Sophocles’s Oedipus meets Ferdowi’s Sohrab and Rustom in Pamuk’s book We men want to kill our fathers and sleep with our mothers. It is an essential stage in our psychosexual development. Or so Freud told us.
In The Red-Haired Woman, his deceptively slight new novel, Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk mixes the story of Oedipus, as told by Sophocles, with the story of Rostam and Sohrab from Fer dowsi’s medieval Persian epic, Shahnameh. Oedipus, trying to escape his fate, moves inexorably towards it, unknowingly killing his father and marrying his mother. In Ferdowsi’s tale, it is the father, the great hero Rostam, who unknowingly faces his son in battle and kills him in a wrestling match.
Cem, the narrator of the first two parts of the novel, is a studious…
