4. Words about words about words about words
As book critics, our writing is a writing on writing. We respond to an author’s metaphors with countermetaphors; we criticize or praise a story by telling a story about it. My favorite work is always that which allows itself to imaginatively intermingle with its source text — to somehow match or channel or negate the energy of the text that inspired it. It can be imitative, competitive or collaborative; it can mimic or mock or scramble or counterbalance the tone of the source. It can be subtle or overt. But it will always have this doubled-over, creative quality: one memorable writer responding, in memorable writing, to another.
– Sam Anderson, in The New York Times
Parmanu 
Oh, oh. First: reading your response to “My Name is Red” brought the book, and my own experience fo reading it, back so clearly that the only way *I* can respond is to read it again. Because that is what you have made me want to do. I loved “My Name is Red;” it’s my favorite of all of Pamuk’s wonderful books, each special in their own way, but this one — perhaps because I love Persian miniatures, perhaps because I was close friends, at the time, with a woman from Shiraz who enlarged the stories for me and made them even more real, perhaps because I too was a calligrapher at one time — was a love affair in the reading, and like a love affair has left its fragrance in my life.
But I also appreciate what you’ve done here and said, the way you’ve constructed this post and spoken of your own memories. What greater tribute to a writer’s work, or to that deeply personal experience of reading and falling into a book that we realize will hold us, somehow, forever?
Beth, it’s wonderful to read that this book had a similar impact on you. Your reading, as your comment illustrates, seems to have been special in a personal way. Perhaps you should consider writing about that experience.
Hate to be prosiac (but that’s what I am, a sub-editor). How long did it take you to structure and write this; and was it a concept that grew as you wrote or one that was first planned and then written?
It just grew, Bunny. The individual pieces came up one by one, and at some point the idea of structuring them in this manner struck.
I had actually started My name is red and then stopped after some pages, since then it is among the books I still need to read. May be now I will go back to it! 🙂
hmmm. i have been unwilling for a long time to pick up Pamuk’s books…..maybe…just maybe i will add this also to my list…only because of your review.