[issybird]

Originally Posted by desertblues

I’m about halfway through and for me this book benefits from a second, more close reading.

At the moment I have the feeling that I’m listening to some inner dialogue, rather than the interaction of two different men.

I know Pamuk was playing with us, or at least leaving the nature of the two men open to speculation, and I consciously chose to read it as inner dialogue, knowing I could be wrong as indeed the ending seems to suggest.

Before I got to the big reveal at the end, The White Castle read to me as a work of prison literature. The Venetian's experiences seemed akin to those of Camus's Stranger and his comment:

I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored.

Pamuk also alluded to Cervantes, who spent five years as a slave after the battle of Lepanto and whose prison experiences were a major source of his subsequent writings. I even thought of Albert Speer and his long walk around the world while in Spandau.

I knew I was running a risk, though, and obviously I got it wrong. The book would benefit from a rereading knowing the ending so I could pay closer attention to the misdirection.

Originally Posted by Billi

What I asked myself is if I would really recognise it when someone else looks exactly like me.

FWIW, I've read that people are unlikely to recognize true doubles, because they're used to the mirror image of their faces and it's the very rare face which is symmetrical.

I've been marshalling my thoughts since I read the book and am now working my way through the posts; I'm sorry if I repeat. An excellent book, deceptively dense and I'm very glad to have read it. Before this I had only read Pamuk's memoir about Istanbul, good enough but I wasn't tempted to read farther, but now I will.