Continuing to extend my reading experience, The White Castle is my first novel by a Turkish writer.
Turns out, it’s both an easy read and a philosophical and existential mindfuck, if you’ll excuse the expression.
The narrator is a young 17th century Italian intellectual whose ship traversing the Adriatic is attacked by Turkish pirates.
He’s taken prisoner and transported to Istanbul, where a the Pasha initially threatens to kill him unless he converts from Christianity to Islam, and then hands him over as a slave to man called Hoja, who is also an intellectual and bears an uncanny resemblance to our hero.
Our man introduces Hoja to Western scientific concepts, setting up all kinds of imperfect balances between oriental and occidental knowledge and beliefs. They work together on a very successful fireworks display for the Pasha of Istanbul, win the favour of the young Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and continue to explore and mine each other’s knowledge, all the while engaged in a volatile master-slave, teacher-student relationship.
There’s more plot development that happens at a physical level, centred around the narrator’s hopes of being able to return home and a collaborative (and disastrous) attempt take the eponymous Polish fortress, but the real action is cerebral and psychological, a tug of war between east and west, science and faith, power and impotence, weakness and strength between two men who are mirror images of each other.
Essentially, The White Castle, written in 1985, is an exploration of identity, roiling around the unanswered question of how two men from different cultures could be so similar and so different.
In a completely deliberate twist, the book has a preface explaining how the author found a manuscript, had it translated, and then published. This, too, is fiction, a construction of a faux author created by the actual author. Did someone say mindfuck?
In its sinuous and unsignalled mingling of fiction and meta fiction, and of perception and reality, The White Castle reminded me of Calvino with a significant dash of Kafka. The setting is perfect, Turkey being the border between Europe and Asia, not just geographically but ethnically, culturally, and philosophically.
I understand that Orhan Pamuk is a multiple award winning author, culminating in being awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. I didn’t know that going into The White Castle, but I’m not surprised. His writing – bearing in mind it’s translated – exhibits a mastery of language and story that kind of sneaks into your brain and subtly makes you rethink what it is to be a human being.
Remarkable and recommended.