Orhan Pamuk’s redhead
Simplicity is a very complex concept. ‘Keep it simple’ is good advice, but not if it results in a simplification of content or a dilution of ideas towards the condescendingly stupid. Simplicity, when it indicates an elegant and succinct description of complex material, is what writers often look for, but rarely achieve. For some truly great artists, quality is seemingly effortless. This is the quality and power of illusion.
A stunning example of this complexity of the seemingly simple can be found in Orhan Pamuk’s The Red Haired Woman. So much fiction takes the form of a biography that it is not necessary to list examples. These life stories take many forms, from chronological sequence to end-of-life recollection, from confused recollection to self-analysis. Very few would follow the highly original form of Orhan Pamuk’s novel, and more importantly, the reader of this book will not be aware of its experimental originality until the very end, perhaps even some time after finishing the book.
The Red-Haired Woman is in three distinct parts. The novel’s main character is named Cem, though the narrative is well developed before we are aware of any names. In the first part, Cem is still at school. Her impoverished family can’t come up with the money to allow the boy to attend a crammer to help him with his studies, so she takes a holiday job working as a well digger. We are aware, though never explicitly, that there are complexities in these family relationships. We are in Istanbul, where we usually find Orhan Pamuk, but thirty years ago when the city had not expanded to its current extent and perhaps where certain things were not openly discussed.
Mahmut, master of his trade, is the well digger. He and his two helpers start working on a sloping piece of land in Å ngÅ’ren, which, at the time, is a quiet little place beyond the city limits, where everyone knows each other’s business and where modernization is on. on the horizon. The pit diggers do their work during the day and retire to a bar in town most nights. There is a theater group in town, and one of its members is a redheaded thirty-something. Cem becomes obsessed with her beauty and, as is often the case in Orhan Pamuk’s fiction, the feeling becomes overwhelming for this impressionable young man. Stubbornly, the digging of the well fails, and Cem prolongs his stay in Å ngÅ’ren. Perhaps unsurprisingly, encounters with the redheaded woman go a long way in educating the young man. Eventually, the worker leaves the project under strange circumstances before it is finished to return to his home in Istanbul, leaving things behind in Å ngÅ’ren that will continue to haunt him.
In the second part of The Red-Haired Woman, we meet Cem again, but he’s an adult now, college-educated, so the crammer who paid for the plow did at least one good thing, and is on his way to becoming a wealthy promoter. real estate, an important but perhaps not a major force in the modernization of Istanbul. He is aware of much of what he left behind in Å ngÅ’ren, as the summer of well-digging has left many lasting memories. These are highlighted when a contract to redevelop parts of the area hits his desk and Cem decides to proceed with the project. Therefore, he needs to revisit the area and retread the only partially recognizable paths he traveled during that personally influential summer some three decades earlier. Some of the characters he met those years ago are still around. Some of the issues that motivated the dissent are still in the spotlight.
The third part of the book is written after Cem’s relationship with Å ngÅ’ren ended. It is in this section that we hear a different perspective on Cem’s life and revealing the details of it in a review would devalue the impact of the book. Suffice it to say that from this different perspective, Cem’s actions and memories take on a completely different character. We knew all along that there were potential consequences, but Cem never thought to find out what might have happened. But reality catches up and resentment grows when ignored. All experience is particular, and we must all be aware that individual perspectives are just that, individual. It is the consequences that are shared.
But Orhan Pamuk’s The Red-Haired Woman is much more than an individual fictional life. The well diggers, visiting the bar in Å ngÅ’ren, chat about many things. Repeatedly, two stories are examined from different points of view. Oedipus, a man condemned to murder his father and marry his mother, is one. One perspective that the pit diggers explore is that Oedipus is unaware of the curse that rules his life, and that even as he consciously tries to avoid its shackles, the power of fate further condemns him to the confines of he. The second story, by Shahmaneh, features Sohrab and Rostam. Almost counterbalancing Oedipus, this story has a father killing his son. And it is these themes, predetermination, destiny, paternal, maternal and filial, and finally impotence that form the intellectual backbone of the work. Cem, the real estate developer, is determined to modernize the place that so influenced his personality, his way of seeing life and his future. But the place will assert itself in his life in a different, totally unforeseen way, one that Cem himself created, but which he cannot influence or control. The patricide and filicide stories that haunted Cem in his youth are finally collided in this brilliant book.
The red-haired woman, this short, accessible and apparently simple novel, thus develops intellectual and philosophical dimensions, mixed with its constant background of political identity and economic change. Only at the end does the reader realize the complexity of its themes and the skill with which Orhan Pamuk blends these seemingly disparate ideas into a biographical whole named Cem, the main character through whom we experience a complete vision of the world. And yet, reading this book, from beginning to end, is always easy. The style is transparent and the reality is almost tangible. It is at once personal and general, mundane and ontological, comfortingly simple and yet emotionally entangled and challenging. It is a perfect example of how simplicity is at the heart of the complex. Or was it the other way around?
