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Summary: A Short Novel that Opens May Philosophical Doors
Comment: On the surface, The White Castle is a story about an Italian man who becomes a slave in Istanbul during the 1600s, and his interactions with his master--known only as "Haji"--and the sultan. This plot, as some have noted in other reviews, can at times be a bit dull. Lurking in the background, however, are a rich set of philosophical puzzles that lure the reader into a deeper interaction with the text and its introspections, and make The White Castle the warm and interesting novel that it is. Haji and the Italian's uncanny physical resemblance and the shifting and ultimately dissolving borders between their personalities beg us to question the meaning of identity. Their tempestuous relationship makes us wonder about the nature of love, and self-love. And the struggle between Turkish and Western knowledge, Haji's desire for Westernization, and the result of the battle for the eponymous white castle cause us to reflect on this struggle in Turkish history, and in the Turkish present. In the end, The White Castle is a novel that captures its reader not with an un-put-downable plot, but rather with its ruminations on the individual and collective 'self' and 'other'.
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Summary: Good writer WANTED to rewrite this book
Comment: Do not waste your time on reading this dull and boring book. There are no dialogues to enliven the story. No single page lured me to go on. I was curious about the Nobelist, but after reading this book I doubt whether I can find enough patience to read the other book by Pamuk I bought... I now need a Simenon, London or Stevenson to breathe some fresh air. Pamuk should have written a 10 page story out of his idea. On the contrary he forces us to go through 166 more pages that persist telling the same things on and on. A great writer is a totally different job...
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Summary: Cultural Switch
Comment: This is the second book by Orhan Pamuk that I have read. "The White Castle" impressed me from the start by the way we are led into the discovery of an old manuscript. The story that unfolded was an interesting one and the main character was someone we were comfortable following. He's a Venitian captured by the Turks and he's just savy enough to get the attention of the Vizier. Parading himself as a doctor, he avoids the misery of slavery but is still under a sort of "house arrest" due to his status as a captive Christian. Eventually, he is teamed up with a Turk and the book essentially is an examination of their relationship. With the seperate cultures but often common interests, there is a lot that's worthwhile in "The White Castle". However, I felt the book bogged down somewhat towards the end. Then it takes a major turn in the next to last chapter and wraps things up a bit too quickly (given the detail of the first 3/4's of the book).
In the other book that I read by Orhan Pamuk ("Snow"), I could tell that the author was adressing the conflict between the modern Turk and the traditional Turk. There were two distinct characters in "The White Castle" that may have represented the same conflict. I wasn't quite sure that I was getting that from what I read but a sharper mind might pick that up (or something along those lines). I enjoyed the book but I was both surprized and disappointed by the way it ended. In an odd sort of way, maybe that's an endorsement.
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Summary: Boring with no story line, despite its deep symbolic implications
Comment: I do not quibble with those reviewers who see in Pamuk's work the deep and enigmatic thinking of a clever philosopher. However, for all his intellectual prowess, he cannot (at least in this book) write a pleasing story. The conceit of the man finding the ancient manuscript is the epitome of hackneyed--it's not even rendered in any new or inventive manner. The plot itself is excrutiatly boring--perhaps its only artful device is that it leaves the reader feeling just as trapped in its plot as the main character is in his captivity for much (way too much) of the book. Despite being recounted in painstaking, dreadfully repetitive detail, the relationship between the Italian and Hoja remains wholly clinical, unemotional and repulsive. The reader comes away with no deeper appreciation of why the Italian is so haunted by Hoja at the end than he had in the beginning (ends up seeming a case of mere Stockholm syndrome!). The storyline, if it can even claim to have one, is woefully slow, and, I felt, had no redeeming meaning in the end (the final chapter is a grave, predictable disappointment). I appreciate that it asks big philosophical questions about the meaning of identity, self-worth, east-west relations, etc., but a page-turner it is NOT. In my opinion, Pamuk is a philosopher and should have limited himself to treatises. He should leave the writing to AUTHORS--those who can weave their deep philosophical questions into inspiring storylines with beautiful imagery and real human emotion. This book is far too dry and dull to recommend to anyone other than a chain-smoking, black-wardrobe-wearing, self-hating philosophy grad. student! :)
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Summary: A case of intellectual incest?
Comment: 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.
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