The White Castle
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 @ 03:45
by Orhan Pamuk (1979)
Part meta-, part historical fiction, The White Castle is the story of the narrator (whose name is never revealed), a young Italian savant and his ambivalent relationship with his Turkish double. In 17th century, caught by the Ottoman fleet during his journey from Venice to Naples, the narrator was brought to Istanbul as a slave, yet his various skilled knowledge acquired him better treatment and fame. Summoned to medicate the ailing pasha (and suceeding), he was then dispensed to assist the Hoja — a master-teacher — who could easily pass for his twin.
Each intrigued by the exotic other, they engaged in an intense Hegelian master/slave struggle of knowledge, identity and power domination. These themes of doppelgänger, the question and paradoxes of identities (of both the characters and the East v. West) permeate the novel throughout, leaving the reader contemplating the age-old question of what makes a person. Although perhaps not as intrinsically engaging in its historical details as My Name is Red, The White Castle is a hard-to-put-down, very readable book.
The translation by Yamani sometimes feels a bit stiff compared to the English version, but certainly much better rendered than Serambi’s Indonesian version of Jose Saramago’s Blindness.
