Seeing Red

Back in late November I made a spectacularly false start on Orphan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, to the extent that I didn't even bother to pack it on the plane back to Manchester for my December reading. How wrong can a reader be? Well, spectacularly, I suppose.

I read most of it in East Shore Hospital in the later part of last week, completing it on Monday night. It ranks amongst the very greatest of the novels I've ever experienced. I don't know how good the translation itself is, but I kept forgetting it was translated, so that in itself suggests we're talking about something quite remarkable on that front alone.

The only excuse I can think of for failing so miserably in November is that the contrast with Pamuk's superb Snow was so great it left me discombobulated. Think of that. A writer capable of masterpieces so unlike each other, offering such different yet related worlds, that it's temporarily baffling.

I'm now, of course, eyeing other novels on Pamuk's resume, but I think I need a break. His work is just so overwhelming you kind of need to step aside for a while, a short one anyway.

In the meantime I thought I'd stick with fiction in translation, so it's on with my cheap copy of One Hundred Years Of Solitude. A re-read is always cleansing and usually illuminating. I think this is the same translation I read in the Picador edition I lost a few years back. At least a couple of the early sentences have an eerie quality of total reminiscence about them.