Literary The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

[Billi]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

Silent House was published in 1983. It is set in the summer of 1980, a period of simmering political tensions in Turkey. In Sept would occur the third military coup in the history of the Turkish Republic. Three years of marshal law followed, and 500,000 people were arrested.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_..._d%27%C3%A9tat

Thank you very much, Bookworm_Girl!

I was thinking in this direction already, if "The White Castle" was not only a historical fiction but covering contemporary subjects. But it was more a vague idea, because I don't know too much about recent Turkish policy to find the parallels and how much censoring was going on there.

[Bookpossum]

Impeccable research as ever, Bookworm_Girl - thank you!

[BelleZora]

Originally Posted by issybird

I suspect any American of a certain age who sees "I am what I am" thinks immediately of Popeye. Kind of a mood-killer as far as Pamuk's tale goes!

I'm about 60% along. Against my will, American cultural references have provided an internal soundtrack because I can't not hear Popeye. Billie Holiday is now stuck in my head by this evocation of Strange Fruit:

that instead of the plane-trees in the hippodrome, there grew fig-trees from which bloody corpses dangled instead of fruit (p. 92).

I've been listening to the Ottoman music links thoughtfully provided by desertblues, hoping to override these 20th century American musical associations, but Popeye dies hard.

Makes me think about the difficulty of seeing beyond our own experiences and culture to understand a writer with different experiences and culture.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I found this insightful interview with Pamuk published in The Paris Review in 2005.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interv...87-orhan-pamuk

Some interesting questions asked by the interviewer are:

What inspired you to write The White Castle? It’s the first book where you employ a theme that recurs throughout the rest of your novels—impersonation. Why do you think this idea of becoming somebody else crops up so often in your fiction?

Do you believe the constant confrontation between Turkey’s Eastern and Western impulses will ever be peacefully resolved?

[desertblues]

Thank you, Bookworm-Girl for the interesting interview with Pamuk!

About the genocide of the Armenians that began on the 24th of April 1915: that still is a very difficult thing, even today. For example: Turkey wants to join the European Union, but one of the conditions for acceptance is the official acknowledgement of the role they played in that genocide, where about 1,5 million Armenians from the eastern Turkish provinces were killed (now Turkish, but Armenian at the time).

In 2010 I was in Turkey, near the border with Armenia, to visit the ruins of the ancient Armenian town Ani. Ani, a 10th century town that has become a symbol for the Armenians, is on Turkish soil now. The Armenians want it back. It was quite an experience to stand among the ruins and look out to Armenia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ani

And in Ani, our Turkish guide told his version of that genocide. Around 1914, the Turkish gave weapons and money to the Armenian, in order to fight the rebels from the Balkan together. But what happens? The Armenian turn around to fight the Turks and what could they do but defend themselves and kill all Armenian?
We were standing around him; silent and embarrassed. No one said anything…

The following year I was in Esfahan, Iran, and visited new Julfa, the Armenian quarter in Esfahan since 1606 A.D. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Julfa
With a promise they could have their own land and the freedom to practice their Christian religion, Shah Abbas invited skilled Armenian artisans from the north to work on his ambitious building projects for Esfahan. After the genocide of 1915 many Armenian fled to new Julfa.
I visited a small museum in that quarter: among beautifully illuminated 15th century religious books I also looked at the commemoration for the 1915 genocide. Very impressive.

[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.

[paola]

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...

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.)

[desertblues]

Originally Posted by paola

I wish I could quote you all, but I am travelling from Japan, and can't quite get the hang of an ipad!(...)
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.(...)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...

I agree with Issybird that Pamuk is messing with (the minds of) his readers, although he tries to warn them as well in his preface.

Paola, on my iPad I have the iAwriter app and there I copy the lines of texts I want to use from iBooks(after having emailed the book as epub to myself and opened in iBooks, or any other program). From the iAwriter I can email the annotations to myself and edit them in my mail etc...

Yes, I agree that Caleb has had some original thinking there

At the moment I'm going with the hypothesis that the Turkish Hoja was in fact on the ship that captured some Venetian, but on this ship was not the Venetian young man that is written about in the book. Hoja must have been intrigued and perplexed by the contact with the Western world through the books and instruments they captured and started a dialogue with himself about the sciences and culture of the East and the West.

I did read the Museum of Innocence and it is quite a haunting book about an obsession. The book My name is Red is also very interesting; in between a mystery one gets educated about the history of Islamic illumination in the days that it was dangerous to deviate from usual practices; worth while! The book Snow was disappointing as I visited the town it speaks about, Kars, just in the days that I was reading the book, and I kept looking for the streetviews Pamuk described although this isn't that important for the book.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by issybird

Pamuk also alluded to Cervantes, who spent five years as a slave

Off-topic! I just played a game of Trivial Pursuit, and this was one of the questions. Very weird coincidence!

[paola]

oops, I had not seen issybird message!

Originally Posted by issybird

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.

thanks for this tip!

Originally Posted by desertblues

I did read the Museum of Innocence and it is quite a haunting book about an obsession. The book My name is Red is also very interesting; in between a mystery one gets educated about the history of Islamic illumination in the days that it was dangerous to deviate from usual practices; worth while! The book Snow was disappointing as I visited the town it speaks about, Kars, just in the days that I was reading the book, and I kept looking for the streetviews Pamuk described although this isn't that important for the book.

could not resist, bought My name is red yesterday.

Originally Posted by desertblues

Paola, on my iPad I have the iAwriter app and there I copy the lines of texts I want to use from iBooks(after having emailed the book as epub to myself and opened in iBooks, or any other program). From the iAwriter I can email the annotations to myself and edit them in my mail etc...

I meant quoting of the messages, not from the book, but this will surely come very handy, thank you.

[Bookpossum]

I have just finished reading the book and love the way Pamuk has played with us to the very end. The book is a bit like the endless reflections you get in a hall of mirrors so that everything is real and at the same time nothing is real.

I need more time to think about it all, but throughout I was struck by a dreamlike quality in the telling of the story, so that things which seemed logical really weren't. And that took me back to desertblues' suggestion that this was all imagined by the Venetian in the moments before he died when his ship was captured.

I love it that there isn't a clearcut solution to the mystery!

[caleb72]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

The book is a bit like the endless reflections you get in a hall of mirrors so that everything is real and at the same time nothing is real.

Very apt.

[desertblues]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

(...) The book is a bit like the endless reflections you get in a hall of mirrors so that everything is real and at the same time nothing is real.(...)I love it that there isn't a clearcut solution to the mystery!

Too right for the both, Bookpossum.

Questions, questions……….I don't know where I'm at with this story. This book about ideas and existence keeps me thinking about the state of science at that time.
Now I am figuring out what the importance of astrology is here. There seems to an emphasis in this novel on astrology, which was in that age, a seperate science form astronomy. Only from the 18th century they were seen as one science and treated thus.
Under the Islam many important works from Greek astronomy were translated into Arabic and came to Europe only from the 12th century. They were responsible for the development of an independent astronomy in the West; through their experiments. In Samarkand (Uzbekistan) I saw the beautiful 15th century underground observatory of Ulug Bek, the famous astronomer, which was destroyed in the 16th century by fundamentalists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulugh_Beg_Observatory
Also in the West there had been influence and pressure from the Catholic Church on these matters as it touched upon the idea and views on God and the world.

The Venetian in the novel seems to be condescending to Hoja about his astronomical knowledge and I wonder to what extent this is valid, just?

Spoiler:

'Two days later, at midnight, he took up the question again: how could I be so sure that the moon was the closest planet? Perhaps we were letting ourselves be taken in by an optical illusion. It was then I spoke to him for the first time about my studies in astronomy and explained briefly the basic principles of Ptolemaic cosmography. I saw that he listened with interest, but was reluctant to say anything that would reveal his curiosity. A little later, when I stopped talking, he said he too had knowledge of Ptolemy but this did not change his suspicion that there might be a planet nearer than the moon. Towards morning he was talking about that planet as if he had already obtained proofs of its existence.
The next day he thrust a badly translated manuscript into my hand. In spite of my poor Turkish I was able to decipher it: I 'believe it was a second-hand summary of Almageist drawn up not from the original but from another summary; only the Arabic names of the planets interested me, and I was in no mood to get excited about them at that time. When Hoja saw I was unimpressed and soon put the book aside, he was angry. He’d paid seven gold pieces for this volume, it was only right that I should set aside my conceit, turn the pages and take a look at it. Like an obedient student, I opened the book again and while patiently turning its pages came across a primitive diagram. It showed the planets in crudely drawn spheres arranged in relation to the Earth. Although the positions of the spheres were correct the illustrator had no idea of the distances between them. Then my eye was caught by a tiny planet between the moon and the Earth; examining it a little more carefully, I could tell from the relative freshness of the ink that it had been added to the manuscript later. I went over the entire manuscript and gave it back to Hoja. He told me he was going to find that planet'(23)

[Bookpossum]

Thanks very much for that, desertblues. I had never heard of this place before. Truly wonderful, including their extraordinary accuracy in calculating the exact length of a year. And how tragic that it should have been destroyed so soon after it was built.

This book has certainly got us thinking about all sorts of things! And to get back to the book - I have been pondering on the meaning of the title, referring to something mentioned almost fleetingly towards the end of the book. I think it symbolises truth - shining there on top of the hill, but almost impossible to capture.

What a great choice this book was. Thank you again for putting it forward, desertblues!

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

that took me back to desertblues' suggestion that this was all imagined by the Venetian in the moments before he died when his ship was captured.

I love it that there isn't a clearcut solution to the mystery!

I consciously chose to read it as if it were imagined by the Venetian once he was captured, to while away his captivity. I have mixed feelings, though, about whether it's a strength or a flaw that there isn't a clearcut solution. I don't mind (that is, I enjoy) misdirection and multiple possibilities as I'm reading, but I also expect the author to have a clearcut solution which the story supports, as in a classic mystery novel. He doesn't have to share it, it can remain nebulous, but I'm left with the feeling that Pamuk hadn't quite made up his mind himself.

Originally Posted by desertblues

The Venetian in the novel seems to be ccondescending to Hoja about his astronomical knowledge and I wonder to what extent this is valid, just

I assumed that it was deliberately unjust, since it wouldn't be that long until the Ptolemaic cosmology was superseded. A not so subtle jab at the implied superiority (by the Venetian) of West over East.