sexual awakening with the mysterious redhead of the title whose hair is cut short by an ethical choice that will haunt him into adulthood. After acquiring both wealth and a fascination with tales of patricide and filicide, Chem is drawn back to the land and wells of his youth. Reality and myth intertwine to create a twist that will send readers back to page one with hurried excitement. VERDICT As much a meditation on the inescapability of fate as a classic murder mystery, this novel will both appease fans of Pamuk's bibliography and delight first-time readers. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.]-Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A youthful misdeed prompts lifelong guilt in the protagonist of this brooding novel about fathers, sons, and the power of stories by Nobel laureate Pamuk (A Strangeness in My Mind, 2015, etc.).In the summer of 1986, high school student Cem elik is working for a well digger on the outskirts of Istanbul. The work is backbreaking, but Cem forms a bond with Master Mahmut, telling us rather too many times that the well digger fills the void left by his vanished father, a left-wing militant who later turns out to be not in jail but with another woman. Fathers and sons just can't get it right in this somber tale crammed with references to the story of Oedipus and its linked opposite, the Iranian national epic Shahnameh, in which a father unknowingly kills his son. Cem becomes obsessed with the Shahnameh after he accidentally drops a heavy bucket onto Master Mahmut at the bottom of a well, panics, and leaves town without telling anyone. As the story moves through several decades in Cem's adult life, he hardly gives a thought to the red-haired actress who improbably slept with her teenage admirer after a performance at a tent theater near the well sitebut that will turn out to be a fatal mistake. The novel has Pamuk's customary wealth of atmospheric detail about his beloved Istanbul and the perennial conflict in Turkish politics (and in the Turkish soul) between secular modernism and traditional values. It's also ham-fistedly obvious and relentlessly overdetermined; Pamuk seems to be trying for the stark authority of folklore and myth, but the novel's realistic trappings don't comfortably accommodate this intent. There are some bright spots: Pamuk paints a moving portrait of Cem's childless marriage, and a searing final monologue by the red-haired woman very nearly redeems the flawed narrative that precedes it. A disappointment, though no book by this skillful and ambitious writer is without interest. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 I had wanted to be a writer. But after the events I am about to describe, I studied engineering geology and became a building contractor. Even so, readers shouldn't conclude from my telling the story now that it is over, that I've put it all behind me. The more I remember, the deeper I fall into it. Perhaps you, too, will follow, lured by the enigma of fathers and sons. In 1984, we lived in a small apartment deep in Beşiktaş, near the nineteenth-­century Ottoman Ihlamur Palace. My father had a little pharmacy called Hayat, meaning "Life." Once a week, it stayed open all night, and my father took the late shift. On those evenings, I'd bring him his dinner. I liked to spend time there, breathing in the medicinal smells while my father, a tall, slim, handsome figure, had his meal by the cash register. Almost thirty years have passed, but even at forty-­five I still love the smell of those old pharmacies lined with wooden drawers and cupboards. The Life Pharmacy wasn't particularly busy. My father would while away the nights with one of those small portable television sets so popular back then. Sometimes his leftist friends would stop by, and I would arrive to find them talking in low tones. They always changed the subject at the sight of me, remarking how I was just as handsome and charming as he was, asking what year was I in, whether I liked school, what I wanted to be when I grew up. My father was obviously uncomfortable when I ran into his political friends, so I never stayed too long when they dropped by. At the first chance, I'd take his empty dinner box and walk back home under the plane trees and the pale streetlights. I learned never to tell my mother about seeing Father's leftist friends at the shop. That would only get her angry at the lot of them and worried that my father might be getting into trouble and about to disappear once again. But my parents' quarrels were not all about politics. They used to go through long periods when they barely said a word to each other. Perhaps they didn't love each other. I suspected that my father was attracted to other women, and that many other women were attracted to him. Sometimes my mother hinted openly at the existence of a mistress, so that even I understood. My parents' squabbles were so upsetting that I willed myself not to remember or think about them. It was an ordinary autumn evening the last time I brought my father his dinner at the pharmacy. I had just started high school. I found him watching the news on TV. While he ate at the counter, I served a customer who needed aspirin, and another who bought vitamin-­C tablets and antibiotics. I put the money in the old-­fashioned till, whose drawer shut with a pleasant tinkling sound. After he'd eaten, on the way out, I took one last glance back at my father; he smiled and waved at me, standing in the doorway. He never came home the next morning. My mother told me when I got back from school that afternoon, her eyes still puffy from crying. Had my father been picked up at the pharmacy and taken to the Political Affairs Bureau? They'd have tortured him there with bastinado and electric shocks. It wouldn't have been the first time. Years ago, soldiers had first come for him the night after the military coup. My mother was devastated. She told me that my father was a hero, that I should be proud of him; and until his release, she took over the night shifts, together with his assistant Macit. Sometimes I'd wear Macit's white coat myself--­though at the time I was of course planning to be a scientist when I grew up, as my father had wanted, not some pharmacist's assistant. When, however, my father again disappeared seven or eight years after that, it was different. Upon his return, after almost two years, my mother seemed not to care that he had been taken away, interrogated, and tortured. She was furious at him. "What did he expect?" she said. So, too, after my father's final disappearance, my mother seemed resigned, made no mention of Macit, or of what was to become of the pharmacy. That's what made me think that my father didn't always disappear for the same reason. But what is this thing we call thinking, anyway? By then I'd already learned that thoughts sometimes come to us in words, and sometimes in images. There were some thoughts--­such as a memory of running under the pouring rain, and how it felt--­that I couldn't even begin to put into words . . . Yet their image was clear in my mind. And there were other things that I could describe in words but were otherwise impossible to visualize: black light, my mother's death, infinity. Perhaps I was still a child, and so able to dispel unwanted thoughts. But sometimes it was the other way around, and I would find myself with an image or a word that I could not get out of my head. My father didn't contact us for a long time. There were moments when I couldn't remember what he looked like. It felt as if the lights had gone out and everything around me had vanished. One night, I walked alone toward the Ihlamur Palace. The Life Pharmacy was bolted shut with a heavy black padlock, as if closed forever. A mist drifted out from the gardens of the palace. Sometime later, my mother told me that neither my father's money nor the pharmacy was enough for us to live on. I myself had no expenses other than movie tickets, kebab sandwiches, and comic books. I used to walk to Kabataş High School and back. I had friends who trafficked in used comic books for sale or loan. But I didn't want to spend my weekends as they did, waiting patiently for customers in the backstreets and by the back doors of cinemas in Beşiktaş. I spent the summer of 1985 helping out at a bookstore called Deniz on the main shopping street of Beşiktaş. My job consisted mainly of chasing off would-­be thieves, most of whom were students. Every now and then, Mr. Deniz would drive with me to Çağaloğlu to replenish his stock. The boss grew fond of me: he noticed how I remembered all the authors' and publishers' names, and he let me borrow his books to read at home. I read a lot that summer: children's books, Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, Edgar Allan Poe's stories, poetry books, historical novels about the adventures of Ottoman warriors, and a book about dreams. One passage in this latter book would change my life forever. When Mr. Deniz's writer friends came by the shop, the boss started introducing me as an aspiring writer. By then I had started harboring this dream and foolishly confessed it to him in an unguarded moment. Under his influence, I soon began to take it seriously. Excerpted from The Red-Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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