Pamuk, Orhan "The White Castle"

Pamuk, Orhan "The White Castle" (Turkish: Beyaz Kale) - 1985 

Orhan Pamuk belongs to my favourite authors. I have read quite a few of his books already, my reviews you can find here.

This novel is as intriguing as "My Name is Red" which was the first Pamuk novel I read and which made me fall in love with his writing.

The author transports us back into the Venice and Istanbul/Constantinople of the 17th century. His tale is about two men who are as different and yet as similar as possible to each other who come from the two different parts of the world. We learn about the differences between the Orient and the Occident at the time but also about their common goals, about man's goals through the ages.

This is the story about a Venetian who gets captured and transported to Turkey where he becomes the slave of a man who could be his identical twin.

We discover a lot about the different characters of the two men as well as the different characters of men leading their lives in the two countries. The characters not only change knowledge but also memories and ideas. They fight together for the future.

If you are interested in Turkey and its Ottoman background, this novel is a must. If you like to read entertaining stories, this is also one of the greatest you might come across for quite a while. This novel was written quite a while before "My Name is Red" and there are similarities between the two. So, if you have read this one, carry on with the other.

What I like most about Pamuk's writings is that he doesn't just tell us about his part of the world, he also makes us think about ourselves and what our goals and meaning in life is. Perhaps that is what draws me most to the literature of this master.

From the back cover:

"From a Turkish writer who has been compared with Borges, Nabokov, and DeLillo comes a dazzling novel that is at once a captivating work of historical fiction and a sinuous treatise on the enigma of identity and the relations between East and West. In the 17th century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople. There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja -- "master" -- a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities. Set in a world of magnificent scholarship and terrifying savagery, The White Castle is a colorful and intricately patterned triumph of the imagination."

Orhan Pamuk "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.

Orhan Pamuk received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 2005.

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