I wish I could quote you all, but I am travelling from Japan, and can't quite get the hang of an ipad!
At first, upon finishing the book I though I did not like it - then I took a day to mull it over, wrote down my thought, and I found myself totally in love with it!
Caleb, I had not thought at all about the Venetian not existing at all, but in fact it is also very very possible. The main voice is the grand master of all unreliable narrator, and I found that once I let myself go with the flow, I could thoroughly enjoy it.
Before I read Caleb's comment, I thought that the Hoja (which means Master in Turkish, according to the extract below) is the one who stayed in Turkey: the night before the ultimate weapon is deployed is really the last night for Hoja - what else has he got to look forward to? All those many years spent thinking of the final triumph, and there he is staring into the abyss of utter failure. He needed a way out, and a fantasy life swap was his only option.
Thinking that the Venetian may not have been existed in the first place is even more intriguing, this soulmate that Hoja can despise to boost his own ego, so this is now my pet theory :-)
I am so glad we read this together, as I do not think I would have enjoyed it this much on my own - so thanks desertblues, and everybody else for all the links (I haven't read the interview yet, but look forward to it!) - including yanks culture, I thought the link would have sent us
here, and now I cannot take that tune out of my head!
One final bit of information: according to the extract below (from Adam Shatz's review of Pamuk's
The Museum of Innocence in the London Review of Books), Darvinoglou means "son of Darwin": I am not too sure what to make of this yet...
Quote:
Pamuk’s career in the English-speaking world was launched in 1990 with the translation of his third novel, the Borgesian fable The White Castle. (His first two novels have never been translated into English.) This slender, ingenious book takes the form of a 17th-century manuscript – discovered, according to a preface, by a scholar called Faruk Darvinoglu (‘son of Darwin’), in a ‘dusty chest stuffed to overflowing with imperial decrees, title deeds, court registers and tax rolls’. The story is told, or seems to be told, by an Italian sailor captured en route from Venice to Naples by the crew of a Turkish ship. Sold on the slave market, the sailor is bought by a Turk who, to his horror, is his lookalike. In theory this man is his hoja, his ‘master’, but it becomes less and less clear who is really the master and who is the slave, as the Italian tutors the Turk in astronomy, engineering and – as the plague begins to ravage Istanbul – disease control. They become inseparable, their personalities merging in a Persona-like moment midway through the novel, when they stare in a mirror together and the Italian realises: ‘The two of us were one person!’ By the end, we’re not sure the sailor ever existed, or whether he is an invention of the Turkish savant, who claims in the final chapter to have written the story. The dialectic of East and West appears as a constantly shifting dreamscape inhabited, and endlessly reconfigured, by a pair of twins, figments of each other’s imagination; as a series of texts whose authorship may never be reliably established.
This short novel caused a big stir. ‘Pamuk in his dispassionate intelligence and arabesques of introspection suggests Proust,’ John Updike wrote in the New Yorker, while the New York Times Book Review announced that ‘a new star has risen in the East.’ Since then, Pamuk has been compared to Joyce and Musil, Kafka and Calvino, and almost never – a further compliment – to the contemporary writers he most resembles, Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami, whose amiable postmodern noirs unfold in urban labyrinths and feature cerebral men searching for their own identities, and enigmatic women with an alarming tendency to vanish. He has produced novels with fantastic industry, and the prizes have arrived in diplomatic procession: the Impac Dublin Literary Award in 2003, France’s Prix Médicis and the German book trade’s Peace Prize in 2005, and the Nobel in 2006, the same year Time named him one of the hundred ‘people who shape our world’. Since 9/11, Pamuk’s novels have been treated as oracles: ‘in the week of the American suicide bombings,’ Hywel Williams wrote in a Guardian review of My Name Is Red – an Eco-like murder mystery about a group of miniaturists commissioned by the sultan to produce a book in the Venetian style, in defiance of Islamic strictures against figurative art – ‘this outstanding novel clamours to be heard.’ ‘Essential reading for our time,’ Margaret Atwood proclaimed in a New York Times review of Snow, Pamuk’s grim, Dostoevskian thriller about Islamists and secularists clashing in north-eastern Turkey. (‘Headscarves to Die for’ was the headline.)
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