Well of sorrows

The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity — ostensibly by a narrator who knows that he is not a writer, but only a building contractor. Polyphonic narratives are replaced by a powerful, engaging clarity. This simplicity is the novel’s greatest strength, yet at certain points seems as if it might become a weakness.

<br> Part one, which takes up the first half of the book, is superbly concentrated. It describes one summer in 1986 in the life of Cem, a middle-class 16-year-old boy who takes on a summer job 30 miles outside Istanbul to earn money before cramming for university entrance exams. Ignoring his mother’s misgivings — his father, a pharmacist and political dissident, has gone missing — he joins a master well-digger as his apprentice.

The episode evokes the disturbing intensity of adolescent experience. Cem’s unformed character shimmers in the disorientating heat: he is capable of being both frightened and foolhardy, both meek and rebellious.