If I tired of the didactic, I could not have stayed married to a grade one teacher for 44 years.

Complaining about about the Nobel literature prize laureate’s instructive tone would be like bitching about Hemingway’s brevity.

There’s so much more to it.

Introduced to Pamuk through his even more educational “The Museum of Innocence” I find “The Red-Haired Woman” comparatively relaxed.

Sure he uses a central character Master Mahmut’s well-digger’s shovel to lay on the lessons.

But what instruction it is: the complex and sometime lethal father son relationship through the filter of Sophocles’ Oedipus, the Biblical and Koranic Abraham and Isaac and Sohrab from ancient Persian writer Ferdowski’s Shahnameh.

The story has a remarkable twist explained in the final narrative by the red-haired actress who takes over from Cem, whom she transformed from boy to guilt-ridden man three decades earlier.

The attraction of this and other Pamuk works is that no-one can relate the convoluted mix of modern and tradition in today’s Turkey with the love and skill that he displays. 

No-one can better describe aching fixation with a loved-one

Under the Attaturk-eclipsing  presidency of Recep  Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey undergoes panful  quotidien changes before our very eyes.

Pamuk’s admirable story-telling provides a touchstone of  what is disappearing.

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