REDHAIRED WOMAN

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.

Editorial Reviews

Allusive, enchanting and perfectly controlled … [Pamuk] is a weaver of tales par excellence.“ –The Wall Street Journal

„A parable about present-day Turkey. . . . It blends the close observation of details with the broad brushstrokes usually associated with myth-making and fables.“ –The Guardian

„An amazingly gifted writer.“ –NPR

„Beautifully written . . . a thoughtful consideration of Western and Eastern myths of fathers and sons, and the limits of free will.“ –Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

„Saturated with sympathy and sense of place. . . . This book sings with the power of diverse remembrance.“ –Financial Times

„Extraordinary. . . . The reader feel[s] as if they’ve emerged from the depths of a well into sudden and dazzling light.“ –The Observer

„Pamuk traces the disastrous effects of a Turkish teenager’s brief encounter with a married actress, elaborating on his fiction’s familiar themes: the tensions between East and West, traditional habits and modern life, the secular and the sacred.“ –The New York Times Book Review

„Story-telling at its finest. . . . There is nothing more rewarding than reading a work by a master craftsman at the top of his game, nothing else like it at all.“ –Counterpunch

„An ending that makes you immediately start the book all over again speaks for itself.“ –The Sunday Times (London)

„Quietly beautiful.“ –1843

„It can fall to fiction to remind us of what has come before . . . a tale of slow-reveal secrets [and] love.“ –Vogue

„The Red-Haired Woman drapes Turkey’s political situation in the language of myth, suggesting that the ancient pairs of Oedipus and Laius and Sohrab and Rostam may have company in the present.“ –The New Yorker

„Engaging and deftly told. . . . Pamuk’s postmodern puzzles are meticulous as ever.“ –Bookforum

„Absorbing . . . Pamuk’s intense political parable tells us much about the plight of Turkey today.“ –Evening Standard (London)

„The allure that Pamuk evokes in this haunting tale of hardship, unrequited love, guilt, danger, dreams fulfilled and dreams destroyed is the stuff that Eastern literature tragedies are made of.“ –Bookreporter

„Pared down, written with deliberate simplicity. . . . Polyphonic narratives are replaced by a powerful, engaging clarity.“ –The Spectator

„Beautiful. . . . Pamuk masterfully contrasts East with West, tradition with modernity, the power of fables with the inevitability of realism.“ –Booklist (starred review)
– From the Publisher

06/19/2017
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. (Aug.)
– Publishers Weekly

*06/01/2017
Winner of the Nobel Prize in 2006 for his unflinching and exhaustive ruminations on Istanbul in such books as Snow and My Name Is Red, Pamuk’s tenth novel is once again set in his beloved Turkey. The story follows Chem, a boy who finds both an employer and a father figure in Master Mahmut, a local well digger. As they move across the countryside, excavating the hidden waterways underneath the Turkish landscape, they also trade stories and myths about civilization. Despite his age, Chem has a sexual awakening with the mysterious redhead of the title whose hair is cut short by an ethical choice that will haunt him into adulthood. After acquiring both wealth and a fascination with tales of patricide and filicide, Chem is drawn back to the land and wells of his youth. Reality and myth intertwine to create a twist that will send readers back to page one with hurried excitement. VERDICT As much a meditation on the inescapability of fate as a classic murder mystery, this novel will both appease fans of Pamuk’s bibliography and delight first-time readers. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.]–Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM
– Library Journal

2017-06-06
A youthful misdeed prompts lifelong guilt in the protagonist of this brooding novel about fathers, sons, and the power of stories by Nobel laureate Pamuk (A Strangeness in My Mind, 2015, etc.).In the summer of 1986, high school student Cem Çelik is working for a well digger on the outskirts of Istanbul. The work is backbreaking, but Cem forms a bond with Master Mahmut, telling us rather too many times that the well digger fills the void left by his vanished father, a left-wing militant who later turns out to be not in jail but with another woman. Fathers and sons just can’t get it right in this somber tale crammed with references to the story of Oedipus and its linked opposite, the Iranian national epic Shahnameh, in which a father unknowingly kills his son. Cem becomes obsessed with the Shahnameh after he accidentally drops a heavy bucket onto Master Mahmut at the bottom of a well, panics, and leaves town without telling anyone. As the story moves through several decades in Cem’s adult life, he hardly gives a thought to the red-haired actress who improbably slept with her teenage admirer after a performance at a tent theater near the well site–but that will turn out to be a fatal mistake. The novel has Pamuk’s customary wealth of atmospheric detail about his beloved Istanbul and the perennial conflict in Turkish politics (and in the Turkish soul) between secular modernism and traditional values. It’s also ham-fistedly obvious and relentlessly overdetermined; Pamuk seems to be trying for the stark authority of folklore and myth, but the novel’s realistic trappings don’t comfortably accommodate this intent. There are some bright spots: Pamuk paints a moving portrait of Cem’s childless marriage, and a searing final monologue by the red-haired woman very nearly redeems the flawed narrative that precedes it. A disappointment, though no book by this skillful and ambitious writer is without interest.
– Kirkus Reviews