Customer Reviews

White Castle

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Dear Orhan:

After countless wasted hours at bookstores flirting with other authors, I discover you, a "new" author I can enthuse about grandly, knowing that with time you will receive the Nobel Prize for literature, while I boast about having read everything of you have written.

You remind me of Milan Kundera and Umberto Eco. There is also the uniquely rich, varied texture of Instanbul inferred in this particular novel, but none the less quite present for me.

(Perhaps i should say that "My Name is Red" is a joyous frolic, a magnum opus, a great success and a good place for your newer readers to start, if they need background in 16th century Istanbul.)

Still I hope no one who reads "Red" misses "White Castle." I found it a serious yet gently amusing exercise in thinking about identity.

There are some telling moments where the two look-a-likes, as slave (captive Italian) and Hoja (Turkish Master) try to tease out their individual nuances and idiosyncracities.

The result is subtle and astonishing. For me, the breathtaking moment is the contrast of the Slaves's anxiety in the face of mounting plaque and Hoja's fearlessness, when faced with the same. This is literature for romantic thinkers.

White Castle is a brilliant play on identity. Anyone who has spent a few introspective moments post 9/11, et al, should read this contrast and synthesis in western-eastern idea.

So please dear Orhan, although it may be a long road to the Nobel, it is I who have everything to gain, rich hours spent over dark coffee, your books clasped firmly in hand because I cannot deny myself the pleasure of reading them. Sometimes to the detriment of all my other obligations.

I first became aware of Orhan Pamuk in May, 1997, when The New York Times Magazine published a fascinating and flattering profile of Pamuk under the title "The Best Seller of Byzantium." Eighteen months later, in December, 1998, Pamuk again made the New York Times headlines when he turned down the coveted title of "State Artist" awarded to him by Turkey's President, stating that if he accepted the award he "could not look in the face of people I care about." Pamuk, educated in the West and clearly bearing the influences not only of the classical literature of the West, but also of the fanciful writings of Borges and Calvino (to whom he is often compared) and of his own Turkey, is a writer who-much like his native country-is caught in the often intractable middle: between East and West, betweem Christianity and Islam, betweem modernity and tradition, between an open society and despotism. It is this position which ultimately defines Pamuk's writing, and "The White Castle", a novel originally published in Turkey nearly twenty years ago and translated into English in the past decade, represents a kind of "locus classicus" of the Pamukian literary project.

"The White Castle" is a story contained in a manuscript found by Faruk Darvinoglu in 1982 in a long forgotten archive of the Turkish governor's office in Gebze. The manuscript, written in the first person, narrates the tale of a young, educated Venetian who is sailing from Venice to Naples in the seventeenth century. His ship is attacked and captured by Turkish ships and the young Italian is carried off to Istanbul, where he becomes the slave of a man named Hoja. Hoja, an advisor to sultans and pashas, is physically identical to the young Italian. Hoja, too, is highly educated-at least by the standards of his time and place-and he seeks to learn from the Italian everything the Italian knows about the literature, science, technology, and art of the West.

Over the course of time, the Venetian and Hoja become indistinguishable, not only in their appearance, but in their thoughts and actions. They collaborate on a number of projects together for the Turkish sultan, the last being the development of a war machine for use in an ill-fated war against the Poles and their Western allies. Using the machine to lay siege to the white castle of the book's title, the the two men ultimately recognize, in the shadow of that castle, that all that they had "experienced for years as coincidence had been inevitable." It is then, in the face of certain failure, that they appear to exchange identities-Hoja fleeing to Italy and assuming the identity of his slave and the slave, in turn, assuming the identity and place of his former master. Or do they? In the enigmatic and occluded narration of "The White Castle", the reader is left as uncertain of the identities of the two men as the Italian and the Turk are of their own confused identities.

"The White Castle" is a powerful, hypnotic, richly imagined book which plays on the notions of identity and cultural difference, on the meeting of East and West, on the sometimes seemingly indeterminate place of Turkey in the geography of the world-and of the mind. It is, in other words, a book worth reading by an author who deservedly merits all the recognition he has gotten in his native Turkey, as well as in the West.

I first became aware of Orhan Pamuk in May, 1997, when The New York Times Magazine published a fascinating and flattering profile of Pamuk under the title "The Best Seller of Byzantium." Eighteen months later, in December, 1998, Pamuk again made the New York Times headlines when he turned down the coveted title of "State Artist" awarded to him by Turkey's President, stating that if he accepted the award he "could not look in the face of people I care about." Pamuk, educated in the West and clearly bearing the influences not only of the classical literature of the West, but also of the fanciful writings of Borges and Calvino (to whom he is often compared) and of his own Turkey, is a writer who-much like his native country-is caught in the often intractable middle: between East and West, betweem Christianity and Islam, betweem modernity and tradition, between an open society and despotism. It is this position which ultimately defines Pamuk's writing, and "The White Castle", a novel originally published in Turkey nearly twenty years ago and translated into English in the past decade, represents a kind of "locus classicus" of the Pamukian literary project.

"The White Castle" is a story contained in a manuscript found by Faruk Darvinoglu in 1982 in a long forgotten archive of the Turkish governor's office in Gebze. The manuscript, written in the first person, narrates the tale of a young, educated Venetian who is sailing from Venice to Naples in the seventeenth century. His ship is attacked and captured by Turkish ships and the young Italian is carried off to Istanbul, where he becomes the slave of a man named Hoja. Hoja, an advisor to sultans and pashas, is physically identical to the young Italian. Hoja, too, is highly educated-at least by the standards of his time and place-and he seeks to learn from the Italian everything the Italian knows about the literature, science, technology, and art of the West.

Over the course of time, the Venetian and Hoja become indistinguishable, not only in their appearance, but in their thoughts and actions. They collaborate on a number of projects together for the Turkish sultan, the last being the development of a war machine for use in an ill-fated war against the Poles and their Western allies. Using the machine to lay siege to the white castle of the book's title, the the two men ultimately recognize, in the shadow of that castle, that all that they had "experienced for years as coincidence had been inevitable." It is then, in the face of certain failure, that they appear to exchange identities-Hoja fleeing to Italy and assuming the identity of his slave and the slave, in turn, assuming the identity and place of his former master. Or do they? In the enigmatic and occluded narration of "The White Castle", the reader is left as uncertain of the identities of the two men as the Italian and the Turk are of their own confused identities.

"The White Castle" is a powerful, hypnotic, richly imagined book which plays on the notions of identity and cultural difference, on the meeting of East and West, on the sometimes seemingly indeterminate place of Turkey in the geography of the world-and of the mind. It is, in other words, a book worth reading by an author who deservedly merits all the recognition he has gotten in his native Turkey, as well as in the West.

Nobel Prize Literature Laureate (2006), Orhan Pamuk, in his first work translated into English from the Turkish, gives us in The White Castle an obsessive tale of a bizarre relationship. He begins with an old framing device, that of finding a manuscript which he then publishes. (Actually, Pamuk is even further removed since he has a fictional character, one Faruk Darvinoglu, find the manuscript and dedicate the book to his deceased sister.) Nathaniel Hawthorne used a similar conceit in The Scarlet Letter (1850). This manuscript is a first-person narrative by an unnamed Italian author who was captured by the Turks and taken into slavery in 17th century. He eventually becomes the personal servant of a Turkish man of similar age--and most importantly--of similar appearance. In fact the two could pass as twins.

This similarity of appearance begins to haunt the Italian, partly because the similarity is inexplicable and partly because the two become so intertwined intellectually and emotionally. Their relationship deepens as Hoja, the Turk who is obsessed with learning, especially learning what he considers science, begins to pick apart the narrator's brain. As time passes they exchange ideas and memories, beliefs and every aspect of their knowledge with the sense that it is the Italian slave who is tutoring the Turkish intellectual. Eventually Hoja with the help of the narrator's learning becomes an advisor of sorts to the young sultan. He interprets his dreams, predicts the end of a plague, constructs mechanical devices and toys for the sultan's amusement, tells stories for entertainment and generally becomes one of the favored members at court. He gains in power and influence and is rewarded with grants of land by the sultan so that he has a secure income.

Meanwhile the narrator, whom Hoja often abuses physically and mentally, has learned Turkish and has made himself indispensable to Hoja. The sultan senses that much of Hoja's impressive learning comes from the Italian slave, and eventually the narrator also becomes a favorite at the sultan's palace. It could be said that what we are witnessing in this story in a symbolic sense is the encroaching influence of science and technology on the Islamic state.

It is psychologically understandable and indeed perhaps inevitable that the narrator would form in his mind ambivalent feelings of love and hate for Hoja, whom he so resembles and with whom he is in nearly constant contact. As the years pass and their differences meld, and as each learns the heart and soul of the other, they become more and more alike until...

Is Hoja the doppelganger or is it the other way around? Is it possible that Hoja will leave Turkey and "return" to Italy after having so thoroughly gleaned the narrator's brain that he can pass as the narrator, even to his Italian family? After all these years, the suggestion that Pamuk makes--and this is really the brilliance of the novel--is that yes it could happen. And could the narrator stay on in Turkey, marry and have children while assuming the identity of Hoja without anyone really being able to tell the difference? Could time and acquaintance overcome the accident of one's birth, overcome even the accent with which one speaks so that one is the other and vice-versa? In a larger sense could such an intense, close relationship over several decades so confuse the minds of these two that they no longer know where the one begins and the other leaves off?

Pamuk's narrative is deliberate and slow-paced, as least by modern standards, intensely felt, and carefully wrought. You may find yourself putting it aside at first, so slowly does the story develop. It covers the span of several decades until the narrator is in his seventies. It is picturesque in the style of stories from centuries past which told of exotic places and strange adventures. There is a vivid sense of a world in transition from the feudal to the modern, of a world hungry for the renaissance, hungry for the knowledge of the West, and yet content within an Islamic society ruled by sultans and imams.

This is the first novel of Pamuk's I have read, and one of his earliest. It is obvious from this relatively modest work that he is a writer of vision and understanding. I am looking forward to reading his more recent work.

I predict that Pamuk will one day receive the Nobel Prize for literature. This is one of the best books I have read in recent years. The impact of this novel reminds me of my first contact with Kafka back in school. This story is, as others say, a book about east-west contradictions, about the west's ascendancy in terms of science. But it is also a book about obsession and identity; a book about what makes us who we are. I recommend this book without reservation!

When Istanbul made its Olympic bid for 2000 Olympics the slogan the organizers chose for their bid may also apply to Pamuk's works: "meet us at the meeting point of continents." But this is not fully accurate for Europe and Asia have interacted and learned from each other for centuries. But until now both sides understood the other only through the prism of faith and popular culture.

Pamuk turns our understanding of East-West relations inside out. His novels are filled with tales that richly suggest how inseparable these two cultures have become through their centuries old interaction. Such is the relationship between Hoja in this book and his Venetian slave. What makes two people from two cultures so much alike is also what sets them apart from the cultural stereotypes of their respective cultures. Hoja is a practical scientist and the venetian slave turns out to be meditative and poetic. And at the end of the book Hoja sails for Europe while leaving the Venetian in Istanbul.

However, despite this straightforward narrative, Pamuk is not a straightforward writer. His style is greatly influenced by the post-modernist school of writers. But to read one of his novels is more like watching a Tarantino movie: complex narrative, exotic locales and colorful characters only add to the mystery, while smooth directing and an elegant prose make his stories irresistible.( I am sure Mr. Pamuk is also aware of this)

As we begin the 21st our need to understand each other is great. The tragedy in New York only confirmed my fears that both Americans and Islamic nations for long neglected mutual curiosity for each other. Art is our mutual treasure which sets us higher for it makes us great. It is also our link to each other as human beings.

The art of Orhan Pamuk provides a richly symbolic terrain for this rendezvous. If you want to understand Islam, if you want to know about yourselves, read Pamuk's books and you will find much insight.

This one is not in the same league of Snow and My Names is Red but it is still worth the read. If for nothing else, in reading The White Castle you can see the evolution of a truly great novellist and the man who should have won the Nobel last year instead of that Pinter.