The Red-Haired Woman
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4.0 • 7 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
‘‘She was looking at me as if she knew everything about me, as if she’d known me for years.’
From the Nobel Prize winner and bestselling author Orhan Pamuk is The Red-Haired Woman, a fable of fathers and sons and the desires that come between them.
On the outskirts of a town thirty miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, the two develop a filial bond neither has known before and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world. But in the nearby town, the boy finds an irresistible diversion: the Red-Haired Woman, an alluring member of a traveling theatre company.
When the young man’s wildest dream is realised, in his distraction a horrible accident befalls the well digger and the boy flees, returning to Istanbul. Only years later will he discover whether he was in fact responsible for his master’s death and who the red-headed enchantress was.
The Red-Haired Woman is a beguiling mystery tale of family and romance, of east and west, tradition and modernity, by one of the great storytellers of our time.
Translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap.
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PRAISE FOR ORHAN PAMUK
'Pamuk’s power continues to lie not with the theatrical but with the quiet and the slow.' Publishers Weekly
'No book by this skillful and ambitious writer is without interest.' Kirkus Reviews
'Orhan Pamuk's brilliance shines.' Sydney Morning Herald
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cem was a teenager when, in the mid-1980s, his father left him and his mother and the pharmacy that had supported their family in the Besiktas neighborhood of Istanbul. He soon takes work as an apprentice to a well digger, Master Mahut, and the two are hired to find water on a large, empty plot of land on the outskirts of the city. Master Mahut "knew himself to be among the last practitioners of an art that had existed for thousands of years. So he approached his work with humility." Over the course of a slow, hot summer the events of which will haunt Cem forever that work and that humility create the tension, the boredom, and the bond between the older man and the younger one. Cem catches the eye of an older, red-headed woman in town, and the image of her consumes him. Meanwhile, building a windlass and burrowing deeper into the earth, Cem and Master Mahut swap stories. Cem previously worked in a bookstore, which fueled his reveries about one day becoming a writer and introduced him to seminal stories of fathers and sons, like those of Oedipus, Rostam and Sohrab, and Hamlet. While Cem's consideration of these stories initially drives the novel, by the end of the book, the contemplation of fatherly themes feels heavy-handed and the story devolves into predictable, almost melodramatic myth. Pamuk's power continues to lie not with the theatrical but with the quiet and the slow.
