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World Hotels - The White Castle: A Novel
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List Price: $12.95
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Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 894.3533
EAN: 9780375701610
ISBN: 0375701613
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: 1998-03-31
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 1998-03-31
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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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. Translated from the Turkish by Victoria Holbrook.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Another Perspective
Comment: It appears that nobody else has spoken about this, so I'd like to add my two cents to the discussion. It appears to me that The White Castle is, beyond being merely a reflection on identity and the nature of subjectivity, a self-reflexive interrogation of the Western novel. I can't help but feel that much of the novel is concerned with the psychology of the writer- writing in the White Castle seems to be an act of ablution and exorcism, a means to externalize and project one's guilt upon a sheet of paper. The examples of confessional works abound in modern letters- Rousseau's Confessions, Dostoevsky's Notes From The Underground, Camus' The Fall, Rimbaud's Season In Hell, most of Henry Miller's work, Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, Proust, Gide, Genet- literature has always had a purificatory/cathartic function.
Of course, it is this sense of irrevocable, indestructible guilt that the author brings with him to Istanbul, along with all the Renaissance humanist concepts of the soul and the inalienable dignity of the sovereign individual. This humanism, of course, would later evolve into the Enlightenment variant that we have effectively inherited- the individual as self-sufficient, self-aware substance, with a number of invariable traits and properties. In the light of the works of Derrida and Foucault, Pamuk's work hardly seems to break new ground. His questions are, to us postmoderns, quite familiar- can one speak of a stable, invariant 'core' of subjective experience? are we merely just walking agglutinations of inherited cultural presuppositions, half-digested texts and hazily-recalled memories? can one ever speak the 'truth' about oneself? can one excavate, from this nebulous morass of discontinuous reveries, imaginings and memories, an impermeable essence that attests to one's absolute singularity?
I think it is these questions that haunt our friend Hoja as he subjects Polish peasants to interrogation. Beyond the pleasure that he derives from being a confessor (and this voyeuristic jouissance is what all novel-readers relish), he is tormented by a conviction that the soul exists, that we are something more than superfluous receptacles of sensory stimuli and arbitrary recollections. Here, psychology is born. This obsessive desire, nay, DEMAND for Truth (with a capital T) and Knowledge (of the irrevocable, essential differences that separate 'us' and 'them', eerily foreshadowing Huntington's myth of the 'clash of civilizations') is characteristic of our civilization, and, as Said has so elegantly demonstrated, is inextricable with the exercise of Power. Hoja, beyond being a naive and bumbling positivist, is veritably Promethean in his insatiable yen for knowledge- he dreams of a day when his comprehensive taxonomies and scientific treatises will be used for world conquest. Again, one cannot help but think of Said's magisterial 'Orientalism', which thoroughly probes the intimate relationship between 'scientific' discourse and governance.
Hoja's monomania separates him from his kin, who, instead of concerning themselves with originary principles and eternal verities, still live in a world of symbols and analogy. One of my favorite episodes in the book is one concerning the plague- the author meditates upon his enveloping fear of death, while Hoja speaks brazenly about his acceptance of celestial decree. If one dies, one is fated to die, why fight it? Allah has assigned us all a destiny, Hoja proclaims, inspirited by his stoicism. Yet, as he converses at length with the author and ponders over his propositions, he begins to reflect upon this position, one that he had never entertained doubts about previously. This encounter with the West casts all his heretofore sacrosanct values in question, and this dialogical dialectic goes both ways- the author gradually assumes Hoja's world as his own. As the Proust quote at the front of the book proves, and as the old saying goes, the grass is greener...Cue Hegel- the opposites pass into each other. Of course, there is no tidy aufheben into a unitary synthesis- Hoja and the author don't become a composite whole, nor do they survive their encounter intact, each wiser than before. Instead, what we are left with is a Derridean situation- the precarious margins between them become dangerously unstable, and they become increasingly indiscernible from one another. This dialectical waltz continues until the close of the book.
I can't say that I loved this book- the prose is often opaque and the narrative is often crowded with (seemingly?) unnecessary detail. Indeed, it is this 'show without telling' dimension of Pamuk's style that is reminiscent of Kafka, but for the life of me I can't find the Kafkaesque humor that some of the other reviewers have spoken of. However, the better segments (the expedition to Poland, the conclusion of the novel) are outstanding. It does feel a little bit dated in '08 (and this, perhaps, doesn't bode well for the future, a strange outcome for a book that was published less than 3 decades ago), though this might have something to do with my weariness with 'postmodern' narrative. This is my first Pamuk novel, and I shall be moving on to 'The New Life' next. Hopefully that one is better.
Customer Rating:
Summary: good personal service
Comment: fast delivery with a personal thank you note inside. the book was in excellent condition and I have no complaints.
Customer Rating:
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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