You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked and you say, “Who is that man?”
You try so hard but you don’t understand
Just what you will say when you get home
Because something is happening here
but you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

Okok, that is a bit of an exaggeration, Bob Dylan’s Ballad of the Thin Man does not entirely apply here. There are some books that feel like they have an emotional core that my experiences do not quite allow me to relate to, or more precisely that I cannot not relate to in the intended way. V. S. Naipul’s The Mimic Men, Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her and to a lesser extent Arundhiti Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah come to mind; while I may enjoy these books, parts of them remain inaccessible to me.

My Name Is Red does not have that same inaccessibility - the plot, emotional journeys taken, some love and some murder, are all fairly universal, or at least become so after being beheld at the historical distance that it is. Instead what made this book more difficult is the cultural context whose canon is so unknown to me. Frustratingly, I can only blame this on my personal ignorances. Constantly throughout are references to the Book of Souls, Book of Kings, Tall Hasan and Hüsrev and Shirin, even names like Samarkand and Tamerlane and Suleyman the Magnificent that I recall as taking up half a paragraph in a history course a decade ago. These names are woven into stories, allegories which I can identify as such while struggling to find their referent, to grasp the underlying meaning and purpose. A man is murdered, three suspects tell three different tales each, relating to their philosophical interpretations of the purpose of art, and I become lost in the sea of names, struggling to differentiate the three.

Outside of this, the book is quite satisfying. The bejeweled, intricate and colorful prose from a perspective both distant and somewhat flattening echoes nothing else but the miniature paintings that are the core of the story - I think. It is not clear to me whether my aesthetic interpretation of the prose accurately reflects an intentional parallelism with the content, or merely comes about as a result of the content. I’m not sure it matters either way: the prose is good.

And the story is good too, burbling up with shifting frame of storytelling and other stories in a style reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, reflecting on art and its production. And then in its murder-mystery-entangled-in-art-and-history, reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and (no aspersion’s intended) Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code - a beautiful trail of logic and analysis coming down to the nostrils of a heretically drawn horse.