3.5
The Red-Haired Woman
ByPublisher Description
From the Nobel Prize winner and bestselling author of Snow and My Name Is Red, a fable of fathers and sons and the desires that come between them.
On the outskirts of a town thirty miles from Istanbul, a well digger and his young apprentice—a boy fleeing the confines of his middle class home—are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, they develop a filial bond neither has known before. But when the boy catches the eye of a stunning red-haired woman who seems as fascinated by him as he is by her, the events that ensue change the young man’s life forever and haunt him for the next thirty years. A tale of family and romance, of youth and old age, of tradition and modernity, The Red-Haired Woman is a beguiling mystery from one of the great storytellers of our time.
On the outskirts of a town thirty miles from Istanbul, a well digger and his young apprentice—a boy fleeing the confines of his middle class home—are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, they develop a filial bond neither has known before. But when the boy catches the eye of a stunning red-haired woman who seems as fascinated by him as he is by her, the events that ensue change the young man’s life forever and haunt him for the next thirty years. A tale of family and romance, of youth and old age, of tradition and modernity, The Red-Haired Woman is a beguiling mystery from one of the great storytellers of our time.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Red-Haired Woman Reviews
3.5
“A middle-class boy from Istanbul, whose father keeps disappearing into police custody for his leftist politics, spends a summer helping a well-digger search for water on a barren plain outside a town called Öngören. What starts as manual labor becomes something closer to an apprenticeship in fatherhood — the boy finds in his Master the steadiness his own father never gave him.
Pamuk uses this bond to open up a much bigger structure: the novel is really an extended meditation on two competing myths, Oedipus and the Persian tale of Rostam and Sohrab — one where a son unknowingly kills his father, the other where a father unknowingly kills his son. Cem spends his adult life haunted by the first myth, convinced he's re-enacting it, only for his own story to fulfill the second in ways he doesn't see coming. It's a genuinely clever double-bind, and Pamuk lets it unfold patiently rather than announcing it.
The digging itself becomes a recurring metaphor — Cem later goes into construction and property development, and Istanbul's own transformation, all that drilling and rebuilding of the ground, mirrors his inability to leave the past buried. The city's wounds and his own start to feel like the same wound.
I found this very readable and genuinely gripping — the prose is spare and unshowy, and the plot unfolds methodically rather than cleverly for its own sake. A couple of things didn't fully land for me: Cem's willingness to keep following one particular figure late in the book, despite clear signs not everyone around him was on board, felt thinner than it should have. And the title character herself gets fairly limited sympathy on the page — the novel gives us Cem's version of her first and at length, and her own section, when it finally arrives, feels comparatively thin. It's hard to tell whether that's Pamuk deliberately showing the limits of his male narrators' view of her, or the book's own blind spot.
Still, a smart, tightly constructed novel that trusts its central myths to do real work rather than just decorate the plot.”“Things that we manifested happen so we have to being careful by saying something . As our elders say, if you say something forty times, it will come true. This idiom offers an inevitable of fate 🤐”
“Far from being a light summer read, it is instead a cautionary tale about obsession. Each part of its ingenious structure plays tricks on the reader, drawing them steadily toward a point of no return.”
“To moja trzecia książka tego autora i myślę, że to część mojego problemu z Rudowłosą. Schemat relacji romantycznych, choć chyba ciężko je tak nazwać, jest podobny i z kolejnym razem coraz trudniej przymknąć na to oko. I właśnie to zepsuło przyjemność z czytania, choć motyw świetny – nawiązanie do Edypa, Rustama i Sohraba, trudnych relacji (a w zasadzie niemalże braku) ojców z synami.
Wierzę, że gdybym przeczytała wcześniej tę książkę, doceniłabym ją bardziej.”
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