My Name Is Red

⚖The case for it

Fault admitted: the mystery idles while the master painters hold forth on their craft at exhausting length. Notice, though, whose voice you are hearing. Pamuk hands the telling to a crowd of speakers, each certain his own eye is the true one, so the pull becomes whose account you trust from page to page. Even a coin, a dog, and a tree get chapters in their own words, and the ideas those voices carry hold the book together long after the plot stalls.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

As a mystery it dawdles. Whodunit matters less to Pamuk than the theory of Ottoman miniature painting, which the master miniaturists expound in long, similar speeches circling style, signature, and blindness, several rounds each. The middle two hundred pages are a seminar with a corpse in the corner, and the Black-Shekure courtship generates remarkably little heat for all its letters.

— the honest librarian