Product Description

Winner of the 1990 "Independent" Award for foreign fiction, this book tells the story of a young Italian scholar who is captured by pirates. Put up for auction at the Istanbul slave market, he is bought by a Turkish servant, eager to learn about scientific and intellectual advances in the West.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107294 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-20
• Original language: Turkish
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From the Back Cover
The White Castle, Orhan Pamuk's celebrated first novel, is the tale of a young Italian scholar. Captured by pirates between Venice and Naples, he is put up for auction at the Istanbul slave market, and bought by a Turkish savant eager to learn about scientific and intellectual advances in the West. But as they bond over each other's sins and secrets, and their relationship grows increasingly complex, master and slave find themselves part of the Sultan's army, and on a journey that will lead them, ultimately, to the White Castle.

'A new star has risen in the East - Orhan Pamuk. The White Castle is one of those rare novels that call into being a complete and self-contained world shot through with a peculiar brilliance ... [He] is a story-teller with as much gumption and narrative zip as Scheherazade.' New York Times

'Elegant and important ... Comparisons with Kafka and Calvino do not exaggerate; their seriousness, their delicacy and their subtlety are everywhere in evidence.' Independence

'Turkey's foremost novelist and one of the most interesting literary figures anywhere ... A first-rate storyteller.' Times Literary Supplement

'Up there with the best of Calvino, Eco, Borges and Marquez.' Observer

Customer Reviews

Whats it all about?
The central character of this novel is an italian who is captured by pirates and taken to Constantinople where he is sold as a slave. The individual he is sold to just happens to look phyiscally very much like him and moreover his principle interest in his slave is to extract from him his western education. The main bulk of the novel is the close quarters contact between the two men, mainly as the turk (who is somewhat connected to the court of the sultan) tries to come up with new ideas, or simply ponder how a clock works, what is the nature of evil. There are pages and pages of the two men simply testing each other out psychologically, sharing ideas, trying to learn all one about the other, trying to outdo one another, in a way courting one another. During this time its not at all clear who is the slave and who is the master, and, being so similar physically whether they are functioning as one or two people. The writing is very interesting told like a fairy story however I am not really sure having turned the last page what the book was about. To me its a story of a foreigner who becomes so completely absorbed in this adopted land and that almost no trace is left of the young italian captured at sea, of individuality and what happens if you live so closely in an unequal relationship (the italian is the slave and his life is determined by the master or is the master too influenced by the slave?) or maybe its simply a fairy-story of an italian who is captured and leads an interesting life in Turkey, I'm not really sure.

A mysterious scrutiny of cultural-individual identity.
The setting is historical, protagonists almost unreal due to a combination of historical irrelevance and a romantic mystery. But the subject matter is chillingly contemporary: who am I?

A state serving Ottoman 'augur', and an Italian slave captured by Turkish pirates start a life together, whose physical resemblance to each other is a symbolic trigger for a bizarre and cunning andventure into the mysteries of their own minds as well as each other's. The background of the novel provides very interesting and valuable insight into the psycho-sociological reasons behind the difference between eastern and western cultures. In the meantime, we explore the concepts of 'self' and 'identity' which results in a paradoxical realisation that these concepts are as fragile and volatile as our own life stories. One of the most interesting books I have ever read; a novel as fascinatingly intellectual as it is entertaining and easy to read due to the incredibly direct and frank style of one of the great authors of our time.

Pamuk's First Novel is a Disappointment
Like many others in my book group, I had been looking forward to finally reading something by Pamuk. And like most of my book group, I was fairly disappointed by this short early novel from him. Originally published in Turkey in 1985, the story is prefaced by an introduction in which one Faruk Darvinoglu purports to have discovered the manuscript in a dusty archive. He then goes on to explain that parts of the story can be historically corroborated, but much of it can't. This should immediately alert the reader not to take everything in the book as it comes. Even more so if the reader knows that Darvinoglu is the protagonist of Pamuk's earlier book The House of Silence. Such intertextual tricks immediately bring to mind the works of Calvino, Borges, and their ilk.

The basic plot is very straightforward: in the mid 17th-century, a young Venetian gentleman is captured by Turkish raiders and sold into slavery to an aspiring Turkish scholar who happens to look just like him. The two men then spend the next few decades cloistered together, engaged in various psuedo-intellectual investigations of astronomy, biology, engineering, and so on. These bring them to the attention of the Sultan (based on Mehmet IV), whose patronage waxes and wanes, culminating in a lengthy attempt to construct a powerful war machine. Along the way, their claustrophobic relationship swings back and forth, and is interrupted by an outbreak of the plague, whose outcome they are tasked with predicting. The book concludes with a brief section which will challenge the reader's assumptions and calls into question everything that comes before it. Namely, are there two characters or are they just manifestations of two aspects of a single person?

This all unfolds at a glacial pace, and the two "characters" are mere ciphers. Their clashing of wills and ideas take up page after page, but the reader is always told about the conflict rather than shown it, and this makes for disengaging reading. Pamuk seems much less interested in storytelling or characters than in grand themes such as the nature of identity, the collision of cultures, and the very nature of reality. But none of these are addressed in a way that is particularly fresh or interesting. The tension between East and West is handled in a fairly superficial manner, as the Turkish master is obsessed with Western advances in science and technology, while the Sultan has a credulous appetite for tall tales and soothsayers. This all comes across as a rather ambivalent satire of the fluidity of Turkish national character. In the end, this is not a particularly good introduction to major modern writer whom many have compared to Eco, Calvino, Borges, Kafka, and Kundera. However, readers who enjoy highly ambiguous works about self-identity with unreliable narrators may find this a satisfying read.