The Red-Haired Woman : Orhan PAMUK

Managed to squeeze-in-a-read on our trip in Turkey.  How appropriate that it should be Orhan PAMUK's Red-Haired Woman.  I thoroughly enjoyed this story which reprised aspects of the Oedipus myth - the interplay of tensions between fathers and sons. The context of the novel is well-digging in a small town on the outskirts of Istanbul. The red-haired woman is a member of a travelling troup of actors who visit the town. She becomes the object of our narrator's attention. There is a connection with the father.

A terrible accident occurs and there follows decades of repressed guilt... and an unexpected denouement. 

The story definitely kept my interest and the final pages definitely caught me off guard. Reading those I simply had to go back and restart the novel. Really?  Check it out - you'll get my drift.

It was fascinating to read a novel in situ - travelling through parts of Istanbul mentioned in the story. I finished it while there but I didn't take the book home with me, passing it on to to a fellow traveller who would be staying longer in the city. I wonder did he manage to finish it.  Leave it there?

Before parting with the book I scribbled my email address inside the back cover. 

I wonder where it is now.

A book set adrift - a bottle in a literary sea. Thousands of miles away. 

Will its ripples reach back?