SOURCE: Kirsch, Adam. “Getting Real.” Washington Post Book World 31, no. 35 (2 September 2001): 13.

In the following review, Kirsch criticizes My Name Is Red for failing to adequately convey the richness and complexity of artistic creation.

Orhan Pamuk is the most popular living Turkish writer, both at home, where his novels are unprecedented bestsellers, and in the West, where he has earned comparisons to Borges and Calvino. As those names suggest, his books can seem postmodernist, dealing as they do in unreliable narrators and shifting identities. But in My Name Is Red, his latest novel, the flatness of the characters, the multiplicity of plots and narrators, the highly self-conscious reference to myth and archetype, are sponsored by Pamuk's antique Turkish and Arabic sources; he is not so much rebelling against European realism as detouring around it.

In summary, My Name Is Red sounds like a familiar kind of book—a murder...