Simplicity is a very complex concept. ‘Keep it simple’ is good advice, but not if it results in a simplification of content or a watering down of ideas to the patronizingly stupid. Simplicity, when it indicates an elegant and succinct description of complex material, is what writers often seek but rarely achieve. For some truly great artists, quality is seemingly effortless. This is the quality and power of illusion.

An impressive example of this complexity of the seemingly simple can be found in Orhan Pamuk’s The Red Haired Woman. So much fiction takes the form of a biography that there is no need to list examples. These life stories take many forms, from chronological sequence to end-of-life recollection, from hazy memories to self-analysis. Very few would follow the highly original form of Orhan Pamuk’s novel and, more importantly, the reader of this book will not be aware of its experimental originality until the very end, perhaps even some time after finishing the book.

The Red-haired Woman is in the three well-differentiated parts. The novel’s main character is named Cem, although the narrative is well developed before we even notice any names. In the first part, Cem is still in school. Her impoverished family can’t scrape together the money to allow the boy to attend a crammer to help him with his studies, so she takes a vacation job for a well digger. We are aware, though never explicitly, that there are complexities in these family relationships. We are in Istanbul, where we usually find Orhan Pamuk, but thirty years ago when the city had not expanded to its current size and perhaps where certain things were not openly discussed.

Mahmut, master of his trade, is the digger of wells. He and his two helpers start work on a sloping piece of land in Å ngÅ’ren which, at the time, is a quiet little place beyond the city limits, where everyone knows everyone else’s business and where modernization is on the horizon Well diggers go about their business during the day and retire to a bar in town most nights. There is a theater group in town, and one of its members is a red-haired thirtysomething. Cem becomes obsessed with her beauty and, as is often the case in Orhan Pamuk’s fiction, the feeling becomes overwhelming for this impressionable young man. Stubbornly digging the well fails, Cem prolongs his stay in ÅngÅ’ren. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the encounters with the red-haired woman go a long way in educating the young man. Eventually, the worker leaves the project under strange circumstances before it is finished to return to his home in Istanbul, leaving behind things in Å ngÅ’ren that will continue to haunt him.

In the second part of The Red-Haired Woman, we meet Cem again, but now he’s an adult, college-educated, so the crammer who paid for the plow did at least one good thing, and he’s well on his way to becoming a rich promoter. real estate, an important but perhaps not a major force in the modernization of Istanbul. He is aware of much that he left behind in Å ngÅ’ren, as the summer of digging wells has left many indelible memories. These are highlighted when a contract to rebuild parts of the area lands on his desk and Cem decides to proceed with the project. Therefore, he needs to revisit the area and retrace the only partially recognizable paths he trod during that personally influential summer some three decades earlier. Some of the characters he met those years ago are still around. Some of the issues that motivated the dissidence are still in the spotlight.

The third part of the book is written after Cem’s relationship with Å ngÅ’ren ended. It is in this section that we hear a different perspective on Cem’s life and revealing the details of her in a review would devalue the impact of the book. Suffice it to say that from this different perspective, Cem’s actions and memories take on a completely different character. We knew all along that there were potential consequences, but Cem never thought to find out what might have happened. But reality catches up and resentment grows when it is ignored. Every experience is particular, and we should all be aware that individual perspectives are just that, individual. It is the consequences that are shared.

But Orhan Pamuk’s Red-Haired Woman is much more than an individual fictional life. The well diggers, visiting the bar in Å ngÅ’ren, chat about many things. Repeatedly, two stories are examined from different points of view. Oedipus, a man sentenced to murder his father and marry his mother, is one. One perspective explored by the pit diggers is that Oedipus is unaware of the curse that runs his life, and that even as he consciously tries to avoid the shackles of him, the power of fate further condemns him to the confines of death. the. The second story, by Shahmaneh, features Sohrab and Rostam. Almost counterbalancing Oedipus, this story has a father killing his son. And it is these themes, predetermination, destiny, paternal, maternal and filial, and finally impotence that form the intellectual backbone of the work. Cem, the real estate developer, is determined to modernize the place that so influenced his personality, his way of seeing life and his future. But the place will reassert itself in his life in a different, totally unforeseen way, which Cem himself created, but which he cannot influence or control. The parricide and filicide of the stories that haunted Cem in his youth are finally confronted in this brilliant book.

The Red-haired Woman, this accessible and apparently simple short novel, thus develops intellectual and philosophical dimensions, mixed with its constant background of political identity and economic change. Only at the end does the reader realize the complexity of his themes and the skill with which Orhan Pamuk fuses these seemingly disparate ideas into a biographical whole called Cem, the main character through whom we experience a complete view of the world. And yet, reading this book, from cover to cover, is always easy. The style is transparent and the reality is almost tangible. It is at once personal and general, mundane and ontological, comfortingly simple and yet emotionally entangled and challenging. It is a perfect example of how simplicity is at the heart of the complex. Or was it the other way around?