My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

            In Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, a murderer stalks the streets of Istanbul. However, while illuminators face grave danger from a man that kills without prejudice, their art suffers under an even greater peril, the threat of Venetian portraiture. The techniques of the European masters inspire jealousy and awe in some stricken Ottoman illuminators, and give rise to fear of obsolescence in others. But the forms are fundamentally different. While Venetian portraiture concerns itself with showing convincingly how things appear in reality, Islamic miniature depicts the pure form of items, people, and ideas. While Venetian techniques perspective techniques reproduce human vision, Ottoman visual style illuminates stories from the perspective of Allah. From this lofty point of view, subjects are revealed in their most perfect form.
             The word "reveal" is chosen intentionally. While Venetian masters use their talent to recreate a figure with paint on canvas, a master illuminator's brush operates more like a finger scraping frost off a window; they allow the viewer to move past what normal human perception would allow, and see things as they really are. The figures they depict existed before books portrayed them, and will persist eternally. They are entities in their own right. This is heavily suggested by the multiple chapters narrated by illuminated figures like Tree, Dog, and Coin, but it is never made clearer than in the opening paragraph of a chapter narrated by the book's titular character, the color Red.
             Red establishes its uniqueness before the reader even reaches the main body of the text. The chapter title, "I am Red," gives the color individuality and character. At first the phrase seems similar to the book title, but upon closer investigation we can see that the subtle difference between "My Name is" and "I am" causes the two phrases to operate in meaningfully different ways.