This account is cleverly contrasted with that of Oedipus. The Shahnameh story first appears in Pamuk’s Ottoman historical novel My Name Is Red (Knopf, 2001) as one of the canonical eastern tales that miniaturists depicted, particularly the moment of father Rostam’s realization that he’s killed his son Sohrab. Pamuk has previously alluded to both myths in his fiction, which represent tropes of East/West encounter. But The Red-Haired Woman, though it engages father-and-son conflict, is, importantly, a woman’s story. This is what Pamuk intends as he skillfully intermingles textual traditions and historical time periods, establishing the trademark intertextuality and intertemporality of his fiction. The myths can be read as generational allegories about tradition and modernity, the East/West conflict, Islam and secularism, and even socialism and capitalism. The two dominant and competing myths come from ancient Greece and Persia (Greece and Iran today are Turkey’s Western and Eastern neighbors): the Oedipal myth from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, where son unknowingly kills father, and the legend of Rostam and Sohrab from Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, where father unknowingly kills son. COULD A CONTEMPORARY STORY of love and vengeance set in Turkey have its roots in ancient myths of patricide and filicide? This is what Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk convincingly contends in his 10th and latest novel, The Red-Haired Woman.
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