Orhan Pamuk is not only a superb writer, he is a cultural phenomenon. Equally at home in the traditions of ancient Islamic literature and Western postmodernism, he's the first Turkish novelist to win spectacular success in Europe and the United States. His four novels published here, of which the best by far is The White Castle (1991), are curious variations on a handful of themes: Turkey's Ottoman past as a stage for the clash and cross-fertilization of East and West; the infinite, tortuous complications of individual and national identity; and above all, the magical properties of books. In every Pamuk novel a book, real or imaginary, is the source or trigger, virtually the protagonist, of the action.

“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed” is the first sentence of A New Life (1997). The narrator sets off on a picaresque road trip through a Turkey shaped by American incursions like Coca-Cola and Hollywood movies, to find the promised new life. Though the book turns out to be a hoax of sorts, the exhilaration and perplexity it causes are authentic and vivid. The lure of a new life—that is, of the old self given a new past along with a new future—is ubiquitous in Pamuk's work. In The White Castle, a 17th-century Venetian, sold into slavery by Turkish pirates, and his master spend years exchanging family histories and anecdotes until they change places and identities. By the end, both reader and characters are not quite sure who is who. The borders of the self, in Pamuk's world, are so porous and ambiguous that the lawyer-hero of The Black Book (1994) can move into his dead cousin's apartment and, without any great difficulty, take the deceased's phone calls and continue writing his idiosyncratic newspaper columns.

Pamuk's latest novel, My Name Is Red (translated by Erdağ Göknar), is conceived on a grander scale than his previous works. Its setting is late 16th-century Istanbul, in the ateliers of the Sultan's court painters and manuscript illustrators. In this milieu beset by religious fanaticism and strife, two artists working on a possibly heretical book are murdered weeks apart. (Readers may be reminded of Umberto Eco, but Pamuk has a lighter, playful touch, more in the vein of Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges.) The opening chapter is told by the corpse of a miniaturist recounting his brutal death, but only 400 pages later do we discover which of the three suspected master illustrators is the culprit.

The mystery moves along in first-person chapters narrated by the eight or so major characters, with intervening chapters contributed by a dog, a tree, Satan, Death, and similarly unexpected voices. We soon learn these voices are the improvisational riffs of a storyteller who entertains in a freewheeling coffee shop frequented by the illustrators and targeted by the repressive fundamentalists. Within the historical setting, Pamuk is obviously alluding to current political and religious struggles between Islamic zealots and advocates of free expression in Turkey and neighboring countries.

At the Sultan's request, the elderly master illustrator Enishte Effendi is supervising the creation of the dubious book whose artistic principles prove worth killing and dying for, intended to represent everything in the Sultan's world. The project is dubious because the Sultan and Enishte wish it to exhibit the intriguing new Venetian manner, with its cultivation of personal style and its use of perspective, portraiture and realistic depiction of the world, as opposed to the entrenched Persian tradition of painting as “the act of seeking out Allah's memories, seeing the world as He sees the world.” (Enishte himself will be the second artist killed for reasons of esthetics.)

Attached to the murder mystery is a love story. Enishte's nephew, the former miniaturist Black, ends a 12-year exile to seek his early love, Shekure, Enishte's beautiful daughter. Shekure's soldier husband never came back from his last battle, and with her marital status in question, she has returned to her father's house to escape the advances of her volatile brother-in-law. When Black presents himself, the clever, pragmatic Shekure is utterly confounded. Should she wait faithfully but probably uselessly for her husband, or succumb to the persuasions of her wild yet attractive brother-in-law, or yield to Black, whose appeal is less frenetic? The two small quarreling sons she dotes on, Orhan and Shevket, complicate her choices. (In an interview, Pamuk said that he is the Orhan of the novel, who at the close is entrusted with telling the story, and that the family configuration mirrors his own childhood. Plus he has a brother named Shevket. “These are my essential subjects: rivalry, jealousy, problems of domination and influence, revenge”; they originate in sibling rivalry as well as in Turkey's ambivalent position between East and West.)

Despite the personal overtones, or perhaps because of them, the love story and family dilemma are the least successful parts of My Name Is Red. Shekure's arbitrariness is unconvincing, and the back-and-forth courtship ritual where Black is teased and manipulated and made to perform heroics in order to win his bride, becomes tiresome. The romance seems a distraction from Pamuk's genuine interest—the conjunction of esthetics, politics and religion. On this subject he can be brilliant at dramatizing subtle painterly distinctions and at offering an overview of Ottoman history and lore—battles, tales of passion, royal intrigue—as preserved in the ateliers of the master painters. The downside, unfortunately, is a great deal of repetition, and erudition often delivered in huge chunks that clearly fascinate the writer more than they will the reader.

The salient feature of Ottoman illustration, as Pamuk describes it, was close copying of the old masters; “style” as we know it was considered a flaw, a deviation. “Illustration,” though, is the key word. “A beautiful illustration,” according to an ancient Sultan, “elegantly completes the story. An illustration that does not complement a story in the end, will become but a false idol. Since we cannot possibly believe in an absent story, we will naturally begin believing in the picture itself. This would be no different than the worship of idols …” Enishte's book has pictures but no text as yet—a risky departure from tradition. Black, besides courting Shekure, is enlisted to provide a text. The book's last page will show a realistic portrait of the Sultan, in perspective—“the same size as a dog. … Our Sultan's … face in all its detail! Just like the idolators do!” This is what horrified the murdered painter, and what he threatened to tell the fanatics; this is why his colleague, eager to try the new methods, murdered him.

To portray life as Allah sees it, “the vision of the world from a minaret,” means resisting the temptation of individual style: “No one ought to compete with Him … claim to be as creative as He.” But in the lengthy and sometimes violent arguments among the miniaturists, the opposite view is heard as well. Perhaps attempting to reproduce Allah's vision is the real presumption. Perhaps the Venetian artists, with their humanist perspective and distinctive styles, are more fittingly humble. As the artists take sides and the quest for the murderer heats up, Black and Master Osman, who represents the old school of thought, spend three days in the Sultan's private library of old manuscripts, seeking clues to the murderer's identity in tiny stylistic quirks. Their research becomes Pamuk's elegiac tribute to the ancient Persian masters, who labored anonymously, for art's sake, to the point of blindness. In an ecstatic moment, Master Osman even blinds himself: blindness is supposedly Allah's gift to the faithful painter. Only when blind, after a lifetime of effort, can he see the world in memory, from an unending, Godlike darkness.

It doesn't much matter, finally, who the murderer is; in the tradition of Ottoman painting, the three suspects sound very much alike. Indeed, Pamuk's greatest tribute to his subject is his use of so many similar voices, in imitation of the technique of the ateliers, where several painters worked on the same pictures in a uniform, time-honored manner. The novel itself might well be the nonexistent text to accompany the daring illustrations, the rich book showing everything in the Sultan's world.

As Enishte approaches death—clobbered by the painter who kills for the right to his uniqueness—he sees “the presence of an absolutely matchless crimson. … The beauty of this color suffused me and the whole universe.” This is the “crimson within which all the images of the universe played.” My Name Is Red takes no sides between Eastern and Western attitudes; it recognizes the need for both and the value of their mingling. “Nothing is pure,” Enishte says. “To God belongs the East and the West.”

That kind of inclusive vision makes the religious fanatics see red: In a climactic raid on the artists' coffeehouse, they kill the storyteller—the ultimate symbolic act. Though this novel wavers in places, it is the work of a master. But for an introduction to Pamuk at his most distilled, I would recommend starting with the incomparable White Castle.

Books, again, are what drive the characters in Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (translated from the French by Ina Rilke), but here they serve to sustain the spirit and free the imagination. Dai Sijie is a Chinese filmmaker now living in France, and it is no wonder that his first novel was an “overnight sensation” in his adopted country. The books that help two adolescent boys weather the rigors of the Cultural Revolution are by Balzac, Romain Rolland, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Alexander Dumas, and Flaubert. A suitcase full of the banned treasures is discovered under a bed in a remote, primitive mountain village (whose former main product was opium) where the urban boys, sons of disgraced doctors and intellectuals, were sent in 1971 to be “re-educated” by hard labor. Dai Sijie himself underwent re-education in his youth, and very likely the novel's pungent details of rural life and work are drawn from his experience, though they could hardly have been as comical in actuality as he manages to make them in fiction.

To say the novel is a charming fable of the Cultural Revolution may seem an oxymoron, yet it is accurate. When the two boys arrive in their new home on the mountain called Phoenix of the Sky, the local headman and assembled villagers shake and tap the unnamed narrator's violin with puzzled suspicion. Hearing its music softens them, but their wariness isn't fully allayed until Luo, the narrator's best friend and fellow exile, assures them the tune is called “Mozart Is Thinking of Chairman Mao.” Quick-witted Luo is also a gifted storyteller: “A pleasing talent, to be sure, but a marginal one, with little future in it. Modern man has moved beyond the age of the Thousand and One Nights, and modern societies everywhere, whether socialist or capitalist, have done away with the old storytellers—more's the pity.” Since the headman is “the last of the lordly devotees of narrative eloquence,” though, the boys are sent off to town every month to see a movie and act it out for the grateful, story-starved villagers on their return.

And so it goes. We know from the outset that art will save the day and save our heroes, even if they have to crawl through coal mines with laden baskets strapped to their shoulders or climb narrow mountain paths with buckets of excrement on their backs. “Dear reader, I will spare you the details of each faltering step; suffice it to say that the slightest false move was potentially fatal.” Other excesses of the Cultural Revolution are mocked in the same wry tone, a boyish marveling at so idiotic a turn of fate. Behind that lurk—or should lurk—terror and despair, yet only intermittently do we feel their weight. Then again, perhaps I don't give enough credit to the indomitable human spirit.

Both boys are smitten by a beautiful young seamstress, daughter of the tailor in a neighboring village, although Luo finds her “not civilized, at least enough for me!” This drawback will be remedied when Luo and the narrator find the suitcase of books stashed away by their friend Four-Eyes, who is interned in a nearby village and reluctantly trades a copy of Balzac's Ursule Mirouët in exchange for help with his work. “Picture, if you will,” says the narrator, “a boy of 19, still slumbering in the limbo of adolescence, having heard nothing but revolutionary blather about patriotism, Communism, ideology, and propaganda all his life, falling headlong into a story of awakening desire, passion, impulsive action, love, all of the subjects that had, until then, been hidden from me.”

The books do more than nurture the boys' hopes and fantasies; they help Luo succeed in love. “‘With these books I shall transform the Little Seamstress. She'll never be a simple mountain girl again.’” He proceeds to woo her by reading aloud. So, besides the fairy tale elements—four crones whose spells cure Luo's malaria, a raven that hovers nearby as an omen, the hidden jealousy of the rival lover—we have shades of Pygmalion!

Toward the end the tale darkens somewhat. While Luo is away visiting his sick mother, the seamstress appeals to the narrator to help her get an abortion. This gives Dai the opportunity to depict the execrable hospital conditions in the small district capital, as well as to explain the Draconian laws regarding unwanted pregnancy. In 1971 not only was abortion illegal, but it was illegal for anyone, including doctors, to help unmarried women in childbirth; moreover, marriage was forbidden before the age of 25. The only way the narrator can persuade a doctor to perform the abortion is by offering him Ursule Mirouët. As a bonus, he throws in his personal favorite, Rolland's Jean Christophe (“Without him I would never have understood the splendor of taking free and independent action as an individual”).

To escape from their wretched situation, the plucky boys long to live in, and live out, a French novel—a touching dream that succeeds all too well. Balzac may have introduced them to the exaltations of human passion and striving, but the seamstress extracts a different lesson. The abortion successful, she cuts her hair, sews herself a spiffy new outfit, and sets off for the city, like Rastignac. “‘She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price.’”

Happily, Dai Sijie emerged from re-education with his talent and sense of humor intact enough to write an amiable novel. But the ingenious French scrim through which he shows the Cultural Revolution casts an unsettling glow over the real thing. Watch for the movie.