The Red-Haired Woman
-
-
4.0 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- £6.49
-
- £6.49
Publisher Description
** ORDER NIGHTS OF PLAGUE, THE NEW NOVEL FROM ORHAN PAMUK **
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
'Saturated with sympathy and sense of place, the book charts a boy's journey into manhood and Turkey's into irreversible change' Financial Times
'An ending that makes you immediately start the book all over again.' The Sunday Times
'Enchanting.' Wall Street Journal
'Many years have now gone by, and jealousy compels me to keep her name a secret, even from my readers. But I must provide a full and truthful account of what happened.'
A studious young man spends a summer helping a master well-digger search for water on a barren plain.
As the two struggle in the summer heat, they develop a filial bond neither has known before. In the nearby town where they spend their evenings, a travelling theatre group has come to stay. The young man is fascinated by the Red-Haired Woman, an alluring member of the troupe, and their brief but intense love affair drives everything else from his mind.
But in his distraction, a horrible accident occurs, which will haunt him for thirty years. Until he decides to track down the Red-Haired Woman and finally understand the fallout from that unforgettable summer . . .
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.
