The White Castle [Hardcover]

Orhan Pamuk (Author), Victoria Holbrook (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1991

Orhan Pamuk proffers a dazzling work of historical and philosophical fiction, set amid the scholarship and savagery of 17th-century Constantinople. When a young Italian scholar is taken prisoner, he becomes the slave and tutor of a Turkish scholar who is his exact double. THE WHITE CASTLE is a triumph of the imagination, as colorful and intricately patterned as a Turkish prayer rug.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

One of Turkey's foremost novelists explores the ambivalent relationship between master and slave in this elegant, postmodernist twist on the theme of the doppelganger. During the 17th century, a young Italian is captured by the Turkish fleet and brought to Istanbul, where he becomes the slave of an erudite man who could pass for his twin. The Hoja , or master, is convinced that the Italian youth's European education is superior to his own and he becomes the young man's pupil. Once the Hoja perceives the superficiality of the young man's knowledge, however, he insists that the slave tell him more, demanding details of his double's upbringing. When this, too, becomes tiresome, the slave confesses to real and imagined sins for which he is beaten. As their relationship changes over the years, with each alternating domination, the author deftly plays the mirror-image characters against each other. To aid the Ottoman sultan in his war against the Poles, the two develop a fantastical war machine. Its disastrous failure in battle proves their undoing. The reader is left guessing at the ultimate fate of the Hoya and the slave, while at the same time admiring Pamuk's skillfully constructed paradoxes.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The third novel by the well-known Turkish writer recounts the life of a young Italian Christian taken captive at sea by the Ottoman Turks in the 17th century. Through his intelligence he is treated quite favorably as a slave and spends his days in Istanbul doing research for the Pasha and young Sultan under the sponsorship of a learned man, whom he hauntingly resembles. A slow, unmoving book that lacks substance or well-developed characters, it ironically concludes in the closing chapters with the author's comment, "I have now come to the end of my book. Perhaps discerning readers, deciding my story was actually finished long ago, have already tossed it aside."-- Paula I. Nielson, Loyola Marymount Univ. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 161 pages
• Publisher: George Braziller; First Edition edition (March 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807612642
• ISBN-13: 978-0807612644
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,132,631 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Orhan Pamuk, described as 'one of the freshest, most original voices in contemporary fiction' (Independent on Sunday), is the author of many books, including The White Castle, The Black Book and The New Life. In 2003 he won the International IMPAC Award for My Name is Red, and in 2004 Faber published the translation of his novel Snow, which The Times described as 'a novel of profound relevance to the present moment'. His most recent book was Istanbul, described by Jan Morris as 'irresistibly seductive'. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. He lives in Istanbul.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars absolutely superb, October 29, 2002

By 

Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The White Castle: A Novel (Paperback)

I have wanted to read something by this author for some time. He came recommended as a truly unique voice, with the additional interest of being a Turk steeped in the mores and traditions of his country and yet able to view them with some satirical distance.

SO I was very happy to discover this volume and was not disappointed. It is a first-rate historical novel set in the Ottoman Empire during the beginning of the Enlightenment in Europe. Without giving away any secrets, the plot follows a young Venetian university graduate who is enslaved and given to a Turkish savant, who wishes to learn from him as much as he can. From the most horrible humiliations and labor, the young Venetian rises to the top of Ottoman society, all the time battling to maintain an identity independent from his owner.

The historical details are fascinating and often very funny. The reader witnesses the limits of proto-science in a more of less Medieval Islamic culture, which is viewed as half magic but also as full of potential power. Then there is the Ottoman court, in which the slave and his owner become key players through guile and some scientific accomplishments, in particular during the plague. The intrigues are full of tension and mystery, a world glimpsed but not wholly explained in a perfect balance of novelistic art.

Finally, there is the inter-play between slave and owner, a conflict that is brutal and terrifying and yet a rare treat for the reader. The psychology of this conflict, I found, is extremely profound and realistic, showing the effect that each had on the other as the years passed. It is also full of surprises.

Highest recommendation.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What is actually in an endless succession of boxes ?, September 20, 1999

By 

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

This review is from: The White Castle (Hardcover)

Looking into a mirror to see who you are and looking into a book to see who somebody else is--two very similar actions but with results that differ. This novel felt like several boxes inside one another; you enter, or maybe fall through one after another, not having comprehended exactly where you were before making the next move. At the end, I understood that I had thought about many themes. It made me imagine fantastic, dream trips across frozen steppes, twisted me around in my mind till I felt like a sick dwarf, and left me wondering who could have written such a strange, powerful novel. And why ? I admired this writer, who I had not read before, because of this power. The story as such is not that found in a usual "novel". It is a Kafkaesque parable, it reminds people of Borges (even on the book jacket), but is not so much like him, calmer and deeper. Pamuk asks who anybody really is and how do you know ? At another level his parable is of relations between the Ottoman Empire and the West, between those who came up with victorious technology and those who attempted to learn it. (p.106) "..we had in hand not a grand plan that would save us from ruin, but only the dream of such a plan." If you want to call this theme "historical fiction" then OK, this is an historical novel, but I would not call it that. What kind of background is needed for scientific discovery ? This question might be a sub-theme, but not the major point. The book is in no way about Islam, unless you want to point a finger at that religion for not inspiring science. Accusations of that sort are a stupid activity if there ever was one. Can one person be another ? Can you change your life for one you'd rather have? These are universal questions and THE WHITE CASTLE is above all a universal novel. Read it. Make your own conclusion. I can't say I understood everything, but it's a hell of an intriguing book.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Quo vadis, Turkey?, November 29, 2006

By 

H. Schneider "Hamlet" (Pandistan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The White Castle: A Novel (Paperback)

I read this little novel because of the author's recent Nobel award. I had wanted to read Pamuk for some time. I had expected something different, more "realistic". One reviewer calls this book a historical novel. That's what I expected, but that is not what it really is.

White Castle rather is an elegant and fairly short parable on the Turkish mindset, torn between national and religious greatness on one side and longing for European modernity and belonging to it on the other. The book is technically reminiscent of Calvino and even some Kafka stories.

OP uses several themes to develop his tale:

This is a doppelgaenger story.

This is a story on the master/slave or servant relation and its dynamics over time.

This is superficially about the conflicts between Turkey and European rivals for power like Venice.

All this is fine and nothing to complain about. But I must admit that the book left me bored after about half way. Maybe the reviewer, who said here that one must be Turkish to appreciate the subtleties of the character's conflicts, was right after all. Or maybe the method is just dried up, overutilized?

I don't know. I will try another Pamuk book for sure.