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.





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 struggle of knowledge and power domination. These themes of doppelg�nger, 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.