The Red-Haired Woman by Ekin Oklap

all obscured by her need for secrecy. The plot of For Isabel is careful, linear. In each chapter Tadeus meets someone who recalls the past and progresses Isabel’s story for the reader. As Isabel’s history and travels come to light, Tadeus is also increasingly presented to the reader as an emotionally invested seeker who “can’t leave this whole area of [his] life in darkness.” On first look, the story is a straightforward search for resolution. Yet the logic of For Isabel is strange, dreamlike. Tadeus claims to be pure light but frequently eats and drinks—absinthe, cachaça, mandarin liquor affect him. Though Isabel lived in the twentieth century, the name Slowacki and his profession are suggestive of the nineteenth-century Polish romantic poet. Time itself is malleable for certain spontaneous characters, like the telepathic bat and the Mad Fiddler. Taken together, these facts are suggestive of some supernatural order, but in the end they only hint at one. Resolution comes without cosmic explanation . This dreamlike quality, this absence of rules, at times gives the work a sense of surprise, but it also makes the reader feel that the plot is undermotivated and casually constructed. What is For Isabel if it is a mandala? Our best hint comes in the beginning note. Written as a diary, Tadeus’s search is one kind of mandala. His travels map the life of Isabel. But Tabucchi claims to share with Tadeus a guilt toward the world and a need to resolve loss, so there is a sense in which For Isabel, as text on a page, is a mandala of regret and forgiveness. In this sense, For Isabel, with its easy prose and vibrant scenes, may speak to anyone. Carson Schatzman University of Oklahoma Orhan Pamuk. The Red-Haired Woman. Trans. Ekin Oklap. New York. Knopf. 2017. 272 pages. For over two decades, Orhan Pamuk has given us the courage to remember the distant and the recent past, in signifiers and colors invisible before. That is why it is no surprise that his new book, The Red-Haired Woman, happens to be about trauma and forgetting. Adorned with notions of the uncanny, The Red-Haired Woman is fearless in its reading of canonical texts like Oedipus Rex and Rostam and Sohrab and in tackling the question of patricide and paternal filicide. The story, like the two novels before the Red-Haired Woman, begins in a 1980s postcoup Turkey. Cem, a sixteen-year-old high school student, finds himself in the middle of a family crisis. Abandoned by his father, he decides to apprentice himself to a welldigger . Already a fragile boy, he quickly gets attached to Mahmut, his master. Even though the job terrifies him profoundly, his yearning for Mahmut’s affection (şefkat in the original language) supersedes his fears, and he stays on the job. He also meets a red-haired woman, Gülcihan, an enigmatic and much older actress. Cem’s voyeuristic inclinations lead to an actual date with her, but unexpected events unravel and things ends prematurely. Cem’s affectionate and trusting relationship with Mahmut also comes to an abrupt and tragic end, leading to Cem’s hasty departure from the village. The rest of the story follows Cem as he is transformed from an apprentice into a successful geologist, a wealthy business mogul, a married but childless man who is Carys Davies The Redemption of Galen Pike Biblioasis Australian author Carys Davies pieces together this collection of short stories with a myriad of characters from all over the globe, detailing their experiences with suffocating isolation. Davies explores each new environment with a precision of language that fully fleshes out the unique environment of every story and makes the characters dynamic and compelling in such a short space. Z. P. Dala The Architecture of Loss Pegasus Books When Afroze receives word that her estranged mother is on death’s door, she leaves her home in Cape Town to visit Zululand. As the daughter and mother wade through their pasts to reach reconciliation, they must also navigate the scars and secrets left behind by the country’s Apartheid era. South African author Z. P. Dala’s crisp writing

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