The Black Book [Hardcover]

Orhan Pamuk (Author), Guneli Gun (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 31, 1994

The Black Book is a stunning tapestry of Middle Eastern and Islamic culture which confirms Orhan Pamuk’s reputation s a writer of international stature, comparable to Borges and Calvino.

Galip is an Istanbul lawyer, and his wife, Ruya, has vanished. Could she be hiding out with her half brother, Jelal, a newspaper columnist whose fame Galip envies? And if so, why isn’t anyone in Jelal’s flat?

As Galip plays the part of private investigator, he assumes the identity of Jelal himself, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even faking his wry columns, which he passes off as the work of the missing journalist. But the amateur sleuth bungles his undercover operation, and with dire consequences.

Richly atmospheric and Rabelaisian in scope, The Black Book is a labyrinthine novel suffused with the sights, sounds, and scents of Istanbul. An unforgettable evocation of the city where East meets West, The Black Book is a boldly unconventional mystery that plumbs the elusive nature of identity, fiction, interpretation, and reality.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Turkish novelist Pamuk's inventive, digressive new novel is a dazzling arabesque stuffed with fantastic tales, metaphysical thought experiments, dreams, symbolic fables, absurdist humor, childhood memories, social and political satire and excursions into history. Galip, an Istanbul lawyer, is alarmed when his wife, Ruya, and her half-brother, newspaper columnist Jelal Bey, vanish. To ferret out leads, Galip assumes Jelal's identity and pseudonymously takes over his popular columns. A former classmate of Galip's turns up, confessing that for years she obsessively fantasized that she was Ruya. A mysterious caller phones, threatening to kill Jelal, who had tried to instigate a military coup in the early 1960s but allegedy betrayed the revolutionary cause. Galip's feverish research, which climaxes in two assassinations, is strewn with red herrings, allusions to Turkish and American films and digressions on the Messiah, Sufi mysticism, human faces and the art of making mannequins. As Pamuk (The White Castle) erects a dazzling hall-of-mirrors meditation on identity, memory and reality, he elliptically condemns a society that uses informers and secret police to enforce obedience.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Well-known Turkish novelist Pamuk's last effort, The White Castle, got raves from everyone but LJ (2/15/91). So why break with tradition? Often compared to Italo Calvino, Pamuk is not so stylized; this book is steeped in the scents and sights of Istanbul and is in fact very specific. But imagery and detail will not suffice to keep most readers reading, and the story of attorney Galip and his missing wife, Ruya, is allowed to drag despite an interesting intrigue that has Galip-suspicious that Ruya is hiding with her half-brother, a popular journalist-assume the identity of the half-brother with unfortunate consequences. Only the stalwart will make it to the end. Demand? The last circulation dates of the three copies of The White Castle in our system are 5/91, 7/91, and 4/93. Recommended for collections especially strong in international fiction.
Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1ST edition (December 31, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374113947
• ISBN-13: 978-0374113940
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (64 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,289,621 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

98 of 102 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars But I Who Write, July 3, 2002

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Black Book (Paperback)

Why bother reading stories? In part to escape ourselves, maybe in hopes of discovering ourselves. "The Black Book" is an intricate meditation on the act of reading that explores both sides of our urge for stories in obsessive detail.

The surface plot involves Galip's search for his missing wife and her half-brother Jelal, a famous Turkish columnist. But the deeper meaning of the story concerns the fact that every story has deeper meanings. As Galip's hunt progresses, the chaos of modern Istanbul promises to organize itself into the key to unlocking a larger mystery whose solution would make every detail of life carry meaning, turning the world itself into literature. As far as I can make out, for Pamuk this literary apocalypse would be equivalent to the Messiah's return and to each of us being reborn at last as ourselves, instead of living as hopeless imitations of our heroes from novels and movies.

Just as Galip discovers that Jelal, his own hero, cribbed his columns from older tales, Pamuk's readers gradually realize that Galip's story is a serpentine riff on the Islamic classics, as his search for Jelal and Ruya comes to parallel the Sufi quest for union with God. The Seeker becomes the Sought, Galip becomes Jelal, the reader becomes the author. The burden of postmodernity, Pamuk seems to say, is to realize that we are author, Messiah and reader rolled up in one, with the world as our text to fashion meanings for.

My one criticism is that Pamuk's tale feels a little too familiar, built around themes like the flux of identity, the absence of fixed meanings, the illusion of originality and the self-referential nature of literature that have already been ridden pretty hard by writers from Borges to Eco. But I like the way Pamuk annexes these postmodern concerns to the question of Turkish identity. What does it mean to be "ourselves" in a country where Westernization is a form of imitation? (and where the Western original turns out to have pillaged ideas from the East) "The Black Book" reminded me why stories matter, how literature shapes us and how amazing it is to have such great art available so easily at places like amazon.

66 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Plotless in Istanbul,---but intriguing nonetheless, October 5, 1999

By 

Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Black Book (Paperback)

Nobody could say THE BLACK BOOK is a thriller, but it is thrilling writing. An Istanbul lawyer's wife disappears. A related columnist also disappears. The lawyer looks for them. That's about it. But the search and the thinking is the thing. Pamuk's style blends Proust with Borges. If you find that intriguing, read the book. Pamuk manages to combine intimate details of life in the modern city of Istanbul with tales of Sufi masters, long ago executioners, Ottoman pashas, and underground fantasies with a great deal of soul-searching on the nature of human identity. "I want to be somebody else, therefore I am" is his theme again, following on from his previous work, "The White Castle". Dreams, intertwining identities, the connection between writing and life, even cryptograms. This is fascinating stuff. Though sometimes the book lags, it always picks up again with another strange twist. Pamuk is certainly one of the most interesting writers working today.

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars sleepless nights..., September 11, 2006

By 

Aleksandra Nita-Lazar (MD, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Black Book (Paperback)

In "The Black Book" the reader embarks on a quest on the streets of contemporary Istanbul, together with the main protagonist, Galip.

One day, Galip discovers that his wife, Ruya, is missing. He immediately connects this with the disappearance of his older cousin, Jelal Bey, a nationally renowned columnist. Galip decides to look for Ruya and Jelal, keeping their disappearance from family and friends. He sleeplessly wanders around Istanbul, collecting clues and encountering people, getting deep into Jelal's life and discovering many of his secrets.

The above paragraph summarizes pretty much the whole plot - there is not much more happening. The ending and solution of the mystery of the disappearance is even quite disappointing... However, what is interesting in this clearly post-modernist book is not the plot, but the form. The chapters interchange between reporting Galip's search for Ruya and Jelal, and Jelal's newspaper columns. The "column" chapters are complete stories, covering subjects as diverse, as events in Turkish history, lives of ordinary (shopkeeper, mannequin maker) and famous (poet Rumi, who reappears in many places throughout the book) people, personal observations, secret organizations, plots and premonitions, and subjects as hot as Turkey's relations with Europe and national identity. The "story within a story" scheme is applied successfully (or even a bit overdone, since the side stories are in effect much more interesting than the main plot), making the association with Shecherezada and the Tales of Thousand and One Night obvious.

I liked the images of Istanbul a lot, I could really see the city before my eyes. This is apparently chcracteristic for Pamuk's prose, Istanbul as the setting, portrayed with love and accuracy, a city of many colors and with a special atmosphere.

Orhan Pamuk succeeded in writing the book which connects Turkish Asian and European traditions, their roots and past with the modern times and fashions. Galip is a new Ulysses (for me, Joyce came to mind immediately, even sooner than Proust), searching for his identity and coming back to himself after a long and stressful journey. The question of personal identity is extremely important here, Galip, as many other characters, longs to be like someone else (in his case, Jelal). Dreams are also essential in this onirical prose (after all, "Ruya" means "dream")... I liked the stories and digressions more and more towards the end of the book - initially I had to adjust to the slow pace though. I am also afraid that the translation into English is not doing this novel a favor.

Having said that, I nevertheless think that it is an enjoyable book for an experienced reader, who does not expect a mystery novel, but something to savor slowly and gradually.