The author’s gift for memorable openings is recalled in ‘The Museum of Innocence”, where the two lovers of the story are first introduced in the middle of the act of lovemaking, an extended erotic description that infuses the reader’s thoughts for the rest of the novel, in the expectation of when will this happen again. ‘My Name is Red’ employs an equally remarkable device to take hold of the reader’s attention and keep it there: the reader listens to a story told by a dead person. And not just any dead person, but a fresh corpse, the murdered man at the centre of the story, speaking now from where his body has been thrown at the bottom of a well. The whole novel is spoken in the voices of different characters, living and dead, as well as unexpected voices like a dog, or a tree in a picture-book. Such variety of voices keeps the reader alert to what might happen next, while enabling a decameron of perspectives about the late 16 th century world of Constantinopl...