[Bookworm_Girl]

I finished the book last night so I'm still trying to gather my thoughts. I'm really glad we read this book and enjoy the challenge of understanding it. The discussion so far has been very interesting. Thank you, desertblues, for sharing your experiences!

I do think Pamuk was playing a game with us. I chose to read the novel literally as if the Ventian and Hoja were two separate people whose lives intersected and then joined and then diverged again in their swapped identities. I didn't mind the ambiguity and liked the layers of interpretation and trying to distinguish what was real and what was imagined. I also think Pamuk was speaking to his countrymen not to take the identity conflict of Eastern or Western so serious that it becomes too much of a burden.

From The Paris Review interview:

I’m an optimist. Turkey should not worry about having two spirits, belonging to two different cultures, having two souls. Schizophrenia makes you intelligent. You may lose your relation with reality—I’m a fiction writer, so I don’t think that’s such a bad thing—but you shouldn’t worry about your schizophrenia. If you worry too much about one part of you killing the other, you’ll be left with a single spirit. That is worse than having the sickness. This is my theory. I try to propagate it in Turkish politics, among Turkish politicians who demand that the country should have one consistent soul—that it should belong to either the East or the West or be nationalistic. I’m critical of that monistic outlook.

From the traveller in the book:

But we should search for the strange and surprising in the world, not within ourselves! To search within, to think so long and hard about our own selves, would only make us unhappy. This is what had happened to the characters in my story: for this reason heroes could never tolerate being themselves, for this reason they always wanted to be someone else.

Turkey is historically recognized as the bridge between Eastern and Western societies. It has characteristics of both and is something unique unto itself as well. I think Pamuk is saying that's ok and both societies can be learned from and appreciated. I also found it interesting that Pamuk says he used his own relationship with his brother as a model for developing the interaction between the Venetian and Hoja. Sibling relationships encompass a wide range of positive and negative emotions from fits of jealousy to support for one another to mutual love. I think it is important that he frames this Doppelgänger relationship as fraternal brotherhood rather than one side of the identity being positive and the other side being negative as often done in literature.

I believe that those who read my story realize by now that I must have learned as much from Hoja as he learned from me! Maybe I just think this way now because when we are old we all look for more symmetry, even in the stories we read.

Perhaps he was right, perhaps what I felt could be called jealousy, but what he didn’t realize was that this was a fraternal feeling.

I think he is also emphasizing the "oneness of humanity" by the way that the identities of the Venetian and Hoja merge and become shared. As the sultan says, "that basically every life was like another." We all have hopes, fears, dreams. Hoja finds that the sins and confessions of the Christians in the European forests are no different than those of the Turkish janissaries or the Muslim villagers.

always the same, the sovereign would ask thoughtfully: must one be a sultan to understand that men, in the four corners and seven climes of the world, all resembled one another? Afraid, I would say nothing; as if to break my last effort at resistance he would ask once again: was it not the best proof that men everywhere were identical with one another that they could take each other’s place?

These are just a few of my initial thoughts. I'll have to reflect for awhile longer yet!