The White Castle is an early novel by the Nobel Prize winner Pamuk, his third book but the earliest one translated into English. For mysterious reasons, our local Barnes & Noble store had numerous copies spread across several "featured" tables; it obviously worked, since I purchased one.
A seventeenth-century Venetian is captured by the Turks. He is taken to Istanbul where he becomes the slave of a man who looks very much like him. They work together to influence the young sultan in the direction of science rather than superstition, but whose ideas are whose?
Most of Pamuk's books deal metaphorically with Turkey's twin desires for tradition and modernity, and The White Castle is no exception. (See also Snow and The Museum of Innocence.) This novel is more nakedly parabolical than the others, with no real attempt to flesh out the characters or the setting.
Despite the book's brevity (161 pages), I found it a slog. The narrator and his master Hoja bicker as their identities s l o w l y intertwine, with no forward motion in the plot. The "twist" ending is telegraphed. All in all, the book felt like Pamuk juvenalia.
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